Some of the types of videos my wife watches have been talking about this. They get free stuff to review, sponsorships, etc... from major brands. It became a way for companies to indirectly make marketing claims that are illegal in other forms of advertising. Claims like "this skin cream cured my eczema" instead of "look how much better my skin looks after using this cream". The new FTC ruling is suppose to hold content creators to the same standard as regular advertising.
The new FTC rules go beyond YouTube. If an "influencer" likes/shares/retweets a post about a product (on any platform), that person must disclose any relationship they have with the company. I view it as an attempt to clean up the guerilla marketing (Pay for likes) that has taken over social media.
I watch a lot of woodworking videos. Many of them get some form of financial gain for using products and name-dropping in videos. I know this because they mentioned it was "sponsored" by the product's manufacturer. It could be a free/discounted tool, sponsorship money, something else I can't think of...
From what I know about it, I don't have a problem with the FTC ruling. It'll probably clean up a lot of the B.S. adverts across social media. How the individual platforms choose to enforce those rules is a different story.
There's a new platform I've recently learned about called Nebula (
https://watchnebula.com), that was created by YouTubers who were being demonetized by YouTube for certain content. It looks like a co-op type arrangement of people who had established channels and are transitioning away from YouTube. One of them is Real Engineering, who moved his war content (strictly engineering related) off YouTube b/c the "violence" got those videos demonetized. (But somehow gamers can still go around "killing" each other and it's entertainment?)
Another platform is Curiosity Stream. Patreon has already been mentioned.
A lot (all?) of these alternatives cost the viewers a subscription fee, albeit usually small. The problem is that when you subscribe to dozens of channels, and they disperse to different platforms...now you're paying a small fee to a multitude of services. I'll probably pay the small fee one day, but only to one service at a time. Similar to what I do with Netflix, Hulu, etc....
The funny thing is if Google would advertise their "Premium" channels better, more people might become paying users. Then Google wouldn't need to rely solely on ad revenue that requires a favorable social opinion of the channel. And the content creators wouldn't need to worry about keeping their content "Google Approved" to get the revenue.
