YouTube Makes Changes To Video Monetization

Aiming to increase transparency and fairness around its video monetization, YouTube announced changes in a blog post last week.

According to YouTube, the company started rolling out improved notifications in Video Manager in an effort to make it fairer and clarify confusion in the creator community around its longstanding advertiser-friendly guidelines. The improved notifications are aimed at making it clearer to creators when a video is demonetized due to advertiser-friendly content concerns and making it easy for them to appeal. YouTube said it’s part of its broader effort to improve the platform and help creators build a good business on YouTube.

“Today, it’s become clear to us that there is some confusion in the creator community, so we wanted to take a moment to clarify things: We did not change our policy of demonetizing videos that may not be appropriate for Google’s brand advertisers. Nor have we changed how these policies are enforced,” it said.

The specific notification changes, which will be instituted over the coming few weeks, include changing the $ icon in Video Manager to yellow with the hover message “Not advertiser-friendly. Request manual review” to make it more clear when a video is demonetized. It will also send an email notifying a creator if a video is newly demonetized due to advertiser-friendly content concerns.

“Note that demonetization decisions may not happen immediately, so a video may be monetized for a period of time after it is uploaded and then become demonetized,” YouTube said. It also enabled the ability for creators to click on the yellow $ icon next to any video that is demonetized due to advertiser-friendly content concerns in Video Manager to request an appeal by human reviews. YouTube said the content creator will be notified once a decision is made on the appeal. If the content creator is successful, the video will immediately be monetized again and have a green $ icon in Video Manager.