Demonetized & Demoralized — Google’s Destruction of Gaming Channels on YouTube!
Without a doubt, content creators have been left reeling as a result of Google’s changes regarding its advertiser friendly guidelines, and among the victims of Google’s ridiculous policies gamers appear to have been hit particularly hard. At present, it appears Google is currently blacklisting entire games from being monetized, including popular franchises like Call of Duty, Destiny, and a more recent victim Left4Dead. The question is, why is Google cracking down on fictional violence in video games, and what can gaming creators do to combat the mass demonetization that’s still weeping across Google’s video sharing platform at lightning speed?
For starters, we too have been hit recently, in fact having 83 videos demonetized from our largest channel. Its something we knew was coming after hearing the horror stories of demonetization from other gaming channels on the platform.
In our case, Google demonetized all of our Left4Dead videos, stating they’re not advertiser friendly, and literally throwing out thousands of hours of our hard work as a result. Now, just imagine working 90 hours a week for months on end with no days off to produce content, and then being told you’re getting screwed and can’t financially benefit from your hard work.
There’s really no good reason for Google to be demonetizing gaming videos that depict what is nothing more than fictional violence anyway. Just look at all the movies and shows on cable television that depict violence, and ad firms dump ads all over them left and and right! Yet, Google insists a video depicting zombies in Left4Dead is some how a travesty.
To make matters worse, when Google demonetized our videos, they offered us no way to contest the demonetization at all. First they give you a link with the option to quote, “Request a Review”, then they tell you they will only review videos that have had at least 1,000 views in the past 7 days. Google enacts these demonetization policies while clearly providing us with no way to defend ourselves at all.
Google’s resorting to such a practice of censorship is also likely to hamper YouTuber’s creative abilities. At this point, we know that anything Left4Dead related is pretty much dead in the water.
To make matters worse, Google actually contradicts themselves, since their own advertiser-friendly guidelines state quote, “Video content where the focal point is on blood, violence, or injury, when presented without additional context, is not eligible for advertising. Violence in the normal course of video gameplay is generally acceptable for advertising, but montages where gratuitous violence is the focal point is not. If you’re showing violent content in a news, educational, artistic, or documentary context, that additional context is important.” — As noted in their guidelines here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en
So there you have it, there own rules state violence in video games is totally acceptable in the normal course of game play, and as long as it has some form of additional context (say a commentary, explanation of something, etc).
Yet, Google doesn’t even follow their own rules, lies to creators, and to make matters worse, doesn’t communicate with them at all.
Previously, we reached out to Google back in August to ask why some videos were not receiving ads, and this was before any of our videos were demonetized, and we had received an explicit response from Google stating so. Here’s the email response we received:
Upon our initial inquiry, we were told ads were in fact being served normally and there were no issues at all, that was just one of several email responses we received. They told us nothing was being demonetized, when in fact more than 80 videos had been blacklisted from serving Google’s ads.
In essence, we were straight up lied to. Or, the more likely scenario is that the Google rep that contacted us back didn’t know what Google’s policies were, or that any of our videos had been hit by demonetization. The latter is most likely the case.
The really messed up part of all of this is that Google never bothered to tell us that all of our Left4Dead videos were going to be demonetized until after we spent 7 days a week for months on end producing more than 60 of them. If we had known that Google was going to do this, then we could have worked to focus on different types of games. The result, a thousand hours of work down the tubes, because Google refuses to communicate with its creators.
Here Google writes up guidelines stating what’s acceptable and what isn’t, we follow them and attempt to adhere to them, then Google changes course, goes behind our backs, and changes the rules without ever stating a word.
They even demonetized some of our fighting game videos, such as a video about an arcade fighting game called Fighting Layer, which by the way has no blood:
One thing to note here, when we do reviews for arcades games like these, they’re typically presented within an historical or educational context, and to preserve their legacy for future generations to experience. Yet, anything that’s even educational in any way, shape, or form is still fair game to be demonetized as far as Google is concerned.
I can only imagine how many creators feel right now, as I know I’m more than likely going to end up homeless over this myself. At this point I assume all my channels are going to get hit by this demonetization circus that Google has going on. Yep, my phone is getting shut off in a matter of hours, and I can forget cutting the bills anytime soon. Its absolutely devastating, and its actually thrown 6 years and thousands of hours of my hard work right out with the trash.
I spent close to 6 years building audiences on the Google+ platform to the tune of over 500,000+ members spread across a dozen brands, along with more than a dozen brand pages with over 150,000+ followers. After years of literally starving to death, I decided it was time to put these brands to work on YouTube and try to make a living from all those years of hard work, and now its likely all destroyed. I’m also greatly concerned as to what long term affects all of this will have on those who work to manage all my brands on the web. We can’t exactly pay people when we have no money.
By all means, I definitely had the means to grow anything I wanted on YouTube given the size of my audiences across the web, but Google’s destruction of content leaves a lot to be desired.
Written and published by Daniel Imbellino, co-founder of Gamers Bay! Connect with us across the web to stay up to date with honest gaming news and reviews!
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