Has your channel being recently hit with the new de-monetization symbols that they’re rolling out across channels?

You might start seeing individual videos listed with either the green dollar sign, yellow dollar sign or even a grey striped out dollar sign. Don’t be too alarmed – what they’re primarily doing is making the process more transparent so you’re actually now seeing the status that was already on that video before they updated the views. For newly uploaded videos, it means the new advertiser/monetization algorithm has had a cursory look at the key elements of your video – including the meta data (title, tags and closed caption text), thumbnails and description.

If your video gets a yellow dollar sign (ad restricted video),  you need to carefully have a look at that and read the provided links to see what’s going on. If you have read these links (documentation including the YouTube Ad-Friendly Guidelines), and then you still feel that your monetization has been restricted or totally de-monetized unfairly – then appeal.

Click that appeal button.  You video will then get manually reviewed. And what they’re saying is that when you do that, you’re actually helping them learn what’s being correctly and incorrectly flagged so they can improve the algorithms. Advice from YouTube is to definitely appeal once you have checked to see that you haven’t breached something from their Ad-Friendly Guidelines.

It likely pays to thoroughly go over the Ad-Friendly Guidelines and be aware of what things the algorithm is looking out for. There maybe some little niggly thing that you can change to get your video to tick over to green monetisation status. You might need to delete that video and  re-upload it and with modified tags, fix the description fix the thumbnail, maybe re-edit the video to remove something that might be causing that partial de-monetization.

When the Yellow symbol appears on a video, the Ad algorithm is believing that there is there’s something about it, whether it’s the description, the tag, the video itself, thumbnails, or closed captioning is unfriendly for advertising which means advertisers don’t want to advertise on a video because of that issue. So sometimes it just means that a minor tweak to your video could make it fully monetized again.

It’s not censorship, it’s YouTube (or their algorithm, at least) saying, “hey advertisers don’t want advertise on videos talking about this or include this particular word, so please have a look”.  Remember, it could be that a sub-section of advertisers are not willing to advertise on say videos that show violence (real or simulated). Therefore any video that appears to be violent, will trigger the algorithm accordingly.

So if you feel that something is amiss on the particular video and you cannot find anything that hits any of those guidelines for advertising whatsoever, then put your appeal in. Sometimes the algorithm has got it wrong, so simply a matter of appealing.  Help train the algorithm so in future, it may learn to get it right.

If you want to learn more about the new monetization flags/symbols, I’ve got some resources below that you can check out. These are materials that YouTube provide in regards to monetization flags and making ad friendly content.

Here is my first ever Tech Vlog on the subject:

Links:

Video: YouTube Channel Creator Insights – Tom’s Take – Enhanced Ads Status & Appeals

YouTube Creators Blog: Expanding the Ability to Appeal More Videos

YouTube Help: Advertiser Friendly Content Guidelines