YouTube’s gaming community took a back seat to YouTube this week after seeing some creators suddenly stop monetizing their old videos.
The culprit is a new policy the company introduced in November to make certain types of content more advertiser-friendly. This change to YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines overhauls the platform’s approach to profanity and violence.
Luckily, YouTube seems to be listening to creators’ concerns, although it remains to be seen what the future holds for YouTube.
“Many creators have reached out to us about this update over the past few weeks,” YouTube spokesperson Michael Aciman told TechCrunch. “That feedback is important to us, and we are making some adjustments to this policy to address their concerns. We will follow up with our creator community as soon as we have more to share. “
In November, YouTube expanded its definition of violence beyond real-world depictions to include “creating violent in-game content directed at real people or shocking experiences such as brutal genocide. An act created for” was included. The company says the gore is fine for “standard gameplay,” but only for his eight seconds at the beginning of the video. The entire section left plenty of room for interpretation, for better or worse.
The policy change regarding profanity was more drastic. YouTube has announced that it will not count “hell” and “damn” as profanity, but all other profanity will be lumped together rather than differentiated based on severity (e.g. , words like “shit” and “shit” are treated the same). road). Additionally, according to the new policy, “the title, thumbnail, his first seven seconds of the video, or any profanity used consistently throughout the video, will not be eligible for ad revenue.” .
We are still eligible if the swearing starts after the first 8 seconds of the video, but some changes impacted a large amount of the video, many of which were made before the change was announced . Creators started noticing the new policies that went into effect around the end of December. I was watching some videos get slapped with new restrictions that limit reach and ad eligibility.
YouTube creator Daniel Condren, behind RTGame, explored the impact of policy changes on his channel in a video that has over 1 million views this week. Condren has been working to change enforcement after seeing about a dozen videos disabled for monetization in recent weeks and appeal requests denied.
Condren tweeted, “I truly feel that if this continues, my entire life will be in danger.” It seems nothing.”
YouTube did not respond to follow-up questions about how it planned to adjust its policy, but noted that the platform has identified previously published and old content that creators may rely on as a source of income. I’m certainly curious if they roll back the video enforcement.
In the face of new regulations targeting the relationship between social media and underage users, the company is clearly trying to make its vast number of videos more age-appropriate (and advertiser-friendly). increase. But retrofitting a platform like YouTube with age restrictions and new monetization rules is a delicate balance. In this case, the changes had quick and widespread impact, leaving the creators little time to adapt.
