This may be a source of disappointment for many but YouTube has just revised its policies and it has now become difficult to earn money through YouTube courtesy strict monetization rules. This was done in answer to the concerns by various advertisers, who raised the voice that their ads were being shown along with content that is deemed offensive or mis-fit.
Now the selection process for monetizing YouTube videos would be more selective. It was also known that Human Reviewers would personally review the content of mainstream and trending YouTube videos, and deem them as safe or not.
The news came out by the managers at YouTube itself this Tuesday. Every video shall be analyzed first before being considered for the Google Preferred category. In case you wonder what that is, then it’s bad news for the top YouTube video creators since it’s an elite program offered only to them. This means that for any new video upload by top YouTube creators, that shall have to be verified too, and too manually. The video shall be checked if they are consistent with the YouTube guidelines or not.
According to Paul Maret in a blog post, who is the vice president of the Tech-Giant Google, “There’s n
o denying 2017 was a difficult year, with several issues affecting our community and our advertising partners.” He further wrote that, “We are passionate about protecting our users, advertiser, and creators and making sure YouTube is not a place that can be co-opted by bad actors.”
The changes were inevitable. People had started to exploit the system, and any controversial video could be up and running garnering heavy money. Therefore, an incident took place, in which there was a boycott by advertisers but a limited one. The boycott was of those YouTube videos, in which sexually suggestive remarks were passed on the children in those videos.
In response, YouTube took a bold initiative and banned hundreds of accounts. Not only this, but nearly 150,000 were deleted from the Google-owned service as well. In addition to this, about a whopping 625,000 videos saw their comment feature being turned off automatically. This was because these videos were becoming a target of pedophiles.
Furthermore, the YouTube management also sought to other measures. The bar is raised to qualify for the monetization of You-Tube videos. Now, the YouTube Partner program requires at least a 1,000 YouTube channel subscribers. Furthermore, at least 4,000 hours of watch time needs to be there for the past 12 months. Thus, it has become really difficult to become a YouTube Partner now. Before this, just 10,000 views in total were required to become a part of it.
As per the YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in December, “Now, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned from our work fighting violent extremism content over the last year in order to tackle other problematic content. Our goal is to stay one step ahead of bad actors, making it harder for policy-violating content to surface or remain on YouTube.”
In November it came on the news by YouTube itself, that nearly 2 million videos and more than 50,000 channels tried for the monetization program, posing themselves as family-friendly, but rather had controversial or inappropriate content.
All in all, it’s a good initiative by YouTube, though it will affect the livelihood of many innocent people as well, since it has become more difficult now to earn money through the Google Owned Service.
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