After his channel was taken down, Christopher spent days trying to renegotiate deals he had made with casinos throughout his tour. The YouTube gambling community isn’t massive, but its biggest channels have tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of loyal and active fans, which allows them to broker brand deals with big-time casinos, gambling-machine manufacturers, and online gambling sites in Europe. “If a YouTube Trusted Flagger can’t distinguish whether there has been a violation based on the public information they give out, I cannot see how they could expect most users to do so either.” “YouTube needs to be more transparent in their policies and give in-depth information to creators,” he said. Others simply quit the job entirely.īen, a vetted volunteer “ trusted flagger,” who helps YouTube identify problematic content and offensive channels, said that after four years as a volunteer for YouTube, he’s seen tensions between YouTube and its creators peak in the past year. This spring, some creators attempted to ban together and start a union, hoping that collective bargaining might help them better reach the company.

While some encourage their fans to tweet at YouTube’s various Twitter handles, that usually proves fruitless, too. When they try to reach out to YouTube, rather than get a person, they get more automated responses.

For the vast majority of YouTube creators who aren’t members of YouTube’s top 3 percent, there’s almost no direct line of communication to the company: Creators get automated emails saying their channels are penalized. Thousands of small channels lost their ability to generate money on YouTube overnight and had no way to appeal. In January, YouTube made sweeping, sudden changes to the qualifications it used to judge whether channels were eligible to earn money on the platform. He doesn’t swear, feature explicit content, or do anything else he thinks might be perceived as violating YouTube’s notoriously vague guidelines, which he and many creators can almost recite by heart.Ĭhristopher and other top creators are in a precarious position: Though their videos provide a steady stream of income to YouTube via advertising, they don’t work for YouTube directly, and the company has a long history of deleting channels, demonetizing videos or accounts without warning, and leaving creators with little to no recourse or explanation. He said he’s careful to get approval from the casinos he vlogs from as well as the slot-machine manufacturers before publishing his videos. Like many top creators, Christopher makes his full-time living from YouTube, and he’s terrified of losing his primary income source.

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