YouTube’s looking to help creators make more money from their content, by enacting automatic human reviews of its automated ad placement assessment in videos, in order to better catch any mistakes or errors.
As explained by YouTube:
“To improve the accuracy of our yellow icon decisions and get your videos monetizing faster, we are experimenting with automatically sending videos that receive a “Limited or no ads” rating for an additional review. This means that in some cases, we may review a newly uploaded video, even if visibility is set to private, and some monetization decisions may take up to 24 hours. We’re rolling this out to a small percentage of creators at first, but we’ll keep you posted on our plans to expand it to all creators that monetize with ads.”
To clarify, the “yellow icon decisions” that YouTube refers to here relates to the ad suitability of your content.
After review, your video will be given either a green, yellow or red rating, with green meaning that ads can be displayed in your clips, and red meaning your content is not suitable for advertisers. Yellow means that you need to review your clip to ensure advertiser suitability, otherwise you’ll only be able to have a small subset of ads displayed in your video.
With a yellow rating, you can also request a human review to ensure that level is accurate based on YouTube’s automated assessment, but with this change, YouTube’s looking to implement this step automatically, so that more videos get reviewed, and more ads get shown.
Which has a three-pronged benefit.
For one, if more ads are cleared by YouTube, that means that YouTube gets more ad inventory. Which also means more monetization opportunity for creators, while more human assessment of its automated review system will also give YouTube additional insight to help improve its review systems moving forward.
It just means more manual review work for YouTube’s team, but that’s obviously something that YouTube’s willing to accept, with the benefit of more ad slots driving the decision.
And that does appear to be a focus for YouTube right now.
Earlier in the month, YouTube also announced that it will begin inserting mid-roll ads into more videos in order to maximize revenue opportunities. YouTube’s updated automatic placement process will see more ads injected into videos “at natural break points,” even older clips, which will mean even more ad inventory for the platform.
Combined with this update, YouTube’s clearly looking to increase its overall ad load, without being too disruptive. Maybe that also relates to the platform offering a cheaper, ad-free version of YouTube Premium, and offsetting any potential ad revenue losses if users take it up.
Which I doubt a heap will, but YouTube is obviously looking to squeeze more revenue opportunities from its content, with the side benefit of facilitating more revenue share for creators.
Whatever the reason, it could be a handy update, facilitating more ad income for YouTubers.