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Youtube's new " Not suitable for all advertisers" rules
🕑 Added 2017-08-12 18:05:34 +0000 UTC So Youtube Changed Things™ and as we know that's usually not good. This week the change is "advertiser friendly content guidelines".Basically YouTube has been catching flak from advertisers for harboring offensive content (best I can tell, usually hate speech a la Twitter, but they're casting a real, real wide net in response). So they've added a machine learning system instead of actually reviewing and banning offenders, huzzah!
What does this matter for my Patreons?
If you're only here because you're a Patreon and not interested in the YouTube changes, changes should be minimal. But since videos can now be rejected it's possible I'll have to re-upload videos, meaning direct links to Early Access videos may die at any time.
Once videos go live they'll stay that way of course, and Playlist links will work even if I have to re-upload and re-playlist videos. Basically you'll just get more playlist links and less direct links, and don't expect bookmarks to early videos to always work.
What's "Not Suitable for all advertisers"/yellow dollar sign mean?
If Youtube "detects" (pulls a number out of it's backside) an offense, a video is blacklisted in the ad system and "limited" (potentially no) ad networks will be willing to run ads on these blacklisted videos. This puts it in a special view in Video Manager you can use to find and attempt to appeal videos that match the guidelines (unfortunately I've found videos that are limited but NOT in that view--great job, Youtube!).
For most channels, blacklisting is effectively permanent; only videos getting over 1k views a day are up for review, and review takes a week. For most YouTubers that might as well be permanent. We also have no idea how brutal they are when reviewing videos. In most cases there's nothing much you can do with a published video that's been matched. Editing the tags/etc won't change it.
How Do I Make Sure My Content Is Safe?
The biggest factor I've noticed thus far is that videos without proper tags/description/title are immediately blacklisted regardless of the actual content. Best I can tell the system seems to largely just use the descriptive text/tags (and possibly auto-CCs, but I swear in quite a few old videos and they're not flagged).
Swearing in titles, even censored like "h*ck", still triggers it. Games known to be sexual appear to be marked (about 50% of my Senran Kagura games are marked). A video using the word "murder" in it's title was caught too Some completely random content is also marked. Videos of games titled "Drunken Robot Pornography" and "a ghost porno" were caught, even though they're effectively "E10" games, it's important to remember this is machine learning, AKA stupid and terrible.
Wacky, exaggerated gaming video titles (which I was never a fan of anyway) should probably be avoided, at least once with any form of swearing/sexual suggestiveness/violence (AKA all of gaming videos with 'wacky' titles).
The best thing you can do is upload all new videos as unlisted (already recommended to avoid the "no quality options yet" issue) and fully tag them before monetizing. If you monetize all new videos by default, this means you'll want to have all the tagging, description and titles in before the upload finishes.
Use of descriptive words seems critical, hence I'm going back to titling all of my gaming commentary videos with "Let's Play". Video titles of only a game name seem to get blacklisted.
If you upload from your phone you're going to need to actually tag your video before tapping upload (all of my unpublished phone uploads were caught because they have no tags by default).
How YouTube Could Suck Less
To soapbox just a bit here, this system is idiotic and should really include humans at both ends of the equation even if machine learning is used to help: start the checking process once a human flags a video. The current system is a complete mess and seems to not check any real-word use-cases, as exemplified by every single one of my unlisted-but-inoffensive videos getting blacklisted simply because I don't tag and describe my videos immediately upon uploading.
tl;dr
YouTube stupid again. Fully tag and describe videos (with no no-no words) before ticking the "monetize" button. Leave new videos unlisted until sure monetization is a-ok (I'd wait 24 hours if possible, we're not sure how long it takes yet).
