YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a new pilot program in an attempt to address the concerns of the platform’s creator community frustrated by new monetization eligibility criteria.
In a blog post, Wojcicki said that a small set of creators is testing a new video upload flow that will allow creators to get more specific with video information as its relates to advertiser-friendly guidelines. The self-certification feature is being added to help creators avoid false positives on monetization icon changes between green and yellow, and avoid having to undergo an appeal process with YouTube.
The feature lets creators answer questions before they publish videos about whether their content contains profanity, violence or any other aspects that might be picked up by YouTube algorithms or internal human reviewers.
“In an ideal world, we’ll eventually get to a state where creators across the platform are able to accurately represent what’s in their videos so that their insights, combined with those of our algorithmic classifiers and human reviewers, will make the monetization process much smoother with fewer false positive demonetizations,” Wojcicki wrote.
YouTube said that in February it released an update to its systems to improve overall accuracy and decrease icon flip-flopping by 90%. Wojcicki said that YouTube is also testing sponsorships as a monetization alternative to ads. The feature will allow creators to set up recurring sponsorships. YouTube plans to expand availability of the feature to more creators in the coming months.