YouTube Kids Has Stricter Guidelines, Making Monetization Difficult

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 26 October 2021, 01:10 pm

YouTube announced it is making it more difficult for kids' videos to get monetized if it is "low quality."

The social media platform showed its new policies in a post on the YouTube Blog.

The platform said that channels with "made for kids" content would need to abide by stricter guidelines if they wish to stay in the YouTube Partnership Program or YPP.

YouTube Kids' New Monetization Guidelines

According to Engadget, the social media platform's new policies are meant to discourage the content creators from publishing videos that are too heavy on commercials and promotions and those that encourage negative behavior or attitudes.

If a channel violates these guidelines, the social media platforms may suspend them from YPP. Meanwhile, any individual videos that break the rules will lose their advertisers.

YouTube's new guidelines could affect numerous channels, including one of the biggest kids' channels on YouTube, which is "Ryan's World." Ryan Kaji is a 10-year-old YouTuber whose videos get millions of views.

Currently, the channel has 30.8 million subscribers, and Kaji's popularity has landed him a show on Amazon, together with a virtual world on Roblox.

Also Read: All YouTube Kids Videos Reported to Undergo Screening

A massive number of Kaji's videos are about him unboxing new toys and showing off toys that he has helped create. It falls under the category of consumeristic, which is what YouTube says it is trying to minimize on the site.

YouTube says that it has reached out to impacted creators to help them prepare before the new policies go into effect. The stated policies are expected to launch in November.

If a channel wishes to remain on YouTube's channels for kids, content creators need to make a lot of adjustments to the kind of content that it publishes.

The most recent change to kids' content on YouTube happened in 2020 when the social media site banned targeted advertising, comments, and community features for kids' videos.

In February, YouTube rolled out "supervised experiences" to help parents get more control of what their older children watch, according to TechCrunch.

YouTube's Adjustments to Kids' Content

The supervised experiences feature lets parents control what content their children can see on YouTube.

According to The Verge, YouTube hopes that the filters will help the parents introduce age-appropriate content and features to their older children and slowly allow them to venture outside the kids' content.

The program will launch first with an early beta, with a wider beta rolling out in the next few months.

Parents have three different levels of strictness that they can choose from, which determines the content that a child is allowed to view on their account.

The first one is the "Explore" level, which is generally suitable for children that are nine years old and up. The second one is "Explore More," which is for children 13 years old and up, and the third one is "Most of YouTube," which is everything except age-restricted content.

In the United States, users over 13 years old can make their own YouTube accounts even if it is unsupervised.