If you are a YouTube user in Spain, you will have received an email from the service in the last few days that advises that they are going to “update the terms of service”. It is, they explain in the email, an update similar to the one that was applied in November of Kenya Email List last year in the United States. The changes have to do with royalty and tax payments for creators, with restrictions on final recognition and, what has become the epicenter of controversy, YouTube’s monetization right.

From now on – or rather, as of June 1, when these rules will take effect for those living outside the United States – YouTube will have “the right to monetize all content on the platform.” You will be able to show ads on all videos, even those on channels “not participating in the YouTube partner program.”

The change may seem not so important, since YouTube is already full of advertising, but it is. It is for content creators , as the first big affected party. It was already what was indicated in November, when the changes began to be applied in the US.

What it means for small creators
The small content creators, who had already been the collateral damage of the brand safety measures that YouTube had implemented long ago (and that prevented channels with less than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewings from being able to monetize their content), were the new ones affected by the last big platform change. YouTube was going to start putting ads on their content, but they weren’t going to see a single penny of the revenue they generated.

In addition, it is no longer just that these contents are generating income from which those who make the effort to create them do not profit, but also that this can become stones in the way of trying to create a community of the size that allows entry in the partner program. Users will be more fed up and tired by advertising and will tend to see less of this content from small channels.

But the modification does not only affect the creators, as this last nuance shows: it will also have effects for the users of the service and, by extension, for the advertising ecosystem itself.