Creators are the heart of YouTube. Being a creator means that you're a member of a large and influential global community. You can help us to preserve and protect this unique and vibrant group.
YouTube's Creator Responsibility initiative
As a creator on YouTube, you agree to follow our:
It's important that you understand these guidelines and their role in our shared responsibility to keep YouTube healthy. Violating these guidelines may result in your videos being deleted, your channel receiving strikes, or, for serious or repeated violations, your channel being restricted or even terminated.
Earn money on your content
Creators who want to monetise content have to follow more guidelines:
By respecting these guidelines, you'll help us to prevent potentially inappropriate videos from being monetised, which can hurt revenue for everyone.
If you don't follow these guidelines, it may lead to you incurring penalties, such as ads being disabled on your content or your channel being suspended from the YouTube Partner Programme.
Learn more about our monetisation policies.
Protect the YouTube community
As a YouTube creator, you should remain responsible both on and off the platform. If we see that a creator's on- and/or off-platform behaviour harms our users, community, employees or ecosystem, we may take action to protect the community.
Beyond the content that you upload to YouTube, here are some examples of on- and/or off-platform behaviour that we may consider to be inappropriate and which may result in penalties:
- Intending to cause malicious harm to others.
- Participating in abuse or violence, demonstrating cruelty or participating in fraudulent or deceptive behaviour that leads to real-world harm.
While these behaviours are rare, they can cause widespread harm to the YouTube community and potentially damage the trust among creators, users and advertisers.
Severe violations that cause widespread harm to the community may have repercussions beyond standard enforcement actions. These restrictions may include:
- YouTube Originals and YouTube Space experiences: YouTube Originals may be suspended, cancelled or removed and you may lose access to YouTube Pop-Up Spaces and virtual gatherings.
- Monetisation, partner management and promotional opportunities: Your channel may lose the ability to serve ads and earn revenue, and could potentially be removed from the YouTube Partner Programme, including losing access to partner management and Creator Support. Access to Studio Content Manager may be lost as well. You may also be removed from YouTube Select lineups.
Additional resources
Use these resources to learn more about YouTube policies:
- Terms of Service: All content uploaded to YouTube must comply with these terms.
- Community Guidelines: All content uploaded to YouTube must comply with these guidelines.
- AdSense programme policies: To be eligible for monetisation, videos must comply with these policies.
- YouTube monetisation policies: To be eligible for monetisation on YouTube, videos must comply with these policies.
- Advertiser-friendly content guidelines: To be eligible for advertising, videos must comply with these guidelines. If you want to upload content that doesn't comply with these guidelines, turn off ads on those videos.
- YouTube Creators: Get tips on making advertiser-friendly content, learn best practices for family-friendly videos and learn how to encourage a positive community with your channel.
- The importance of context: Adding context to your video helps us to understand the background and intent. We do allow controversial videos that have educational, documentary, scientific or artistic intent.
- Learn how to report inappropriate content.