YouTube’s New Community Guidelines Are Impacting Gaming Content Creators and Their Streams; Here Is Why

Streamers and YouTube content creators have been frustrated with YouTube’s community guidelines for quite some time now. Many YouTubers have faced bans because of it, and some have even gotten their accounts taken down. A recent amendment in their regulations has been causing issues specifically for the YouTube gaming community.

According to a report by Kotaku, YouTube’s new changes related to profanity and violent content have been hampering the work of creators that make content on M-rated games. On top of that these new rules have ended up demonetising the videos that are violating these rules.

These rules aren’t new and they were introduced months ago in November, 2022 through a blog post. According to those rules, the creators that use thumbnails, titles and videos that contain sexualised texts, obscene language, images and audio, or gratifying language, will not receive ad revenue.

This rule applied for adult content, violence, harmful or dangerous acts, sensitive events, inappropriate language and drug related content. In terms of video YouTubers are being restricted from ad revenue, when this type of content is portrayed in the first 8 seconds of the video. Post that if the profanity is “consistently throughout the video”, then that may lead to removal of ad revenue too.

The issue that many gaming YouTubers are facing is that not only are their new videos being demonetised, but also the content they had published before the amendment. One YouTuber, Daniel Condren has raised his views about the change through a video uploaded on his channel. He has also said that YouTube has not been communicating at all during this change of regulations.

He finally got in contact with YouTube personnel, that informed him that their system has been updated. The updated system now instantly identifies uploaded content that violates their policies. Furthermore, viewers are also able to to report content which is later reviewed by a team at YouTube.

Many YouTubers did find workarounds, by adding buffers in their video, before profanity entered the content. But even then if profanity was found to be consistent the video would be demonetised eventually. Also, this solution couldn’t be used for the videos that have already been uploaded.

It seems YouTubers have no choice but to adhere to this policy, as another Youtuber that goes by the name MoistCr1TiKaL, has come out and expressed his concerns. He stated that this situation would’ve been bearable if it came directly through YouTube as opposed to ‘his ass’. He is now extremely convinced that policy changes will never be communicated effectively by YouTube.

Condren has also stated that he will be reevaluating his relationship with YouTube. He added that he loves producing content and having a community, it is the favourite part of his life. However, this issue has shaken him up.