YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting

Does anyone have any idea about why these rules would be secret?

The only thing I can think of is that YouTube is not confident in their guidelines & categorization, and does not want to defend these choices publicly.

> any idea about why these rules would be secret?

Don't work for youtube, but I'm guessing they would be secret for a couple of reasons.

1. If made public, people could post violating content and work around it by making sure they won't get flagged with carefully crafted thumbnails, content etc. Ex: Take a look at the 'Nudity' section. There are examples of 'Partial nudity' in which a guy wearing underwear is deemed inappropriate because it looks 'Vulgar'. So one could, in theory avoid such thumbnails, and still post vulgar content in the video and get by their censors.

2. It would also open Youtube to criticism, just like the Facebook breastfeeding content was, a whiles back.

I have a feeling that the internet will get outraged about this for one reason or another, but just from looking at this, it actually seems like a sensible policy designed to keep YouTube out of trouble. Nothing extreme or unfair, just avoiding to show ads next to stuff advertisers would not want to see their ads next to, while also making an effort to avoid offending or censoring youtubers.

Probably won't be flawless, because things rarely are, but seems pretty reasonable.

I don’t understand what the term “demonetization” means in this context.

When a video is flagged for “demonetization” what are the immediate consequences? I’ve never actually met anyone who got paid for something that happened on YouTube, so I just don’t understand how the business side of YouTube even works.

For the life of me, all I’ve ever directly witnessed is the occassional friend who received a DMCA notice, because they uploaded an audio rip of an album they wanted to listen to from a work computer, as a public video.

It means the video won't have ads and thus the creator won't earn any money from ads. It's very difficult to make a lot of money from YouTube ads, but some people are doing it and getting "demonetized" really hurts them.