How YouTube’s New Rules Impact Your Channel and What You Should Do About It

In early 2020, YouTube implemented a series of changes to their policies, designed to better protect kids and their privacy. This change requires all creators to designate the videos they upload as “made for kids” or “not made for kids.” The surprising thing for many is that ALL channels are affected by this rule, not just those designed for children.

Why is this important?

If content is designated as made for kids, then any viewer’s personal information will be treated as if the viewer is a child, regardless of their age. In addition, if your video is designated as made for kids, YouTube will disable comments, live chat and other features, and will no longer serve personalized ads on those videos. So if you’re using videos as a means of lead generation or you use comments to interact with your viewers, then you need to be sure your settings are correct.

If you’re a B2B company, then your videos likely aren’t meant for children. There’s no harm if a child watches them, but they certainly won’t be buying your products. However, you’re still required to indicate whether your content is intended for children or not. The good news is, you can set the designation at the channel level and any new videos will default to this designation. You can override the setting on individual videos if necessary, but otherwise you can “set it and forget it.”

There are three ways to designate your content as made for kids or not:

1. If none of your content is made for kids, set the designation at the Channel level.
2. If some of your content is made for kids but other content is not, set the designation at the Video level.
3. If all (or most) of your content is made for kids, set the designation at the Channel level.

Instructions can be found here, and it’s a good idea to also edit the audience for existing videos.

YouTube will be using machine learning to help identify content, but we all know that machines don’t know everything. And since you know your content best, you’re better off setting your own designation before YouTube does it for you. You can change it after YouTube sets it, but your channel may suffer in the meantime.

This post is courtesy of MMC Project Manager Chris White.