Yes, Youtube is making video creators' lives harder and harder...especially when it comes to earnings. It is incredibly hard for beginners to get 1000 subscribers and 4k hours of people watching their content...that is the beginning to start earning. Plus, the views are accounted for by exct seconds and minutes now so it makes it much harder to have actual nice numbers. There is so much content and they keep advertising the big ones and so the small ones are left on the curb picking up the pieces of random users who end up bumping in your content. It is no use to say wow make a nice video, do this or that, the search engine is just so full and it will mostly show people who will give Youtube more money so....pretty sad.