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European YouTubers with more than a million followers increased by 70% in 2018, and worldwide more than 40% of creators have high incomes.

The YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, sees in the phenomenon of YouTubers and influencers the future of entertainment and media.

The content creators of the world’s most famous video platform “are creating the next generation of media companies and we are delighted to see how much Youtube’s creative economy is thriving,” said the executive.

But, before they come out of the YouTube ecosystem and start founding production and media companies, YouTubers belong to the platform.

Not only that: the successful figures that the video portal updates year after year owe a lot to the phenomenon of influencers. And Wojcicki is not about to deny that YouTubers are, if not indispensable, at least essential to the operation.

Not in vain the number one priority of the counselor this 2019 is to “support the success of the creators and artists” of YouTube.

Wojcicki made these statements public on the platform’s creators’ blog, in a summary of what happened in 2018 and the challenges and goals for the current year for a brand that has just been crowned the favorite of the millennial generation, above Apple and Netflix.

YouTubers keep YouTube at The Top

Wojcicki revealed that in 2018 almost doubled the number of YouTube channels with more than one million subscribers, and that also grew 40% the number of YouTubers who earn between 100,000 and one million dollars during the year.

In the European Union (EU), the number of channels with more than one million followers increased by 70% in 2018.

YouTube notes as successes the inclusion of new forms of monetization for YouTubers, such as the extension of YouTube Music and YouTube Premium to almost 30 countries, as well as allowing content creators to increase their profits by selling products, content subscriptions, tickets to events or even receiving donations from users on the chat app.

“We also continued to make channel memberships more widely available, reducing the subscriber threshold from 100,000 to 30,000,” said Wojcicki, who also took the opportunity to mention the reform of the EU Copyright Law against which both the company and its sister Google (both Alphabet subsidiaries) have charged in recent months.

As the Digital Economy has explained, the copyright legislation discussed in the European Commission has, in the opinion of the technological ones, undesirable consequences in the creation of contents on YouTube.

The video platform claims that, thanks to pressure from YouTubers to overturn the reform, a petition for signatures on Change.org gained the support of 4.6 million people.

“The awareness they created was fundamental, because last year, when I met with policy-makers in Strasbourg, I realized that many of them had heard about big business, but did not understand the impact and size of Europe’s creative economy. I shared with them the enormous economic benefit they all bring to their home countries,” Wojcicki said.

YouTube is self-critical

While celebrating a new period of growth, YouTube admits that 2018 was also a year of difficult learning.

For example, a button: Rewind 2018, the video with which the platform tried to synthesize the events of the year, was so hated by YouTubers themselves, critics and users, that it became the video with more “I don’t like” the story (more than 15.5 million “dislikes”, and counting).

“Even at home, my children told me that our Rewind 2018 was shameful,” Wojcicki wrote. “We understood from our creators that the video did not accurately show the key moments of the year, nor did it reflect the YouTube they know.

We’ll do better to tell our story in 2019,” he added. The material was criticized for excluding big stars from the portal and for extolling trends with little bellows.

YouTube is also self-critical about the little or no support it gave to the community of YouTube journalists until it began to become popular among users, and recognized that it can also be clearer when communicating the safety or regulatory measures it takes that may impact YouTubers or users, something that also gave several problems in 2018.

“In short, 2018 was a year of changes, challenges and opportunities. This year, no doubt, will be more of the same.

Keep the comments received, even if they are sometimes difficult to read, because it is your questions and comments that make YouTube the best video community for all of us,” concluded the CEO.