Sean Kennedy  🧵 🧶

For those of you who don't know me, I make video essays that search for meaning in art. These videos take an incredibly long amount of time to research, script, and animate, resulting in a single ~10 minute video taking a month to produce.

Because of this workload, these videos go out once a month, if I'm lucky, and because of the length cannot possibly earn the new 4000 hours of watch time per year. I think it's funny that the new guidelines are 1000 subs and 4000 hours because no channel of that size can match it

YouTube, these new guidelines are further promoting lower-effort content to be mass pumped out, and I don't think that's the thing YouTube should be known for. I understand that there's a lot of bad channels out there that meet monitization requirements and they caused issues.

However, these new guidelines are not the solution, but they're close. One way to fix it would be to have it be either 1000 subs or 4000 hours of watch time. Another would be to lower the watch time level. Or, you could make it a lifetime 4000 hours of watch time.

Personally, I think the lifetime 4000 hours is the best solution because a 1000 sub channel can actually have that in its lifespan, but most likely will not in a year's time. Also, this ensures that experienced YouTubers stay around, stopping the problem of "burn" channels.

YouTube, I really like using your platform to produce the best possible content I can, but with these new guidelines the way they are, it's nearly impossible to produce high-quality content that takes time to produce and have it matter.

As previously stated the view boost to monetized video is hugely important, and taking that away from channels that produce time consuming content will kill them. Maybe you don't care about that. Maybe you want your platform to be vapid, but that's not the YouTube I see

The video essay community here has been slowly starting to gain momentum, and these videos are incredibly thought provoking, artful content that enriches the platform. Filmmakers too have been on the rise, and they cannot possibly sustain with these new guidelines.

So YouTube, I greatly implore you to re-evaluate these new guidelines just a little. Not only myself, but most of the people I know through your platform are negatively affected by these guidelines, and that isn't fair to small creators struggling to make it.

Like, take @ShayMay_ 's Pokemon video. Sure, it's 7 hours but it took nearly a year to make! Putting effort in and making that quota for a smaller channel is unattainable. And like, the problems were caused by people trying to pump out as much as possible, why reward that?