YouTube Demonization, it would never affect us here at vidiq, afterall we're here to help
YouTubers right?
Hello everyone, welcome back to vidIQ, my name is Rob.
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YouTube demonitization, the scourge of all video creators right now.
You spend hours crafting your masterpiece only to discover that the moment you upload
it to YouTube from out nowhere you're socked by that dreaded icon.
Do it.
Go on, I dare you.
Do it.
The most common flag video creators are being hit with is this 'Not suitable for most advertisers'
warning
It leaves you in adsense limbo, not really knowing whether your video will get ads or
not.
You can appeal the flag but you either need to have 10,000 subscribers or the video needs
at least 1,000 views over seven days.
The appeal process is a manual review, that can take days, and as well all know, most
video traffic comes in the first 48 hours.
We've already shared one video creator's story on how it affected his channel and the horror
community at large and now we have our own weird story to share.
Now just before we start, we don't monetize our content here at vidIQ, however we did
need to put our channel through the monetization process in order share external links on our
videos.
Ok here's what happened.
This is the content in question, a video about how YouTube are killing off their featured
content tool.
Now if I click into the video and check the monetization tab with have a green icon but
as I said earlier we're not monetizing the content.
However, when I first uploaded this video and before I had written the title, description
and tags it received a not suitable for advertisers warnings, so as a test I uploading it again
to see what would happen.
Lo and behold it got hit with the same warning and at that point you're thinking this video
is going to need a manual review if we wanted to monetize it.
But we already have proof below that exactly the same video is perfectly acceptable for
monetization, so what happened?
First of all let's check what the monetization tab tells us.
It does indeed say it has limited or no ads and that I would have to request a manual
review.
Why did this happen?
Well so far all we've done is upload the video and thumbnail.
Is it the filename, the current video title or the thumbnail that has a gravestone on
it?
Who knows, but let's start tinkering with the video info.
First of all I pasted in my Title, tags and description from the video which is now available
for monetization.
That didn't seem to fix the warning so I decided to systematically go through the other stuff
starting with endscreen cards and to my utter astonishment adding endscreens seemed to fix
the issue.
Whoa, whoa.
Hold on, you're trying to tell me you can fix demonetization with endscreen cards?
That can't right
No, that's not right, but it did send me down a demonetization rabbit hole that made me
a little crazy.
The next test was to add the endscreen cards first and this time it made absolutely no
difference, the video still has a warning against it.
I wanted to turn my attention back to the video info so again I changed title, description
and tags and as before it didn't seem to make any difference but I decided to leave it for
about a minute and then refresh the video manager page.
Ok so now the video is available for monetization.
it must be something to do with the video info.
Next test.
upload the video without the thumbnail, let's make sure YouTube isn't somehow detecting
that gravestone as ad unfriendly.
Alright, it's still add unfriendly, by process of elimination we are getting there.
What we're going to try this time is to simply remove the word dead from the title, nothing
more.
No description update or video tags added.
Save the changes, wait a minute, refresh the video manager page and... boom.
So surely that wasn't the fastest one minute Youtube manual review, there must be some
automated ad-revue system checking Youtube videos.
Let's test it out.
The obvious thing to try was to reverse what we just did, stick dead back in the title.
I refreshed the video manager page several times over five minute but no warning returned.
So I uploaded the video again with different titles.
Dead Dead, dead, dead
I'm not dead I even tried adding an exclamtion mark at
the end, nothing worked.
But change the title to deceased which means exactly the same thing and yep no problem
that's clean.
Confused?
Well I'm afraid it's about to get worse.
As some of you many know I have another YouTube channel called the Video Gadgets Journal where
I do run monetized content so I decided to upload exactly the same video with the same
title there and what do you it's fine with no ad warning.
Another thing that you're supposed to be able to do is to filter you videos by those with
ad warnings.
However, when I do this on the vidIQ channel, my supposedly ad unfriendly video disappears
from the list.
But at the same time if I click on all the relevant links I can request a manual review
if I want to.
We could go around in a million circles and not get any closer to the answer so from our
experience what are the questions?
Is this video actually ad unfriendly or is there some weird bug in YouTube that's making
us chase a red herring?
Does Youtube demonitize content based on nothing more than a single sensitive word in a title?
Does YouTube's ad-system automatically check videos when you change the title, tags and
description?
Does YouTube treat channels different depending on how much advertising data an experience
a channel has?
Once a video has been deemed advertiser friendly, can you manipulate it to make it ad unfriendly
again?
And finally which YouTube AI robot is in charge over there, this guy?
Bite my shiny metal a...
So plenty of questions to discuss in the comments below and if you have a demonitization story
you want to share we'd love to hear from you.
I guess the one thing we can take from all of this is that if you do get that icon, it
might not be the end of the world, it may just require a simple tweak in your video
data.
But of course I appreciate that a lot of you this demonetization issue is a lot harder
to resolve.
Now I'll leave you with one final ironic thought, if any vidIQ video should be demonetized it's
this one.
We've got comic violence, use of weapons, coarse language and some criticism of the
YouTube platform.
Make sure to check the Pinned comment and I'll let you know if it is deemed ad unfriendly.
But I suspect we'll be absolutely fine
That's it this video, I hope you enjoyed watching this video as much as I enjoyed making it.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.
Bye for now.