As someone who is in the business, the one thing that has had this effect is YouTube's drive towards brand safety. Brand safety always has a material effect on

As someone who is in the business, the one thing that has had this effect is YouTube's drive towards brand safety. Brand safety always has a material effect on an advertising company's bottom line, and YouTube being loss-making, they've been going full blast in the past two years to make the site as ad-friendly as possible. One thing about brand safety though: it's expensive to achieve. Brand safety = high production value, vanilla content. This means high costs coupled with slow growth. This heavily favours the established or well-funded media entity. The 'genuine' camcorder-weilding film student can only afford to try this YouTube thing out for a few months before going broke. With this constraint on time and money, the one-man shows resort to cheaply produced, edgy content to grow as fast as possible and now they're being slaughtered for this approach.