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YouTube’s Gaming Community pushed back The push came against the company this week after some creators saw their old videos suddenly demonetized.
The culprit is a new company policy Available in November To make certain types of content more advertiser-friendly. The change, made to YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, overhauls how the platform handles profanity and violence.
The good news is that while we don’t quite know what the company will do yet, YouTube is clearly listening to creators’ concerns.
“We’ve heard from many creators about this update in recent weeks,” YouTube spokesperson Michael Aciman told TechCrunch. “This feedback is important to us, and we are making some adjustments to this policy to address their concerns. We will follow up with our creator community as soon as we have more information to share.”
In November, YouTube expanded its definition of violence beyond depictions of the real world to include in-game violence “that targets people with real names or acts that are engineered to create a shocking experience, such as brutal mass killing.” )”. The gore in “standard gameplay” is fine, but only after the first eight seconds of the video, the company said. The whole section leaves plenty of room for interpretation, for better or for worse.
The change in its blasphemy policy was even more drastic. YouTube has announced that it will no longer count “hell” and “damn” as swear words, but all other swear words will be grouped together rather than differentiated by severity (e.g. words like “shit” and “fucking” are now will be treated the same way). Additionally, “profanity used in the title, thumbnail, or the first 7 seconds of the video, or continued throughout the entire video, may not earn ad revenue,” according to the new policy.
If the profanity appears after the first 8 seconds of the video, it still qualifies, but some of these changes affect a large number of videos — many of which were made before the changes were announced. Creators began to take notice of the new policy, which went into effect around the end of December, with new restrictions on viewing some videos, limiting their reach and ad eligibility.
Daniel Condren, YouTube creator who runs RTGame, Explores the impact of policy changes A video on his own channel has more than 1 million views this week. Condren has grappled with enforcement changes in recent weeks after seeing about a dozen videos decriminalized and his appeal request denied.
“If this continues, I truly feel like my entire livelihood is in jeopardy,” Condren tweeted. “I’m so bummed that this is even happening and there’s nothing I can seem to do to fix it.”
YouTube didn’t respond to our follow-up questions about how it plans to adjust the policy, but we’re certainly curious to see if the platform will roll back enforcement on older, previously published videos that creators may rely on for revenue.
The company is clearly trying to make its bulk of its videos more age-appropriate (and advertiser-friendly) in the face of new regulations on social media’s relationship with underage users. But tweaking age restrictions and new monetization rules on a platform like YouTube is a delicate balance — and in this case, the changes have swift and widespread effects, leaving creators with little time to adapt.
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