Recently YouTube videos have been dominating the entertainment industry. With television slowly retreating from the spotlight, the YouTube platform has had an influx of company-based creators rather than the normal small time individuals. Small time individuals like ConflictNerd, or Dylan Clawson, who joined Youtube in 2012 now has almost 325k subs opposed to BuzzfeedVideo with over 18 million subscribers, which joined only a year earlier. This is a very big threat to media and entertainment.

Big businesses, like news networks such as FOX news, have a firm hold on the economy and media in general and with it our lives. With these companies taking over Youtube and other popular platforms of newer media they are crushing all creativity on the platform. The businesses are able to pay Youtube to show more of them and less of the creative videos. This threat is very real and creators on the platform have noticed it.

“YouTube is broken,” is a phrase commonly said by the creators many love as YouTube limits how much of their content is seen, leaving viewers missing videos they would watch.

YouTube attempted to fix this by adding the notification bell, which does not always alert when a video comes out. This algorithm affects the platform as a whole, as it caters to the companies rather than the individual creators as it should. YouTube is letting the creators that made it the force that it is, die out and be replaced by things like, Fox News, T-series and other companies.

According to the Washington Post, YouTube is based on an algorithm of the amount of time a video is watched, and how many views it gets to determine what videos to promote and which not to promote. Big companies, specifically, have been flooding the recommended and trending pages on YouTube with their content.

But YouTube isn’t only promoting big companies, but are also editing the feed of videos to the watchers. For many who have a job as a “YouTuber,” and live off of the money they earn from the platform, some have noticed that YouTube often does not show their subscribers their videos. In order to fix this problem the “YouTube bell” has been implemented. This bell system is highly flawed as many people do not click the bell and the bell itself does not notify people of uploads anyway. In addition to these large problems, due to the massive popularity of the site, it is difficult for smaller creators now to get a start on things and are overshadowed by the news and already large “YouTubers.”

This is clearly wrong and needs to be stopped. YouTube has truly been catering to large companies, intentionally or not. Once YouTube is fully over-run by companies, all those favorite “YouTubers” and creators that someone might have will lose their entire livelihoods. YouTube is a broken platform, that has been changed from its days of being a platform for all sorts of media to mainstream media, like news and sports.

YouTube should return the power to its individual creators, and not become the new main media filtered by conglomerate voices.