YouTube Making More Changes to Publisher Accounts

In the last week or two (maybe slightly longer) the AdSense help forum has noticed a large influx of questions from YouTube publishers; lower earnings, more views but less impressions, lower CPCs, ads not showing in videos, etc. have been plaguing YouTube creators in recent weeks (a lot of complaints over the last week in particular).

According to the YouTube Creators official blog ... there are even more changes coming.  This will impact newer publishers, and smaller channels with low view rates more so than any of the larger channels though; and it may be part of the reason for some of the above complaints (at least those related to ads not appearing in newly uploaded videos).

To quote youtube's own article:

"Starting today, we will no longer serve ads on YPP videos until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views. This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies. By keeping the threshold to 10k views, we also ensure that there will be minimal impact on our aspiring creators. And, of course, any revenue earned on channels with under 10k views up until today will not be impacted."

Note: the "today" they refer to is the day they published that article, and that was Thursday, April 6, 2017. It also notes (see the bolded statement above) that if you are one of the creators/publishers with a channel that has less that ten thousand views (in total) and you've already got earnings from it, those earnings will still be issued to you. You just won't be earning any more because they will no longer serve ads in your videos.

If you reach ten thousand views (not spam views, not fake views, not views from traffic exchanges) and your channel becomes eligible, then it looks as though YouTube would review your status.

"In a few weeks, we’ll also be adding a review process for new creators who apply to be in the YouTube Partner Program. After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we’ll review their activity against our policies. If everything looks good, we’ll bring this channel into YPP and begin serving ads against their content. Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules."

Also see this official post in the YouTube forum.

Whether this announced change had something to do with ads mysteriously disappearing from some videos and channels in the week before the announcement I don't know. There have been other factors that may have affected some of the channels on YouTube prior to this.

The  net has been abuzz over issues with non-advertiser-friendly videos displaying ads, and in fact some of the largest AdWords users in the world were in the process of pulling away from AdWords, and that of course would mean a lot of ads that were appearing on YouTube videos would have been replaced with lower paying advertisers (a possible reason for lower CPCs) and some videos simply may have found themselves with a lack of advertisements altogether. AdSense and YouTube took immediate action over this particular issue, and are still sorting things out completely, but it looks as though some of the advertisers (if not all) are willing to hang on for a bit. That information comes from a few subsequent news reports, but how this will fare over the next few months is anybody's guess.

To be honest though, as I've noted lots of times in my blog - I'm not a YouTube expert and I have no idea how things work "behind the scenes" ... in other words, how or why YouTube decides certain things and then how they implement them isn't something I have any knowledge about.

If you're a monetized partner with more than ten thousand lifetime impressions, I expect the new partner rules won't impact your channels, but whether or not the other issue impacted your earnings or not is something different (and something I don't want to get into). Over the comings weeks, you may see either a return to your previous levels, or you may find that your earnings only bounce back part of the way. What happens will depend on both AdSense, and AdWords, along with the advertisers in question.

posted by J. Gracey Stinson