As part of YouTube’s updates to their YouTube Partner Program and Google Preferred programs this month, there is also an important change to how YouTube will treat user-uploaded videos that use your copyrighted content. Once particular change has gone rather unnoticed. This has to do with how YouTube will treat user-uploaded video that uses copyrighted content.
In order to simplify advertising deals, YouTube will no longer serve ads on claimed user-generated content or UGC until the content has been manually reviewed and been confirmed suitable by the monitoring team. This may be negative for copyright holder who earns revenue through third-party uploads. Particularly affected will be record labels and musicians who generally have their music used a lot as soundtracks and creators that have made videos which get used in compilations, reacting, highlight reels or similar UGC.
Once the videos have been reviewed and deemed brand safe, ads will play again, as usual, creating revenue. To prioritize for manual review, YouTUbe will use a number of factors, such as the number of views and view velocity. This will mean that popular videos will get reviewing much quicker, whereas unpopular uploads will take longer to get the advertising reinstated. Copyright owners will not need to do anything and so far, there is no option to appeal for a quicker result.
Besides a smoother running of ads generally on YouTube, this should also encourage channel owners to make their own content, rather than issue UGC and copy someone else’s content
Are you unsure how this will effect you? Do get in touch and let us know your concerns.