Back in February 2011, Google issued the Panda Update to its algorithm. Among other things, this update targeted "Content Farms", and Hubpages, where I used to write, was found to be a content farm. At the time, I was making money by writing articles, and Hubpages had a mechanism to get these indexed on Google so ordinary people could discover my articles. At the time, YouTube was not a source of income for me, but I began to use it create videos to illustrate my articles. Here is the first video ever that I uploaded to YouTube, as part of an article called "Chocolate Under Communism".
After my traffic on Hubpages was destroyed by the Panda Update, I hosted articles on sites of my own, such as PubWages and Historia Obscura . But eventually only YouTube videos and their monetization brought me pageviews and income. In suggested videos, YouTube pushes videos that appeal to the lowest common denominator. YouTube is filled with a diverse group of content providers. By its own definition of a content farm, Google is running a content farm. But now they are going after their own content farmers... What gives? Is this censorship? Or are the powers that be just making sure all content creators have to be employed by large corporations?
