YouTube loosens its profanity monetization rules after creator backlash
YouTubers who curse like sailors, rejoice!
In a video published on Tuesday to its Creator Insider channel, YouTube announced that it's relaxing some of the new policies regarding profanity on the platform to allow more monetization opportunities for creators.
According to YouTube, profanity will no longer be treated the same across the board. Videos containing words like "asshole" and "douchebag" and other "moderate profanity" can still be monetized. Content with harder cuss words like "fuck" will receive limited monetization if those words appear in the first 7 seconds of the clip or if the swears are repeated throughout the video. This is a big change from the previous policy which stated content containing those words could not be monetized at all.
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In addition, songs and other background music containing either moderate or hard profanity can also be fully monetized now as well.
What will still result in outright demonetization of video content? Profanity of any sort in a video's title or thumbnail.
Mashable has previously covered YouTube's monetization policies around profanity as many creators had found the initial rules vague. The company put out a video back in 2019 explaining some basics like how words such as "dang," "damn," "shoot," and "hell" were all safe to use within monetized videos.
The video platform rolled out controversial changes to its advertiser-friendly content guidelines in November of last year. The new policies limited monetization on creators' videos if certain curse words were used, or if swearing was frequent throughout the video.
The backlash from YouTubers was immediate. Among the biggest issues for creators regarding the changes included videos that contained profanity within the first 8 seconds were automatically demonetized. In addition, the change was retroactive, meaning that creators' older videos from before the policy changes were suddenly being demonetized due to rules that did not exist when the content was created. Another issue with the policy was that YouTube treated even "moderate" profanity like "asshole" the same as stronger curse words like "fuck."
"Upon reviewing our own enforcement data, we found the profanity policy resulted in a stricter approach than we intended," said YouTube Lead for Monetization Policy Conor Kavanagh.
YouTube's loosening of the rules doesn't come as a surprise. In January, YouTube announced that changes were being made after listening to creators. But, now, those changes are here, and creators' f'ing content can seemingly be monetized again.
