YouTube has been suffering a serious backlash from its content creators on the past few months, but the situation was made even worse now that Youtubers have caught up on the Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines. However, what does it mean for creators and viewers, and what does it change for YouTube?
Basically, what happened was that Youtubers started noticing their videos were getting demonetized without any warning.
Upon investigation, they found out that most of that had been disclosed the Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines.
The Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines are exactly what they sound like: guidelines you should follow to make your videos “safe” for advertisers. The guidelines are the following:
Content that is considered "not advertiser-friendly" includes, but is not limited to:
- Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humor
- Violence, including display of serious injury and events related to violent extremism
- Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language
- Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items
- Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown.
If any of the above describes any portion of your video, then the video may not be approved for monetization. If monetization is approved, your video may not be eligible for all available ad formats. YouTube reserves the right to not monetize a video, as well as suspend monetization features on channels that repeatedly submit videos violating our policies
Source: Youtube Help
At first glance, this seems pretty reasonable. After all, YouTube’s main source of income is based on their advertisers, and some of them may not want to be linked to a video that discusses sensitive topics - in Philip DeFranco’s case, his video was likely unmonetized for discussing a story about rape.
This is, however, a case of censorship and backward logic from YouTube’s part. Especially because, apparently, these guidelines have been demonetizing videos for a long time, but only now was there any clarification about it.
Even Pewdiepie, Youtube’s most subscribed channel since 2013 (and currently with a sub count of almost 48 million) has suffered from these guidelines. According to himself, many of his videos were unmonetized based mostly on sexual humor and inappropriate language - which if you know Pewdiepie, is the foundation of 90% of his more than 2000 videos and one of the main reasons people follow his channel.
This is concerning because now YouTubers can’t say what they want if they expect to make money from their videos - which to many smaller channels, is their only option.
However, assuming there isn’t much of a choice, Youtubers could just adapt to these changes and settle for making advertiser-friendly content, right? Well, there’s a catch.
Caddicarus, a smaller channel with about 500k subscribers made a good point about it by reviewing Nicki Minaj's Anaconda, a video with over 600 MILLION views that breaks every single guideline more than once… and is still monetized.
You don’t even need to see the video to acknowledge it absolutely does not respect any of YouTube’s guidelines - in fact, it’s easy to think of at least five more similar music videos that are equally not advertiser-friendly - and yet, you can bet they are still monetized.
Channels are being hit unevenly. Content creators such as the aforementioned Youtubers (and a lot more) are severely censored for merely mentioning certain topics in their videos or using harsh language, while a massively popular song like “Anaconda” gets a free pass. This is biased-censorship.
What did YouTube do about all this?
To be fair, they did implement a system which allows a Youtuber who had their video demonetized to ask for an appeal, if they think the video does not break any of the guidelines. This has made possible for a lot of Youtubers to have their monetization back.
However, it also led to them realizing this had been happening for a very long time without their knowledge, which means, even though they are able to fix the monetization problem NOW, who knows how much money they lost during this time when there was no way to react?
What now?
The best creators can do for now is keep talking about it and not settle for such an unfair system, especially considering that’s how they make a living. Every time their voices were heard, YouTube did something about it. Not much, but something. So they should keep talking.
As for viewers, maybe it’s time to keep an eye open for alternative ways of supporting your favorite creators. Many creators like Jordan Underneath have Patreon profiles, which allows them to live of off making videos despite not having a huge subscriber count - which comes to show, once more, how little money they make on Ads without having their videos unmonetized without warning.
On Patreon, you can pay very small values for their content - usually, something like $1 a month - which, believe it or not, is more than a small channel gets per video on YouTube.
YouTube is not dead - in fact, it should live for a long time. What we came to realize is that YouTube as we know it is dying.
Creators are progressively more unsatisfied with this unfair treatment that’s slowly but steadily shifting the very core of what YouTube was supposed to be: a platform for creative content.
If YouTube loses these people, surely it won’t die, it will remain a platform for creative content - but one where you can’t say this, or that, or that, or that, and not even that.
And it sounds very, very boring.
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