YouTube to be changed drastically. Opportunity for new streaming sites?
On September 4th, the FTC swung the largest penalty to ever be fined from the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. Described as “30 times larger than the largest COPPA civil penalty the FTC has ever obtained”, the penalty of $170,000,000 is being charged to YouTube. In addition, the FTC will be conducting a sweep of Youtubes content after time has passed for new rules to be set in place. If any content creators on youtube don’t properly tag their content as for children’s viewing so it can have non-targeted ads as apposed to ads based on collected data, they may also be sued by the FTC for $42,000 per video.
While YouTube and Google are big and can probably handle being made an example of. It may be very difficult for Youtuber’s to continue on as unless they are big production companies, the legal risk this law poses may be too much for your average Youtuber. Youtube may be heading the direction of having bigger and bigger production content as they transition to more of a cable-like service, this change may accelerate that much more.
So where do these content creators go?
We know many content creators make a living off of content that may meet the criteria under this law (animations, games, music), and already many are setting up other ways to make an income from their fans such as Patreon and Twitch. This seems like it may be a chance for any platform looking to take up the characteristics that Youtube started with and is now moving away from. A platform for any one person to start making content and creating a fan base.
I can’t help but imagine this is just the start of big changes to come in how advertising is done on the internet. While this law has been in effect since 1998, we’ve recently started seeing problems occur with other social sites in regards to online privacy and regulators like the FTC have started to step in.
wether targeted ads make viewing them easier on the consumers or not, I think we may see big changes and possibly more regulation and enforcement until continued problems with online ad viewing are taken care of.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/audio-video/video/ftc-press-conference-settlement-google-youtube
