How YouTube Demonetizes Videos
YouTube has been having secret meetings with preferred creators in order to figure out an alternative way to censor certain content. According to this blog, that someone sent to me, the process of demonetizing videos is pretty straightforward, but the person who is reviewing the video can flag it for any reason, outside of the many reasons they list. This information was obtained by a couple of anonymous sources, but their evidence matches up to what we have been hearing for the past few months. I was provided with a few images that I think at least some of you might find interesting, as they show exactly what kind of content they are flagging.
This is how the page greets you as your start your reviewing process. I suppose it’s a decent barometer for what is appropriate. This is where you start when you go to review a videos demonetization.
To save you the time, I won’t read through all of the categories, but each category reads like how you would imagine. Most of the categories are straightforward, and they have reasonable guidelines for those categories.
One category does stand out, which is marked controversial. This is where the biases of the reviewer really come into play.
In this slide, a little later on, you can see the option to check “other potentially problematic content,” where you can write in your own reason for flagging the video.
Finally, at the bottom, it has the no sensitive content area, where it says “Select this option when the video does not contain any material from the sensitive categories described above, or any other offensive, disrespectful, or otherwise controversial content.
It also reminds the reviewer to “Be sure that you feel comfortable watching the video in a public place with the volume on before selecting no sensitive content”
Now that you are familiar with how videos are considered sensitive, and unfriendly towards advertisers, you can now create your videos with the rules in mind. For a long time, as a person who makes videos on YouTube myself, I have just wanted to know what the criteria is, what the actual rules are. When videos are flagged, you are not told why, but given a vague email.
Recently, a video of a short compilation of President Trump was demonetized, which is a great example of how vague these rules really are. What’s worse than the demonetization is the way videos are buried following the dreaded yellow dollar sign. The video will get about 20–40% of the traffic a monetized video would. This makes sense, as you have to imagine that YouTube wants to show off as many ads as possible, and therefore prioritize the videos are will have ads in them, This is why YouTube will not recommend or promote videos that don’t have ads on them, at least not that I have seen.
