- In this video, we're gonna talk about
two words no YouTuber ever wants to see:
"reused" and "repetitious."
And if you ever get an email from YouTube
containing either of those words,
then I'm afraid you ain't getting monetized.
But in truth, it's your own fault.
Harsh, but fair.
But the prevailing wind,
the course of direction YouTube is on,
along with the mass of policies now in place
should be enough of a warning to you.
Let me give you an example.
(electronic music)
I've watched the News Be Funny YouTube channel for years.
It compiles all of the best news bloopers
from around the world.
But six months ago, something really odd happened.
The channel deleted almost all of its videos,
and wiped out half a billion views.
I mean, who would voluntarily do that?
A channel that's in trouble with the YouTube law,
that's who.
YouTube basically told the channel
you can't just stitch together content
with minimal changes or no changes at all.
What you and I would call a montage.
But the News Be Funny channel
wasn't some fly-by-night operation.
They'd been on YouTube for a decade,
and have appeared in publications
such as Time magazine and GQ.
So the News Be Funny channel
were just doing what they thought was okay.
Until it wasn't.
And YouTube's advice to fix all of this
was to add commentary to all of the news clips.
And that's exactly what the channel did.
- [Narrator] We begin with Instagram changing its algorithm.
Anchor Kallyn Hobmann has the tech bytes.
- [Kallyn] Instagram is changing
its ranking algor, algori, rithm...
Wow, that's a tough word, everyone.
- [Narrator] Next, let's turn to anchor Keith Russell
for the sign-off.
- [Keith] Thank you for watching.
- Nah, the whole flow of the video
is ruined by the narration.
Don't tell. Show.
But the problem is,
News Be Funny have to include that narration
to make it transformational content.
The spirit of the reused-content policy
is to make sure that YouTube is monetizing original content
that adds value to viewers.
If a creator puts a thoughtful or funny spin on content
that the creator didn't originally create,
the creators therefore transform the content in some way.
And as a creator myself,
who spends, on occasion, days
putting together videos,
I'm in general agreement with this policy.
It is infuriating to see some people,
who I can't call creators,
take content from here, there, and everywhere,
mash it all up,
and get millions of views
profiting from other people's work.
Having said that, what I will concede
is that there is a very fine line
between content harvesting
and content curation with some transformational efforts.
It is YouTube that sets that line,
and none of us know exactly where that line is drawn.
And YouTube themselves can also get it wrong,
at least in the creator's opinion.
And so if you decide
that you want to grab your video and audio content
from existing sources,
you are already on YouTube's reused-content radar.
Read this document inside out,
so you know exactly what to do.
I'll link it in the description.
And as a final point on reused content,
this has nothing to do with copyright.
If the original video has a Creative Commons license,
or you have permission from the content owner,
that doesn't matter.
if you don't change anything to the source material,
YouTube will consider it reused, and rightly so.
All right, let's move on to
rep, rep, rep, repetitious content.
That was a glitch in the matrix.
(electronic music)
Just like reused content,
YouTube has a fairly hefty outline
of what repetitious content means
in their documentation,
which I've linked below.
And this has much more to do with
what's going on at a channel level,
as opposed to individual videos.
Now, this isn't about using the same intro and outro
in every single video,
although you really shouldn't do that,
that's a big waste of time.
And this isn't about covering the same topic
in every single video.
As long as you have
a different angle, a different approach every time,
you should be fine.
This is about reading from books, comics, and the internet
without offering anything new,
changing music to dodge content ID,
and repetitive content of low value.
And this is where creators really need to take note.
Recent articles are indicating
that AI-generated content is against Google's guidelines.
And since YouTube is a part of Google,
you can bet this stance filters into video content.
And it does.
And in particular, it's these two points
that I feel most creators slip up on.
Programmatically-generated content and image slideshows.
These two points put you
in a very particular YouTube bucket,
and it's a very popular one.
Faceless channels.
Now let me stress, at this point,
there is nothing inherently wrong with faceless channels.
There is no face to this video
guiding me through an animated recreation
of a World War II event.
But there is a human voiceover,
and original graphics I have not seen anywhere else.
Problems can start to arise
when creators use tools that computers mostly take care of,
such as:
- [Computer Voice] Text to speech,
a common practice in short-form videos,
but still very jarring in long-form content.
And static images or stock video
that's clearly not original content,
when the content is so similar from video to video
that viewers can't tell the difference,
or even if a human created it.
You're going to end up
on YouTube's repetitious-content radar.
- [Computer Voice] All of which leads us
back to trying to figure out YouTube's imaginary line
between what's acceptable and what isn't.
Okay, this is getting weird now.
- I appreciate that a lot of this may sound very technical
and quite vague.
So let me put it in its simplest terms possible.
If your goal as a creator
is to one day monetize your YouTube channel,
then do less copying, pasting, downloading, programming,
and more of what my T-shirt says.
Just create.
Keep it authentic, keep it genuine, keep it original.
Keep it "you."
- [Computer Voice] Now, Rob has kindly let me
outro this video.
So if you want to avoid being a copyright idiot,
watch this video over here.
Also, my hot take is that sub4sub actually works.
So unless you want to be
a YouTube noob for the rest of your life,
spam the YouTube comments
as if your worthless life depended on it.