YouTube Can Scrap Accounts if they’re not “Commercially Viable”

YouTube is without a doubt one of the biggest video hosting social media platforms. I just thought I’d mention that in case you’ve been living in a technological black hole for the last 15 years. Any way…

You may well be accustomed to regularly seeing terms of service being updated for your various online platforms. Presumably, you’d think there wouldn’t be much new in there aside from some fresh legalese.

Twitter user Christian Maracle, however, is clearly one of those people who likes digging in the detail to find out what’s actually being changed. It seems though, he’s actually found a subtle, but very significant addition to it. Following a post on his account, he has found that YouTube is now reserving the right to delete your account if they don’t consider it “economically viable”.

YouTube Introduces Controversial TOS Changes

As part of the new changes, YouTube is reserving the right to delete your account (or perhaps more specifically, your videos) if they deem it to not be “commercially viable”. A change that clearly has a lot of users worried that they might start summarily scrapping accounts with hundreds of videos simply on the basis that they haven’t ‘made it’ yet.

The new terms state:

“YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.”

What Do We Think?

In fairness, you can (at least in part) understand this decision. It is, after all, difficult to justify why YouTube should host thousands of hours of video content on a channel that has less than 10 subscribers. That is, however, as much leeway as I’m willing to give them.

With these new terms set to come into effect on December 10th, are we set to see masses of accounts suspended? We doubt it. That being said, however, clearly moving forward they’re going to want to make sure that if you are posting something on there, it does at least have to serve a purpose. Any way you look at this though, the key point remains. YouTube can suspend you on a very flimsy pretext that would likely apply to 95% of users.

In short, we see problems on the horizon here. You can, however, do us a favor! Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel via the link here for all the latest tech news! (Shameless plug).

What do you think? Are you for or against these new rules? Either way, why? – Let us know in the comments!