Reasons You Might Get Denied for Ad Monetization
As you should know, if you want to use the YouTube platform to host your videos, you need to comply with their Terms of Service (TOS).
The best way for YouTubers to know if they could be doing something wrong is by carefully reading the Community Guidelines.
There are 9 main categories of things that you shouldn’t do with your videos if you want to get partnered:
- Nudity or sexual content: Pretty self explanatory. YouTube is not a pornographic site. However, they don’t tell you that things like recording in a bikini will also violate this guideline and not allow ad monetization.
- Harmful or dangerous content: Dangerous challenges are the first examples that come to mind. Also, pranks like making people believe they’re in real danger, even though nothing is going to happen to them, are prohibited on YouTube.
- Hateful content: Racism or discrimination against someone or a group of people.
- Violent or graphic content: Any shocking content, including medical procedures where open wounds are shown without explanation or no educational purpose. Same applies for violent crimes.
- Threats, Harassment and cyberbullying: You can critique other people, but there’s a line you shouldn’t cross. Public humiliation or harassment incitement will draw that line.
- Spam, misleading metadata, and scams: Of course. Anyone with their brains in the right place wouldn’t try to monetize a channel used for scamming and robbing people online.
- Copyright: Now THIS is the interesting one. Probably around 80%-90% of people having troubles getting into the YouTube Partnership program have a problem related to this. It’s really hard for people without knowledge about laws to really know if they’re doing something bad. Using any copyrighted content (any image, audio or video that isn’t yours) without permission is not allowed, except under certain circumstances. Keep reading and I will explain you this REALLY well below.
- Privacy: Giving personal information from other people is completely against most TOS of any online service. This includes addresses, security numbers, account names, bank accounts, etc. It’s very dangerous and it can ruin lives. So, please, respect other people’s information or get out of my site!
- Impersonation: If you’re trying to deceive people into thinking that you’re someone else that actually exists—it’s okay to create a persona or a character and play it—, you will get into trouble.
