With a new round of policy changes, YouTube has angered and confused a lot of users, including some quite large channels. The new bout of chaos for the site centers on the content guidelines for “advertiser-friendly” content. Now it’s worth mentioning that these guidelines were in place previously. This policy is not new and nor has it significantly changed.
“While our policy of demonetizing videos due to advertiser-friendly concerns hasn’t changed, we’ve recently improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication,” a YouTube spokesperson writes.
Here’s a link to the full YouTube policy. The first paragraph contains an important sentence that places the rest in more context: “If the video does contain inappropriate content, the context is usually newsworthy or comedic and the creator’s intent is to inform or entertain (not offend or shock).” That should be enough to protect the vast majority of produced work, as it has previously.
It would seem that the algorithm YouTube is using to enforce this policy has been put into overdrive; as thousands of previously unflagged videos, some of which are not intended to shock and don’t violate policy, have now been demonetized. It looks like a lot more YouTubers will need to check the manual review process out.
