YouTube is growing up. Thanks to the influence of Google, the video-sharing site is becoming a haven for professional content, with advertising coming out of every orifice. And now we have video guidelines to match the maturity.
YouTube As A Human
If we think of YouTube as a human being, we can see how at the beginning of its life, it was slowly growing, with more and more people aware of its existence every day. Its reach and influence also grew and affected more people every day.
It then became the most popular kid at school, doing what the other kids wouldn’t dare do, allowing copyrighted clips to be uploaded, and generally behaving like it owned the playground.
And then a father figure came into its life, with Google buying YouTube. Soon after that, its first run-in with the authorities happened, with Viacom suing the video-sharing site for $1 billion.
YouTube Growing Up
It has since started to clean its act up, and looked at where its headed in life. Gone are the reckless days of youth, and in its place is emerging a grown up site trying to embrace professional content and draw in advertisers.
And now, thanks to a new set of rules pertaining to the uploading of videos, YouTube is finally maturing into an adult, and leaving those days of sexually suggestive material and profuse swearing behind.
The new guidelines are explained in a YouTube Blog post which does its best to strike the balance between lecturing and teaching. The new rules are as follows:
Stricter Standards For Mature Content
Pornography and footage of sexual activity has always been banned from YouTube, but those guidelines are now being expanded to include sexually suggestive videos. These will now be age-restricted.
Sexually Suggestive Content And Profanity
Videos which contain sexually suggestive material, or profanity (swearing), will now be “algorithmically demoted”. This means video marked as inappropriate will find themselves falling down the ‘Most Viewed’ and ‘Top Favorited’ charts.
Improved Thumbnails
Thumbnails will now be algorithmically chosen to better represent the content of the video than they currently do. Uploaders will still have the choice of three thumbnails, but these will no longer purely come from the 25/50/75 percent points of the video.
More Accurate Video Information
Titles, tags, descriptions, and metadata has always been the place for unscrupulous video uploaders to game the system in order to drive traffic. While gaming the system has always been against the rules, more enforcement will now be brought it.
Conclusions
These rules represent a more mature approach from YouTube, and are mostly a good thing. If Google wants YouTube to truly start competing with Hulu and the like, and attract serious advertisers, then a tightening of the video guidelines was always going to be necessary.
However, there are some YouTube videos which contain copious amounts of swearing, or rely on sexually suggestive innuendos or remarks to hit the spot. What these content creators are now going to do remains to be seen, but the most likely outcome is they’ll move to an alternative site that doesn’t have such strict rules.
