YouTube

Content policies

Each time you upload content to YouTube to which you own exclusive rights, you need to select the policy that you want to apply to that content, whether it's audio-visual content or audio-only (songs).

A policy is a set of rules in which each rule specifies an action – monetize or block – and a set of conditions under which that action should be taken. The policy explains how YouTube should handle a user-generated video that contains your content.

By default, YouTube will create two policies that you can set for your content:

• Monetize everywhere – You want to earn money on any video that contains your content.
• Block everywhere – You want to prevent any video that contains your content from being viewed on YouTube.

How do I define new policies?

You can edit policies or define new ones on the Manage Policies page in your CMS account. The YouTube CMS Uploader application will only let you select policies that have already been defined in your CMS account. So, if you want to set policies other than the default policies, you'll need to create the policies before uploading your content. Keep in mind you can always edit policies after uploading if you wish.

You can instruct YouTube to consider any of the following criteria in order to determine the correct policy action to take for one of your songs:

• The location of the viewer
• The type of content – audio, visual, or audiovisual – that matches your asset. 
  • Note for Audio ID users: This criterion is not really relevant for sound recordings since they can only match the audio portion of a video. If you were to upload music videos, though, you could use this feature to set different policies for user-uploaded videos that matched your music video's audio and video content than for uploads that only matched your video's audio track.
• The amount of the user-generated video that matches your content. The amount can be specified as a specific length of time like 2:13 (two minutes and 13 seconds) or a percentage, such as 80%.
• The amount of your content that is contained within the user-generated video. Again, the amount can be specified as a specific length of time (2:13) or a percentage (80%).
• The date that the viewer is attempting to watch the user-generated video that contains your content.

The following video demonstrates the process of creating several different types of policies. The video is best viewed in full screen, which can be seen by clicking the full-screen button located in the bottom-right corner of the video player. Also, this video doesn't have an audio track, so please don't be alarmed by the silence.