Since they've decided they need to vet all channels before ads are shown, and they can't do that to every channel, they've had to set an arbitrary view/subscriber limit. But now they're going to lose out on ad revenue for millions of previously-monetised videos, while still having to host them for free.
Ironically though, most of the controversy is from large content creators that won't be effected by this so, who knows.
How many dollars does it cost them to vet a channel?
My 3 minute video makes me ~.3 cents per view. It's actually less than 3 minutes, most don't watch the whole thing. 4000 hours in a year = $240 revenue. So, advertisers are paying $360.
If you have just 2000 hours of views per year, Google is throwing away $60/year in revenue.
My linked gmail account alone with 10+ years of data should scream legitimacy alone.
They tried to crowdsource it with YouTube Heroes. I guess that didn't end up being enough.
It's Google. They'll tell advertisers that every channel will be manually reviewed to make them happy, but the degree of manual review will vary.
They'll score most channels as low risk and do a cursory manual review to 'check-the-box', and the degree of review will go up from there.
This is bad news for advertisers too. Say your product is in demand by people outside the supposed ideal target audience then you won't be able to reach them.
Or if you do not care who buys your product so long as it sells. What if half of your audience are watching stuff deemed to be not monetisable? It doesn't matter if you vote Trump or not so long as you could drink more cola.
Thank god for that.