YouTube has updated its Terms of Service and starting November 18, YouTube will run more ads on some creators’ videos. But it won’t share the portion of the generated revenue with the creators.
This is because these small creators are not big enough to get enrolled in the Partner Program. In the updated terms of service, YouTube stated that it will now play ads on the content of smaller creators.
Prior to this, YouTube used to run ads only on those creators’ content who were members of the YouTube Partner Program. And these were large creators having a set threshold of subscribers and views.
FYI, in order to become a member of the YouTube Partner Program, a creator should live in a country where YouTube is operating. Moreover, the channel should have 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months and has to have over 1,000 subscribers.
However, with the changes in the policy, YouTube will now run ads on any video complying with its guidelines. This means that ads will not run on videos that contain inappropriate language, violence, sexual content, drug-related and firearm-related content.
Advertising is a big business for YouTube and its parent company, Google. A huge chunk of revenue is generated from ads itself. In the last quarter, Google generated around $5 billion in ads.
Creators also rely on ad revenue to get their cut. Now, YouTube will be able to run more ads on its platform without sharing the revenue with several content creators in the process.
The revised YouTube ads terms and services are effective from November 18 in the US
Notably, the revised YouTube terms and policy changes will be effective starting November 18 in the US. However, for countries like India, it will go live somewhere in 2021.
As a reaction, these changes did not go well down with the YouTube creators. A YouTuber with over 3.5 million subscribers called this change “nuts.”
Well, the argument is also viable, as small creators won’t be able to get monetization from the ads running on their videos. And YouTube will take 100% of the profit by running ads on the videos of these creators.
YouTube has not revealed details about how many creators would be impacted by these new changes. Though it mentions that, the change will be implemented initially on a small number of videos.
There are several creators that have kept their channel ad-free on purpose. However, with these new changes, YouTube will run ads and will hamper the ad-free experience the creator want’s to provide to its audience.
But now the option is gone. From YouTube’s perspective, it is their right to do so. As it is allowing the creators to upload videos for free. Note that it took a long time for YouTube to become profitable.