Content suitable for advertisers

If you are part of the YouTube Partner Program, you can put ads in your videos and make money from them. But first, your video must meet the guidelines for advertiser-friendly content. In videos, you should not talk vulgarly, show violence, blood, injuries. Adult content is also not welcome, nor is anything shocking or controversial that ends in human tragedy. However, context is always important. If you can provide sufficient information, why you show these things in the video and they are primarily intended to educate, they can be monetized.

It happens that you will be absolutely sure that you followed all the rules, but the automatic system will still inform you that for some reason your video does not meet the monetization criteria and is not suitable for most advertisers.

Self-certification

YouTube also offers the possibility of so-called self-evaluation - Self Certification. It is a system where you say whether your video contains or does not contain elements that are included in the aforementioned guidelines for advertisers.

If you repeatedly tag your videos correctly, YouTube will rely on you and build trust in you. Your content will be easier to monetize, but remember that everything that you upload to the platform, it goes through automatic checks. You know... if anything. If the system finds out that you tagged previous videos incorrectly, you will lose trust again and you may even be expelled from the partner program.

We try to rate our videos as truthfully as possible. If you are too, YouTube will eventually rely mostly on you.

What else to do...

As we help our partners who create on YouTube, we notice how they prepare videos and then upload them to the platform. Many upload a bare video first because the process it can take quite a long time in some cases and then they deal with other things. These include title, description, preview image and other metadata.

This procedure is understandable, but it may happen that if after uploading an unpublished video without added metadata, the automatic review system starts, the result will be a yellow dollar.

The video itself may be fine, but without the necessary metadata, it doesn't provide the necessary context to help the system determine whether the overall content is suitable for advertisers. So the video gets the yellow dollar because it's a safer choice for them.

Private vs uncategorized video

We understand that when you upload a video, you usually don't want to publish it right away. It could be because, as we mentioned, you don't have the metadata ready for it yet, or you're waiting for your usual time when your viewers are used to expecting a new video.

However, the basic mistake is that you set the video as private. It is true that no one but you can see it this way, but while the video is private, the YouTube system does not perform automatic checks on it. It gets a tag on their page - pending and they can't move it forward because it's a private video. Therefore, it happens that this process takes longer than normal, i.e. even more than seven days. Sometimes the system does not even get to the review - we have already recorded such cases.

We were advised by the people at YouTube that videos should be uploaded well in advance. Ideally a few hours before the planned publication. This will give the system enough time to perform monetization and other checks.

If you have space, add the necessary metadata to the video already during recording. Create a title, description, upload a preview image, add labels, etc.

Don't forget that this data must also comply with the rules. It would be a great shame if a long-planned video gets a yellow stop just because of one inappropriate word in the description.

By the way, if the yellow dollar is holding you back from creating or you have any problem with monetization, please contact us. We will look at it together and we will definitely solve it!