With its 5.5 million subscribers on YouTube, the channel DramaAlert still has a good chance of calling out Google’s video platform and succeeding in righting the wrongs of demonetization.
Most smaller independent creators should be so lucky – but that is the reality these days on one of the world’s biggest social networks.
On February 16, the video’s author, Daniel Keem, explained the nature of his trouble with YouTube on Twitter.
Keem did use the word, “egirl” – but YouTube punished him for supposedly using another, “Negro.”
Tagging YouTube’s support account on Twitter, and including a screenshot as evidence, Keem, who is behind the DramaAlert channel, said that while he was in reality offering instruction on how to “dress up and become a(n) egirl” YouTube captioned this as, “how to dress up and become a Negro.”
The result?
Apparently, the video’s swift demonetization.
Keen hit back by accusing the giant platform of being the ones who “said Negro” and therefore “should be punished.”
Keem’s audience on Twitter had a range of questions arising from the situation: would YouTube compensate the creator for the ad revenue lost during the demonetization of his content?
Would it make any difference if he were to correct the captioning, and then have the system reverse the demonetization – such as happens when removing banned words from video titles?
Some responded by suggesting that time is of the essence, and that the number of views on the video would have fallen by that time, meaning that re-monetization at a later date would not make much monetary difference.
(This is also a problem faced by creators whose time-sensitive content is taken down based on fraudulent copyright infringement notices.)
Other commenters said that Keem should sue YouTube and see how that goes, while one shared their dreams of a super-influential YouTuber, like PewDiePie, creating his own video site and providing a better platform for other creators.
As of February 17, the captioning on the video remained unchanged, leading to the conclusion that the ad monetization option was also still disabled.
H3H3 Production’s Ethan Klein was also recently demonetized when YouTube thought that a racial slur was used during a livestream with the ex-Papa John CEO. In that case, YouTube soon fixed the issue and remonetized the video.
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