Best practices for assets

These features are only available to partners who use YouTube Studio Content Manager.

Below you can learn about the best practices for creating and maintaining your assets:

Active references

If you plan to use Content ID to match and claim user-generated content, make sure your references are active. To check the status of your references:

1. Sign in to Studio Content Manager.
2. From the left menu, click Assets.
3. Click the filter bar and choose a filter:
   • To find assets with no active references, choose Active references > No > APPLY.
   • To find assets with inactive references, choose Inactive references > Yes > APPLY.

When you see an asset with an inactive reference, consider reactivating it so the asset continues to make Content ID matches. 

Make sure you don’t accidentally activate any references that are inactive due to Content ID abuse concerns.

Reactivating references will help you to take full advantage of Content ID. Content ID will only make automated claims for a reference if the reference is active.

When you see an asset with no references, consider creating one.

Learn more about references.

Accurate metadata

Download your Assets report and check your metadata. Ask yourself:

• Does it have unexpected characters or spacing?
• Does this metadata facilitate easy reporting for my team?
• If you're a music label, do you have data in the ISRC field?

You can then edit individual assets or make bulk edits to the asset metadata with a .csv file template.

Learn more about comparing versions of asset metadata.

Labeled assets

Using asset labels is beneficial for partners who want to separate assets for a given album, TV show, etc. These custom categories make it easy to organize your asset library.

Once you've created and applied asset labels, assets are grouped together for easier filtering, bulk updating and performance analyzing.

For example, on the Assets page of Studio Content Manager, you can use the filter bar and choose Asset label. You can then easily identify a group of assets and make a bulk edit, such as updating a match policy.

Learn more about asset labels.

Correct ownership

There are three places to identify asset ownership conflicts in Studio Content Manager:

1. On the Dashboard page in the Issues card, click Ownership conflicts.
2. On the Issues page, filter by Issue type > Ownership conflict.
3. On the Reports page, click the Assets tab and download your Asset conflict report.

Always update ownership info when it changes, such as when you license content in new territories.

Learn more about resolving asset ownership conflicts.

Clear policies

On the Policies page, check a few policies to make sure they function in a way that corresponds to their title.

For example, if you have a policy titled “Monetize worldwide,” check that it actually has rules that will monetize worldwide. 

Also, make sure your custom policies have accurate parameters that will match only content you have exclusive rights to. 

Learn more about policies.