A number of YouTubers have made videos about a new round of demonetization that has severely crippled their channel(s). This is in addition to the previous demonetization that went into effect on a number of channels last year. Recently, some YouTubers have pointed to a possible blacklist that Google may have devised, which is automatically demonetizing videos, regardless of the content, and regardless of whether or not it even breaches YouTube’s content policy standards.

There’s a six minute video from LazarBeam, a YouTuber with a million subscribers, where he explains that after the PewDiePie issue from earlier this year – where the Wall Street Journal concocted a witch hunt on the YouTuber in order to get his ad revenue pulled – ad revenue has taken a major dive across the board. The video contains a lot of rambling, but he does bring up that some of his content can still be monetized, but a lot of it is no longer eligible for monetization and he has no idea how to make content that fits within YouTube’s guidelines for monetization.

Luimarco also did a video recently about how YouTube has basically demonetized almost all of his videos, and they’ve recently been completely removing monetization options for his videos.

He also mentions that he subscribes to a lot of “free thinkers” on YouTube, and that all of the “free thinkers” have been targeted for demonetization as well.

Luimarco explains…

“There is an algorithm now – it’s definitely not a person going through my videos – because they did it to pages and pages and pages. Some of these videos are not even public, they’re private. So that is an algorithm. As a matter of fact, all of my private videos received this [demonetization tag]”

 

“[…] Every metric definitely plunged rather significantly in the last few days.”

As mentioned in the video above, YouTube did make a post on their support page informing YouTubers that they can appeal videos marked ”Not suitable for all advertisers” using a review process, which was published on August 7th, 2017. However, having YouTube review the videos doesn’t usually result in YouTube reinstating monetization.

YouTuber RazörFist also recently did a video about this issue on August 13th, 2017, but he states that it’s not just an algorithm, it’s an advertising blacklist.

I did reach out to ask about when he noticed this change taking place, and he states that it was about a week ago, around the time when Google had updated the support page about appealing videos that have been demonetized.

His video above literally demonstrates how a video uploaded with zero offensive content, no foul language, no copyrighted material, and no objectionable thumbnail, was still automatically demonetized even after it had been set to private, which corroborates what Luimarco had stated.

According to World Alternative Media, some channels had 95% of their content demonetized. According to their video, many Antifa videos aren’t being demonetized.

According to World Alternative Media, the new algorithm demonetized a wide range of their content, including all of the top videos on their channel. They also mentioned that they had only made about 30% of what they had made this month compared to where they were last month.

This new algorithm is part of Google’s new initiative to stomp out what they called “supremacist” content and “extremist” content.

Google announced last year that they would be working with Twitter and Facebook to curb hate speech. At the beginning of August of this year, Google announced that they would be following up on their anti-hate speech tools by utilizing the new Limited State content policy, which would effectively block comments, search results, sharing, and ratings on videos that would be affected by this content restriction tool, even if the video content does not violate any of YouTube’s content policies or regulations.

YouTube will also be utilizing a recommendation algorithm to veer people away from videos they deem “extremist” or “supremacist”, and instead herd them toward content to reeducate them about certain topics or issues that they may have been looking up on channels that are on YouTube’s blacklist.

With this newest form of demonetization, some channels may either have to change the kind of content they produce and request to be removed from YouTube’s blacklist, or shut down altogether.