YouTubers are in revolt—and they want their host platform to acknowledge their revolution sooner rather than later.
"Tick tock," Joerg Sprave says in a video addressed to YouTube. "The clock is ticking."
Sprave isn’t a teenage gamer or a Hollywood-based vlogger. He’s a bassy-voiced, middle-aged German man who once was a C-level executive at a consumer electronics company and now makes high-powered slingshot weapons in the woods for an audience of 2.3 million. He laughs like Santa. He looks like someone who could survive punching a bear. In the video, Sprave advises the platform to respond to the demands of FairTube, a collaboration between the YouTubers Union that Sprave founded and IG Metall, Europe’s largest trade union. The demands are sweeping: Creators want greater transparency, a more stable and equitable approach to monetization, and a seat at the table when the platform makes decisions that impact their livelihoods. If YouTube doesn't respond to these demands, Sprave warns, they can expect "a shitstorm."
With just eight hours left on that countdown clock, the German branch of YouTube’s parent company, Google, reached out, inviting FairTube to a meeting in Berlin on October 22. "The expectations are very high. We won’t be satisfied with talking about how nice the weather is or how we all want to make YouTube a better place," Sprave said before the meeting. "I know of no channel that does not really struggle with YouTube’s algorithm, demonetization, with all the changes."
Once you start paying attention, you’ll hear the same grumbles from all corners. Celebrity YouTubers in head-to-toe Gucci quip about being unrightfully demonetized. Videos start and end with statements like, "if YouTube likes this kind of video, we’ll do more." Small channels plead for likes, explaining that it helps videos fare better. It feels like creators are constantly protesting some policy change or another, whether it's being unverified en masse or suddenly disqualified from making ad revenue. The #YouTubeIsOverParty has to be one of the longest running platform-bashing bashes on the web. Creators want fair treatment; YouTube wants to run a business; not everyone is getting their needs met. No wonder creators are looking to collective action.
That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube wants to respond to the masses. "We explained to the union in great detail what [we're] doing in terms of transparency and support for YouTubers," a YouTube spokesperson told WIRED. "But we have also made clear that we are not going to negotiate their demands." There’s a queasy but complicated asymmetry to the situation, like a beehive negotiating with a crop duster. Of course, that’s not just true of YouTube and Google’s relationship with the 24,000 creators who make up the YouTubers Union—it’s their relationship with almost all of their creators, who likely number in the tens of millions.
That relationship isn’t getting any better. Just before the FairTube meeting was supposed to take place this week, Google decided that no YouTubers—including Sprave—would be welcome. FairTube and YouTubers Union members are understandably displeased, but not at all surprised.
Tensions between YouTube and YouTubers have been rising steadily since 2017, when the platform made a series of policy changes creators refer to as “the Adpocalypse.” It started, like many things did in 2017, with racism. Advertisements were playing on bigoted videos, prompting giant companies like Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson to pull all of their advertisements (and money) out of the platform until YouTube could guarantee their ads wouldn’t be running against extremist content. Facing stiff financial penalties and public outcry, YouTube scrambled to find a way to sift through its billions of videos for an ever-diversifying array of revolting behaviors, from prejudice to pedophilia. “We're deeply invested in creators' success; that's why we share the majority of revenue with them,” says a YouTube spokesperson. “We also need to ensure that users feel safe and that advertisers feel confident that YouTube is safe for their brand.” The solutions to these very real problems, however, also have created most of the creators’ gripes.
“When companies and governments crack down on platforms, platforms may place that burden on creators,” says David Craig, coauthor of a series of books on the rise of online creator-driven industry and culture.
Before getting into what those burdens are, let’s address some assumptions about YouTubers. Most YouTubers aren’t millionaires famous for living their lives. Most don’t have Nike brand deals and fleets of assistants to bring them green juice and walk their small dogs, or account managers who can call YouTube when something goes wrong. That stereotype applies to maybe a few dozen people on the platform, but those people are not the only ones who helped YouTube to grow from cat video emporium to the second most popular search engine on the web.
For Sprave, becoming a full-time YouTuber, even one helming a popular, multimillion-subscriber channel, was a pay cut on the best of months. Since YouTube’s changes to the monetization policies, it’s one he’s no longer able to afford. “You’re not making a fortune," he says. "You’re living the life of an artist, not a celebrity, and artists are notoriously poor.”
It’s not YouTube’s job to make people rich or to replace their day jobs, even if those people have enriched the company. FairTube doesn’t want PewDiePie money for all. They just want a pathway to money for everyone striving to follow YouTube’s rules, which at present exists in theory but not in practice. To the union, the most pressing problems are twofold: Nobody knows what YouTube’s rules are, and since YouTube has tailored its policies to placate its (lucrative) advertising partnerships, the rules seem to represent an implicit gag order for some categories of creator.
YouTube has a rule book. Otherwise their 10,000 or so raters, who are the human backstop to its various algorithms, would have nothing to go by. According to Sprave, the creators know it exists only because information about it has leaked, offering a bit more detail than the community guidelines and terms of service publicly available.
To make matters more confusing, when a bot or a rater has determined that you’ve broken a rule and are therefore demonetized, the explanation delivered to your inbox by the machine-learning system is extremely vague—no mention of the rule broken, no time code for the violation—and if you care to appeal, no opportunity to explain why your video was within bounds.
“YouTube has been working to clarify these things, but the machine-learning system is by its nature a black box, so there are limits to what they can know about its decisionmaking,” says Anthony D’Angelo, a YouTuber and former executive director of the YouTubers Union’s now-defunct predecessor, the Internet Creators Guild. “We’ve been reassured time and time again that the system will learn given more correct decision and more appeals.”
What that amounts to, though, is a bunch of disgruntled creators being paid less for doing more work. "Several of my videos have comment sections now permanently disabled for the 'presence of a minor,'" says Evie Lupine, a sex and BDSM educator who has never featured a minor in any of her videos. "YouTube will not tell me which ones, or give me a way to search through the videos to find [the problem], despite the fact I have 300-plus videos and hundreds of hours of footage." Many creators also think being informed that your video is demonetized via form email is just flat-out rude. "It's no way to tell someone you call a partner that you just killed weeks of their labor," Sprave says. Or that they worked those weeks for free.
Maintaining the knowledge gap between creators and YouTube’s human and algorithmic raters seems, according to Sprave, to perpetuate a culture of confusion, and if you’re feeling cynical, of accepting unpaid labor. "If you can't do gun videos anymore, fine," Sprave says. "But then tell them the truth that they're not wanted on the platform. Assuring them they're welcome but then demonetizing them is unfair, and this has to stop."
Of course, it’s not just people making videos about guns who dangle in constant demonetization limbo. “We also want to explicitly express our solidarity with the LGBTQ+ YouTube creators who are currently suing YouTube in California regarding many of the same problems, especially lack of transparency regarding recommendation and monetization,” says Michael “Six” Silberman, an IG Metall representative. Many times over the last few years, queer creators have faced algorithmic penalties for the subject matter they talk about because it isn’t, as one ill-fated filter put it, “family friendly”—and hence advertiser friendly. The result: YouTube, which claims to pride itself on inclusivity and frequently features queer creators in its own advertisements, doesn’t pay its queer creators as well, if at all.
"YouTube created the means for which these new voices could not only appear, but make revenue, and then the platform took away that money," says Craig. "That’s where the rise of the YouTubers Union is coming from, the giving and taking away."
The give and take is bad for users too. If creators are penalized for saying anything outside what’s palatable to a narrow class of monied corporations, YouTube becomes a very boring platform.
The YouTubers Union and its partnership with IG Metall are not the first attempts at organizing online creators. The aforementioned Internet Creators Guild, founded by prominent and well-respected YouTuber Hank Greene, was a splashy effort that collapsed this summer, unable to gather adequate funding or recruits. Nor is FairTube the only union vying for creators’ and YouTube’s attention. "I think the German effort is the most significant right now," says D’Angelo. "There’s also an opportunity for more traditional entertainment unions. SAG-AFTRA is very much interested." According to D’Angelo, the powerful Hollywood union currently represents many creators in their offline work, but notes that the SAG-YouTuber team-up is at present "very much an LA thing."
YouTube, at large, is not. Sure, many YouTubers are American, and many celebrity YouTubers are even based in Los Angeles, but that’s not really who unions are for. The powerhouse creators need the union less than other creators. "When Logan Paul gets demonetized, he can just call a YouTube vice president," Sprave says. "He doesn’t have to talk to an anonymous email."
What's more, the US creators live under different labor laws than many of the others looking to unionize. Operators of small to medium channels are from everywhere—while D’Angelo was running the Internet Creators Guild, they had members in dozens of states, as well as in New Zealand, Spain, and the UK. That, D’Angelo notes, creates a real challenge when trying to organize. Compared with the people who first unionized Hollywood in the 1930s, who worked not only in the same country and city, but often the same building, YouTubers have a lot less tying them together.
Or at least, that’s the way it seems some YouTubers, many of whom, as both Craig and D’Angelo point out, have grown up in a pretty anti-organized-labor period of American history, a time when many unions have been chipped away into oblivion or toothlessness. "A lot of the talent is young kids who are dropping out of school to do this job. There isn’t a built-in familiarity with the history and importance of unions," says D’Angelo. "That leaves them in a very vulnerable position because they haven’t been exposed to these ideas."
In some cases, even if people are familiar with what unions could do to help them push back against YouTube and Google, they’d never risk it. "People feel bullied from being advocates," says Joshua Lamel, executive director of Re:Create, a coalition of digital rights groups that advocates for online creators. "People on these platforms still want to be in the traditional systems; they want to be movie stars and work with record labels. Some are terrified of getting on the wrong side of Disney."
It’s tempting (and easy) to paint Google and YouTube as worker-stomping monopolists, but not even disgruntled creators see them that way. "I’m simultaneously constantly frustrated with YouTube and in awe that it happens at all," D’Angelo declares. Sprave offers similar assurances that he bears the platform no bitterness, that these organizing attempts come from a place of love. D’Angelo says that he admired YouTube’s swift response to creator outcry about its new verification policy, and everyone said they understand that YouTube is not cynically sabotaging its own creators. They know that YouTube represents an engineering and social challenge of unprecedented complexity, and that advertisers are a hugely important stakeholder for not just YouTube, but also for Google and Alphabet.
Which is why it’s so disappointing that Google suddenly disinvited YouTubers to the FairTube meeting that never was, and that YouTubers Union members felt they had to vote to cancel the meeting rather than shoulder the snub. (YouTube maintains that the meeting is merely rescheduled, since another German trade union, ver.de, is still interested in meeting at a later date.) It may end up working against Google: Silberman did not come to play. He notes that in the European Union, YouTube’s failure to disclose how it categorizes videos and video creators may violate GDPR.
In California, YouTube may soon face regulatory pressures from new gig-economy legislation. "We are prepared to investigate YouTube’s compliance with these regulations, as well as others coming into force in the EU next year, as necessary via litigation," Silberman says.
A commenter on Sprave and FairTube’s video announcing the meeting’s cancellation put it more succinctly: "Commence Operation: Shitstorm."
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