Five Reasons Why YouTube is not Social Media: TheTechBoy Unpopular Opinion:

Hello, this is TheTechBoy with an Unpopular Opinion.

YouTube is not social media. I have five points about why and will explain each point fully.  

Source: unsplash.com/@christianw

1. Comments under Videos are Text Only and Do Not Contain Images.

1. In social networks, you can add more to comments than text and an emoticon. This is because social media is designed to connect people with each other, not to give feedback and metrics on a video.   

2. YouTube is video/audio only. (Not including community posts. We will get to that.)

1. Social media allows users to post images, live locations, and other non-videos.   Technically you could post an image to a YouTube video, and play some audio behind it, (or no audio) but that is not the same as posting an image to Instagram.   

3. Monetization is Easier  

1. TickTock monetization requires a user to have be at least eighteen years old, have 10,000 followers, have 1,000 views on videos in thirty days, and have three posts posted in thirty days. (Souce) Twitter Super Follows require the user to be at least eighteen years old, have ten thousand followers, and tweet twenty-five times in thirty days. (Source 1) (Source 2).    YouTube requires four thousand watch hours and one thousand subscribers. Monetization is also open to more countries. 

   

   Source unsplash.com/@giorgiotrovato

   
   

4. YouTube has More Learning Material, and is Used in Schools. 

1. For example, software called Edpuzle is used in schools, which takes a YouTube video and teachers can add questions to the videos. There are also scores of education channels on YouTube. You cannot get the same level of education from a sixty-second video.  

   

   Fair Use Edpuzzle.om

   
   

5. There is no Private Messaging.

1. On social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there is the ability to send direct messages to people. YouTube does not allow people to talk to each other privately.  

Arguments:

YouTube has Community Posts. 

YouTube Community posts allow the creator to engage with his community and post images to the channel. However, YouTube community posts are just one aspect of YouTube. This is not the main goal of YouTube, with the main focus being on the videos, not Community Posts. Also commenting on community posts does not allow users to upload anything other than text and emoticons.

YouTube has Comments.

By this logic, my website is social media. Just because something has an aspect of social media does not mean that it is social media. YouTube is focused on videos, and relatively small channels (only one thousand subscribers) can get AdSense revenue, compared to some social media networks that require ten times more subscribers and have more stringent country requirements. 

            Conclusion:

 In conclusion, YouTube is not social media and is more like a User Generated, television station, because it has advertisements, and the ways you engage with other fans and content creators are different from social networks.   

Tell me what you think by leaving a comment below. To read my post about TickTock, please click here.