Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.
You’re thinking long term strategy, YT is owned by Alphabet, a publicly traded company, they are only able to think in quarters. All that matters is short term gains for investors, and besides once the short term gains run out the investors will just dump the stock and move on to extracting what they can from the next company.
It doesn’t make long term sense, they are driving away the new big content creators, and will lose market share.
They have no competition to speak of so they feel comfortable squeezing their creators, this is only the start.
You’re thinking long term strategy, YT is owned by Alphabet, a publicly traded company, they are only able to think in quarters. All that matters is short term gains for investors, and besides once the short term gains run out the investors will just dump the stock and move on to extracting what they can from the next company.