With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing the smaller channels and helping people discover and share new creators. Hype is an entirely new promotional system inside of YouTube: there’s a new button for hyping a video, and the most-hyped videos will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard. It’s a bit like Trending, but it’s focused specifically on smaller channels and on what people specifically choose to recommend rather than just what they watch.
The actual mechanism behind Hype is pretty complicated. A video is only eligible to be hyped in the first seven days after it’s published, and of course, if it’s made by a channel with fewer than half a million subscribers. Each user only gets three hypes a week, and each hype is worth a certain number of points that inversely correlates to how many subscribers a given channel has. (The idea is that smaller channels should be able to hit the leaderboard, too, so each hype to a smaller channel will be worth more points — YouTube is doing an awful lot here to try and make sure the biggest channels don’t just dominate the leaderboard.) The 100 videos with the most total points hit the top of the leaderboard.
I see what they’re doing. You know how in the real world the billionaires make the rules and can flex their power? So can bigger youtube stars. This can lead to youtube losing out a bit in negotiations just like the government will sometimes fuck its people over because some rich twat gets a bug up their ass and tosses some cash around. But what if those bigger youtube stars had less share of the market? Hype likely won’t cost youtube itself viewers, but it could shift viewers around redistributing them to less known channels. Now the bigger stars are a little less big and bring a little less to the negotiating table.
Negotiations for what? YouTubers have pretty much no say in how YouTube runs and they make most of their money outside of YouTube (things like merch and sponsorships).
Even the biggest YouTube stars represents nothing in terms of views compared to YouTube overall and they don’t have any alternative places to go with the same reach if they left YouTube.
Mrbeast does ~500M views a month, Google has 2.5 billions active users generating between ~5 and 10 billions view a day. He represents 0.002% of Google total views. Would you bother negotiating for 0.002% of your salary ?
People who made a carrier of YouTube videos are Google’s prisoners, they have literally zero negotiating power.