Not “Commercially Viable”! YouTube May Delete Your Account

YouTube is undoubtedly one of the most commonly used, user-friendly, informative, and most importantly, free of cost applications today. This popular online video streaming service has made its mark on us pretty deep. It has begun to nearly rival Google search in terms of providing a solution to everyday needs and problems. 

That being said, YouTube is also an income source platform where people have become millionaires as well as promoted themselves and their channels for different social media platforms. With time, YouTube has helped people set up their businesses and has covered the marketing part as well. As per the stats, more than 9% small businesses in the United States of America, use YouTube.

But despite YouTube’s ever growing popularity and reach, their new terms of use might sound like a huge step down from what made the platform popular in the first place. The decision of deleting the non performing accounts (at YouTube’s sole discretion) is as rebellious as the step Instagram took to remove the number of likes being visible on a post (testing phase). Instagram boss Adam Mosseri stated that “What we’re hoping to do is depressurize Instagram a little bit, and make it a bit less of a competition,” “The idea is to try and reduce anxiety and social comparisons, specifically with an eye towards young people.”

YouTube New Policy

As per YouTube’s new policy, “YouTube may terminate your use of the Services, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.” This update will be in action from December 10th, 2019. This might mean that if channels don’t make enough money, YouTube will possibly terminate their accounts. A few days ago, the company started sending emails to the account holders with the updated terms of service agreement where the termination and suspension of account section couldn’t have been more vague. The language used can also mean that users who looks at lots of content but don’t necessarily monetize for YouTube, can also have their account removed.

The company stated that they may terminate the account access if that’s not commercially viable, however, there were no info as what will be the company’s commercial value criteria. What factors will be considered while not deleting an account and vice versa. Will there be any prior notification or directly deletion of the account? The impact will be very huge knowing that a lot of people’s livelihoods depend on YouTube only. What if the channel owners won’t be able to make enough money or can’t attract more viewers or won’t get more attention to their videos? In the era of technology and internet where everything is online, no user is able to digest this step taken by YouTube.

Is YouTube Planning To Change Its Vision Or Mission?

Has YouTube become so concentrated on earning revenue that it’ll only keep the well performing channels which are generating income for the company? Considered as a sea of information, entertainment, and whatnot, is YouTube planning to limit itself to a specific interest or should we say only profitable interest? Because people get info and learn something new on YouTube if they have videos to watch and how will that happen if the channel won’t have enough viewers or attention in the first place? Or the company is planning to delete individual user’s accounts who just surf on YouTube, access unlimited content, watch anything and everything, however, don’t generate any income for YouTube? 

What Exactly They Mean By Not “Commercially Viable”?

To get to know the exact meaning of the statement made by YouTube in their updated terms of service agreement, are they actually planning to delete the non-profitable channels or taking hands into action of deleting the channels which spread negative news, disperses hate speech, violent oratory and considering them as “not commercially viable” or removing the individual user accounts who looks through a lot of videos, watch the vast world of info and doesn’t generate a single penny for them. The whole point is that YouTube is giving itself the authority to delete the accounts they think is not “commercially viable” at its sole discretion.

Online Discussions And What Should We Do Next?

Since the statement is too vague to get the exact meaning, there are online discussion going on where the YouTubers are, of course, freaking out with the announcement. The reactions are very specific and quite genuine where they are expecting that either their channel or account will be deleted and that too won’t be decided by them.

Don’t you think that this decision has made YouTube a less liked application than it was a few days ago? Has the news made new Vloggers a bit discouraged or should we wait for a few days till the company gives any statement with reference to the same news but a bit more specific or just sit back and wait for Dec. 10th to see what kind of accounts gets deleted which YouTube considers as “not commercially viable”..

We will keep sharing the latest update on this article as and when we get any. Till then, stay tuned and share your opinions below.