YouTube Gaming Community delayed against the company this week after some creators saw their old videos demonetized out of the blue.
The culprit is a new policy that the company presented in november to make certain types of content more advertiser-friendly. That change, made to YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, revised the platform’s approach to profanity and violence.
The good news is that while we don’t yet know what the company will do, YouTube is apparently listening to creators’ concerns.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard from a lot of creators about this update,” YouTube spokesman Michael Aciman told TechCrunch. “That feedback is important to us and we are in the process of making some adjustments to this policy to address your concerns. We’ll be following up shortly with our creator community as soon as we have more to share.”
In November, YouTube expanded its definition of violence beyond depictions of the real world, including violent in-game content “directed at a person with a real name or fabricated acts to create shocking experiences (such as brutal mass murder).” The company said gore in “standard gameplay” was okay, but only after the first 8 seconds of a video. The whole section left a lot of room for interpretation, for better or worse.
The changes to its profanity policy were more drastic. YouTube announced that it would no longer consider “hell” and “damn” as profane words, but all other profanity would be lumped together instead of differentiated based on severity (for example, words like “shit” and “fuck” would now be treated as profanity). in the same way). Additionally, “profanity used in the title, thumbnails, or in the first 7 seconds of the video or used consistently throughout the video may not receive ad revenue,” according to the new policy.
If the swearing-in triggers after the first 8 seconds of a video, you’re still eligible, but some of the changes affected a large number of videos, many of which were made long before the changes were announced. Creators started noticing the new policies in place at the end of December, and saw some videos with new restrictions limiting their reach and ad eligibility.
YouTube creator Daniel Condren, who runs RTGame, explored the impact of policy change on his own channel in a video that racked up over a million views this week. Condren has been dealing with the app changes in recent weeks after seeing about a dozen videos demonetized and his appeal request rejected.
“I truly feel like my entire livelihood is at risk if this continues,” Condren wrote on Twitter. “I am so upset that this is happening and that there seems to be nothing I can do to resolve it.”
YouTube didn’t respond to our follow-up questions about how it plans to amend the policy, but we’re certainly curious if the platform will revert the enforcement of old, previously posted videos that creators can rely on for revenue.
Faced with emerging regulation that focuses on social media’s relationship with underage users, the company is clearly trying to make its massive trove of videos more age-appropriate (and advertiser-friendly). But updating age restrictions and new monetization rules on a platform like YouTube is a delicate balance, and in this case, the changes had a quick and radical impact that gave creators little time to adjust.
