After nearly a decade of people complaining about YouTube’s abysmal copyright system, which makes it infuriatingly easy for scumbag companies to screw content creators out of their ad-revenue by filing false copyright claims, YouTube has finally decided to “look closely” at its policies, whatever the hell that means. YouTube has made it abundantly clear that it’s too lazy to make an effort to protect its content creators, so long as it’s still receiving a cut of the ad-revenue, but the recent wave of criticism being generated by Reddit has forced YouTube to at least do SOMETHING.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki tonight tweeted out a message of thanks to the YouTube community at large, vowing that the company is “listening” to recent feedback from creators, who’ve taken issue with the site’s complaint system. A growing number of popular YouTubers have criticized the company’s way of handling copyright violations and, in turn, the appeals process about those notices. Channels impacted by the complaints system can lose out on monetization — sometimes for weeks at a time. That’s proven so annoying that some YouTube users are at least weighing the idea of removing their content from the platform. Wojcicki doesn’t want that to happen. In an attempt to assuage those concerns, YouTube is assembling a team “dedicated to minimizing mistakes and improving the quality of our actions,” an employee wrote on the site’s help forums. “The feedback you’ve raised in comments and videos on YouTube and beyond is having an impact. It’s caused us to look closely at our policies and helped us identify areas where we can get better.” Further, YouTube will be rolling out unspecified initiatives over the next few months to strengthen the relationship between support staff and the people making all those videos with millions of views. “We’ll also make improvements to increase transparency into the status of monetization claims.”