Big Story: YouTube Launches New Advertising Restrictions On Gun Channels
OutdoorHub Reporters 04.07.17
YouTube has launched new restrictions that are putting all gun related channels at risk of disappearing forever.
In a blog post, YouTube announced they will pull all ads from gun related videos.
“For millions of creators, making videos on YouTube isn’t just a creative outlet, it’s a source of income. We set up the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) in 2007. Today, more creators are making a living on YouTube than ever before. However, with this growth we’ve started seeing cases of abuse where great, original content is re-uploaded by others who try to earn revenue from it. To help protect creator revenue, we recently made it easy for anyone to report an impersonating channel. To date, this change has helped us terminate hundreds of thousands of channels violating our policies. Now, we’re taking another step to protect creators by updating the thresholds required to join the YouTube Partner Program.”
So, what does that mean?
According to the statement released by YouTube, “After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we’ll review their activity against our policies. If everything looks good, we’ll bring this channel into YPP and begin serving ads against their content. Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules.”
While some gun channels will be able to stick around, a majority of creators will suffer greatly. Creators will no longer be able to devote all their time making videos you enjoy and will likely have to find a new way to pay the bills or cover filming costs.
Until now, the Partner Program was opened to anyone with a YouTube account, and allowed creators to start getting paid almost immediately for ads ran on their videos. Due to the severe push-back YouTube and Google received for ads appearing on inappropriate videos, the company will now begin enforcing under stricter guidelines.
These stricter guidelines seem to be a blanket solution that gives Google and YouTube the power to better police content, even blocking channels from the partner program altogether. . .
Note: It’s not just the guns they’re going after. It appears that, according to Gizmodo.com, YouTube is also blocking some LGBT content as well. . .
As far as the guns, we’ve reached out to YouTube for comment after several of our partners in the gun community were monetized for their gun related content, but have not received a response back yet. As of now, there is no indication if the change is temporary or permanent, but this certainly speaks volumes to the YouTube creator community.
