YouTube recently decided to try and explain how profanity affects monetization of videos; its Creator Insider channel uploaded a video to do just that.
To be clear, YouTube hasn’t changed its monetization policy on profanity. The point of the video is to explain the current system YouTube uses to determine if a video is monetized based on profanity. The video runs for a few minutes and goes over some of the words that advertisers typically avoid.
What is accepted?
YouTube does allow monetized videos to have some profanity. “Things like dang, shoot, damn, hell, no worries about those, like they’re totally safe to monetize. You can use them as much as you want in your video, the title or thumbnail” says John, from YouTube’s Monetization team.
What isn’t accepted?
Words that aren’t accepted are words that you can’t say on primetime television. According to YouTube, F-bombs and words as such shouldn’t be included in thumbnails, titles or the beginning of videos.
“There’s going to be a type of content that’s just not safe for monetization at all and that’s any use of racial slurs, derogatory content, really mean or hateful words” John continues.
When asked what is considered the beginning of a video, Creator Insider answered that a general guideline is around 30 seconds. “A general guideline for “the beginning of your video” would be around 30 seconds, but that may evolve over time. We’ll let you know if there are significant changes,” the channel commented.
Not so good reactions from the YouTube community
The video hasn’t been met with a warm response from the community. Currently, the video’s overall likes barely edge out the dislikes, having a ratio of 1.6K likes to 1.4K dislikes. Also, many are calling on YouTube to fix their copyright claim system. Many have commented that their videos and streams still get strikes and demonetized even if they go the whole video without using profanity.
What do you think? Does YouTube do a good job of explaining their profanity system? Or should they be putting their efforts elsewhere? Let us know in the comments.
