Content Creators And The Risks For Money Laundering

YouTube is a force of nature. If one requires information on how to build a cabin from mud and twigs, there is a video for that. If you want to watch someone clean up crime scenes, there is a whole YouTube channel for that. The first rule of the internet is that if you can think of it, someone has made a video for it, nearly without exception. We have seen the rise of terms like "Influencer" and "Content Creator," and the prospect of making a living recording yourself doing any number of obscure tasks is now a perfectly viable course of action. According to Global Media Insight, 2.7 billion people use YouTube Worldwide every single month, and content creators currently operate about 114 million active channels.¹ What this translates into, monetarily, is that content creators were paid $70 billion over the past 3 years.² While this makes YouTube a media giant, and the second most popular search entity next to Google (YouTube is owned by Google LLC), it also results in