YouTube has clarified how some of its guidelines on what videos are eligible for ads apply to video game YouTubers, telling Polygon that most gameplay footage is probably fine — but montages of video game violence are not.
This is worth noting if you’re a game developer who maintains a YouTube channel, either to highlight your own work or to showcase other peoples’ games.
Last week the company published a blog post broadly stating that the company had made changes to how it decided which videos were ad-friendly (and thus monetizable.)
The company made it clear that videos which feature “hateful content,” “incendiary and demeaning content” or “inappropriate use of family entertainment characters” were not eligible for ads, but there was no specific mention of video games (which account for a significant portion of YouTube’s business.)
Of course, back in March a bunch of game-focused YouTube channels were suddenly flagged as mature and restricted, an event YouTube later characterized as an algorithmic error.