- We've had two very interesting new snippets
come out of YouTube recently,
one of which could have serious implications
on monetization of your content.
So let's take a look.
- [Male Announcer] VidIQ.
- [Female Announcer] VidIQ.
- [Male Announcer] VidIQ.com.
- [Rob Wilson] The first is a video on YouTube
from the always informative Creator Insider YouTube team.
And it talks about using profanity in your videos,
and how that affects monetization.
There are no new policies or guidelines in this video,
but it does help you determine
what level of profanity is acceptable.
- So these are like, the f-bombs,
the type of words that you don't hear on prime time TV,
the words you don't say to your mom.
- Words that we will never not say right right now,
but we will find a way to get them on the screen somehow.
- Yep, exactly.
So those are the type of words where,
you wanna keep them out of the title,
you want to keep them out of the thumbnail,
and you wanna avoid using repeatedly
at the beginning of the video.
- So I think you get a generally
good understanding of what type of words
you can and cannot use in your YouTube videos.
And if you're still unsure, we do have
the controversial keywords checker,
which does check all of your tags, titles, and descriptions
for verbiage which we think is inappropriate.
It goes along the similar lines
as what YouTube has just told you there.
Something very interesting said in that video
was to try and avoid profanities
in the beginning of the video.
When a lot of people asked the YouTube team about this,
and they clarify by saying the beginning
of a video is the first 30 seconds.
So if you are going to drop any bombs of any kind,
try and leave them until a few minutes into the video.
I'll leave a link in the description
if you want to watch the original video.
The question that it still doesn't really answer for me
is how automated is all of this process.
Is there simply at YouTube that looks
at the tags, titles, and descriptions
and then the auto-captions of videos
for the first 30 seconds,
or is there somebody manually checking all of this
to make sure that YouTube doesn't make any mistakes.
I suspect not, so what I would suggest you do
is put a (dolphin whistles)
dolphin noise in every time you swear.
On to the next new snippet then,
which is more of a dossier, and it's a lot more concerning
because YouTube could be about to lay the smack down
on your candy bottom.
Can we say candy bottom?
Nice.
This was posted in the YouTube Help Community Section
on January the 15th and is rather ominously titled
Strengthening enforcement of our Community Guidelines.
To summarize, this document reminds you
of what the Community Guidelines
are on posting content on YouTube,
and that they're going to enforce these guidelines
more stringently in a couple of months.
This could be interpreted several ways,
a couple of which might be, YouTube are finally
gonna go after all of those channels
that you've been pointing out,
saying that their content isn't appropriate,
or lots of video creators who have been making content
assuming that its safe, is suddenly not going to be
because YouTube has effectively
changed the goalposts on their Community Guidelines.
I suppose in one sense, you could argue
that they're dialing all their policies to 11.
Now there's a lot of interesting wording in this document,
because I think YouTube know
that a lot of this is coming their way.
It states we know that transparent communication
is important, so we are announcing these changes today
alongside a grace period to allow time
to review the updates and make changes to your content.
What it also says is that content that was posted
prior to these enforcement updates
may be removed, but will not receive a strike.
So YouTube are being pretty clear here.
They are laying their cards out on the table.
Over the next couple of months,
you need to sort out your content
so it meets the community guidelines.
If you don't, you won't receive
any restrictions or penalties to your channel,
such as strikes, but the content may be removed
and it may not be monetizable.
As well as that, content that you already have
on your channel from potentially years ago
is under scrutiny as well.
So if in a couple of months time,
you start to see those yellow dollar icons again,
your channel's being demonetized,
you're getting strikes on your channel,
YouTube is gonna point to this document
and say we told you so.
The worry I have is that what YouTube
is telling you in words doesn't always translate
to the audio and visual format.
- [Narrator] But did you know, the vast majority
of YouTube's flags don't come from people,
they come from technology.
We've developed powerful machine learning
that detects content that may violate our policies
and sends it for human review.
In some cases, that same machine learning
automatically takes an action, like removing spam videos.
And as a video creator, it would be
that automation that worries me the most.
Reading a document could be interpreted as saying
these are the old community policies,
we used to operate at this level,
(bell rings)
now we're operating at this level.
(alarm goes off)
And that could cause complete carnage
as we've seen before with Adpocalypse.
My advise to you right now would be to get familiar,
very familiar, with this document.
Get familiar with the three key policies:
custom thumbnails, external links,
dangerous challenges and pranks,
and click on all of those links
and read all of the documents thoroughly.
If you are hit with any of this
over the next couple of months,
YouTube is gonna point to these documents,
so you want to know them inside and out.
I wish you the best of luck
at getting your channels in order,
and before we lay the blame on the obvious candidate
such as YouTube and the advertisers,
I think there's just one person
we can hold responsible for this:
Sandra Bullock and that bloody Netflix film.