by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 16, 2016

Being a creator on a YouTube multichannel network is a pretty big club and at one time, it seemed the roster of MCN creators channels grew as fast as the U.S National Debt Clock digits move.

Style Haul’s site is as typical as any other in this regard. It beckons neophyte fashion and beauty entrepreneurs by telling them they’ll “up your monetization game when we bring you strategic brand partnerships." No doubt, lot of those channels work out, but because you’re talking thousands of channels--Maker Studios at one point had 60,000--a lot of them don’t do anything.

Most creators are not taking wheelbarrows to the bank, unless they’re doing the landscaping.

VideoInk reported last week that YouTube is now making it easier for creators to exit from their MCN daddies. It seems many of those MCNs will let most of them go without a lot of legal wrangling.

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Around the biz, VideoInk’s Jocelyn Johnson reports, the process is call Cr-Exit for “creator exit,” and it’s not as automatic as just filing to leave. MCNs have 30 days to consider the request, and in theory and probably in practice, reach out to make a better arrangement with a creator who wants to leave the MCN.

YouTube is enabling the process until July.

Over the last little while, YouTube has worked to make sure there’s not a mass exodus of channel creators that could wound the MCNs being impacted.

But this story says “the volume of requests is anticipated to be in the hundreds or low thousands rather than the tens of thousands.”

There’s some odd-duckness to YouTube, which generally is an aggregation of content owned by everybody else. It always reminds me of those giant Sunday flea markets in which vendors pay for space, though YouTube’s payment is in the form of an ad split. It’s a loose confederation.

Giving MCN creators a simple way to start a new live may seem enticing, but a YouTube spokesman said: “Since creators are ultimately the owners of their channels, we want to make sure they control who can access their revenue, content and data.”

Any number of stories point out that even under the best of circumstances, when creators have millions of followers, it’s still hard to make a buck.

We’ll see what happens.

“Substantively, the tool does not impact our obligations to our creators and vice versa, MCNer Jason Cosgrove VP, Strategic Partnerships / GM, DEFY Creators Program, told VideoInk. “In our case, we feel our boutique partnership program offers our partners great value and puts an emphasis on individual communication and collaboration. We anticipate our partners will still opt to communicate with us directly rather than through a tool in the dashboard.”

pj@mediapost.com