I guess I'm not that surprised, because I just spent close to 20 months with a client who was deeply embedded in the internet advertising space. The problem boils down to this:
- Internet advertising has been priced too high since the very beginning, the ROI just wasn't there
- Between ubiquitous ad blocking and the populace over time learning to just ignore ads, even what returns companies were getting are getting thinner and thinner.
Obviously, YouTube needs content, but at this point it's big enough that it'll get that content from
somewhere; movie/game trailers, etc, etc. All advertiser friendly, and usually high quality. The lower tiers of content creator just don't matter as much in the big picture.
YouTube is phenomenally expensive to run. You make money by either raising prices or reducing expenses. They can't raise prices, so the only thing they can possibly do is reduce expenses, and their clearest path to that is changing who gets paid for what. Also, by limiting the scope of what pays out, they can offer advertisers a clearer picture of where their ads will be seen, which won't let them raise prices, but can at least stabilize them/keep them paying.
This probably doesn't bother me as much because I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but the challenges in the industry are very, very real right now, and this is a completely understandable and predictable response to it. There's a lot of arguments to made as to whether or not it's the correct response, but it's not a knee-jerk sort of thing.