> However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason.
YouTube is a monopoly. This is exactly the type of things monopolies do.
Yes, there are other places to upload videos to watch on demand, but they’re much smaller, less well known, and just more niche.
> "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
The creator is not a customer. The viewer is not a customer. The advertiser is the customer.
Yes, you can poison the well and lose users, and thus alienate your customers, but again, YouTube is a monopoly. There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.