Yesterday, YouTube star Philip DeFranco told fans that YouTube was shutting down his channel. Specifically, that they were driving his revenue down, which would force him to devote less time to his channel. While that particular account may have had an element of hyperbole, the notion all over was that YouTube’s newest assumed crackdown was due to a rule change, despite YouTube stating that wasn’t the case, and that the service would box out a great many creators because their content was not advertiser friendly. The guidelines for what was considered ad-friendly are somewhat ambiguous, and include any controversial subjects or potentially offensive content, though many YouTubers found some videos demonetized with seemingly no such content in the videos. The internet practically caught on fire over the issue, with a relevant Twitter hashtag seeing well over 100,000 Tweets.
Given YouTube’s recent push for creator advocacy, some saw the move as a bit strange, if it was what the internet thought it was. Now that the dust has settled and more creators aren’t seeing videos demonetized, it’s become clear that YouTube was telling the truth; policies have not changed, and there was no mass crackdown. They had flipped the switch to start notifying YouTubers when their videos got their advertising taken away, and the massive number of videos that did not fall under “ad-friendly” guidelines was great enough to make it seem like the service had suddenly changed something or had done a sweep and demonetized a massive number of videos. Philip DeFranco, the star that began the frenzy, took to Twitter to express his opinion on their response, saying “So before you were just turning off ads and not emailing us?”. Previously, he had called the policy “censorship under another name”.
The new system is meant to be more transparent with YouTubers, telling them what videos had been demonetized. There is an appeals process that YouTube stars can go through to have their ad revenue on a video reinstated, but it’s unclear how many videos may make the cut on appeal; while some were undoubtedly a false alarm, the guidelines are a bit on the stringent side, meaning that many existing videos out there, such as YouTube musicians’ songs that have strong language or refer to copyrighted or controversial content, could fall flat in the appeals process. Only time will tell how well the mass appeal that’s surely coming will fare, but for now, YouTube seems to be done flagging videos, leaving creators to carry on with business as usual, though perhaps with a tweak in their content if they want to monetize.