YouTube is cracking down on false positives causing demonetisation

Back in February, YouTube controversially introduced new eligibility criteria for monetisation, raising the barrier for content creators to earn money from their videos. The Google-owned platform has revealed that this has been working as intended since its implementation, and that further changes are on the way, including a way for users to combat wrongful demonetisation called Self Certification.

YouTube reiterated that the initial changes to its monetisation eligibility was to help reduce the amount of videos that were being incorrectly flagged as breaching the advertiser-friendly guidelines. As a result of the changes, the platform has revealed that instances of incorrect demonetisation have decreased as much as 90 percent and the subsequent appeals is down 50 percent.

The addition of Self Certification is YouTube’s attempt to reduce these numbers even further, by allowing content creators to provide the platform with specific information about what is in their video to help determine whether or not it pertains to the advertiser-friendly guidelines. With more feedback, YouTube believes that there will be less of a worry about false-positives resulting in videos being temporarily demonetised.

“In an ideal world, we’ll eventually get to a state where creators across the platform are able to accurately represent what’s in their videos so that their insights, combined with those of our algorithmic classifiers and human reviewers, will make the monetisation process much smoother with fewer false positive demonetisations,” explains YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in a blog post.

Creators will also be getting access to YouTube’s sponsorship program, which debuted in September 2017 and has been piloted since. This gives users access to an alternative means of payment beyond advertisements. The limited set of creators that have been testing the sponsorship program “saw substantial increases in their overall YouTube revenue” as a result.

All of this is an attempt to entice advertisers into sticking with the platform after larger YouTubers PewDiePie and Logan Paul managed to scare some away via controversial behaviour. It is also to benefit smaller content creators, in which YouTube realises will find it significantly more difficult to earn money on the platform. Whether or not this works in practice remains to be seen.

KitGuru Says: It is great that YouTube is reviewing its current practices in favour of its less established content creators, but the sole reliance on statistics could cause a disconnection between what is truly wanted out of the platform. There is also concern over whether the Self Certification questionnaire will be sufficient enough to make a difference. What do you think about YouTube’s latest efforts?

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