YouTube’s ‘demonetization’ controversy

One can hear a lot of hue and cry around YouTube these days. The reason- YouTube’s new demonetization scheme according to which the world’s biggest video site is preemptively flagging some videos that have “non-advertising-friendly content.”

Seasoned 'Tuber Philip DeFranco was one of the high-profile to speak out, likening YouTube's actions to "censoring" people by hitting them in the wallet.

However, YouTube has refused any claims about policy change. While YouTubers have just started to complain that video about depression, videos with swearing, videos with controversial subject matter, and so on are being denied the opportunity to make money from ads, YouTube says the only thing that has changed is the way users are notified.

The company issued a statement which says, “While our policy of demonetizing videos due to advertiser-friendly concerns hasn’t changed, we’ve recently improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication to our creators.”

YouTube also says that only 1 percent of “partner videos” that it sells ads for, like DeFranco’s, have been “demonetized.”

YouTube's policies indicate a number of reasons ads may not be displayed on videos: "Sexually suggestive content including partial nudity and sexual humor, violence, including displays of serious injury and events related to violent extremism, inappropriate language including harassment, profanity and vulgar language, promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items and controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies even if graphic imagery is not shown".

“We recently started rolling out improved notifications in Video Manager to make it clearer to creators when a video is demonetized due to advertiser-friendly content concerns as well as to make it easy to appeal<…> Today, it's become clear to us that there is some confusion in the creator community, so we wanted to take a moment to clarify things,” the company added in its statement.

DeFranco, however doesn’t concur with them.

Youtube: This isn't a policy change, its just a notification/appeal change.

Me: So before you were just turning off ads and not emailing us?

— Phil DeFranco @ PAX (@PhillyD) September 1, 2016

According to him, appealing demonetization decisions may be easier now; however, YouTube has also accidentally revealed that clandestine demonetization has been going on for some time.