YouTube is a place for people all over the globe to share their stories. More than 400 hours of video are uploaded every minute on YouTube, 100s of millions of hours are watched each day and billions of users visit YouTube each month.
To ensure that our community is safe for creators, viewers and advertisers, we have created automated systems that help us filter through all the content on YouTube. These systems are sometimes called 'the ads algorithm' or 'systems'.
How our systems impact monetising creators
Our systems look at your content and channels in different ways and at different stages. For creators in the YouTube Partner Programme, our monetisation systems can impact both your content and your channel.
Impact on content
When you turn on ads for content, our systems scan it in two ways:
- Advertiser-friendly content. Any video that you monetise with ads must meet our advertiser-friendly content guidelines. Our systems check your video title, thumbnail, description and tags, and the video itself, to see if it meets our guidelines. You can see the outcome of this in the form of a monetisation icon.
- Viewer engagement. Our systems will also scan for viewer engagement. This means that we look at things like comments, likes and whether the entire video is watched. We also look at other kinds of content that your audience watches. Our systems may then make another monetisation assessment that could change your video's monetisation status.
Learn more about monetisation icon status changes and what you can do.
Impact on channel
Our systems also check to see if you make consistently accurate monetisation decisions on your channel. Remember, you should only turn on ads for videos that meet our advertiser-friendly content guidelines. If you consistently turn on ads for videos that violate our guidelines, our systems may flag your channel. In egregious cases, we may turn off your ability to monetise with ads, or remove you from the YouTube Partner Programme.
What you can do about the system
Our systems don't always get things right. That's why you can always request a review of your video's monetisation status. When you request a review, a trained policy specialist looks at your content to see if it meets our guidelines. If our reviewer disagrees with our automated system, we will take the reviewer's decision as final.