YouTube policy change prevents partners from including sponsored content

For years, people have been doing sponsored videos on YouTube on top of having YouTube ads enabled for their account. This allowed them to earn money from their sponsors that they endorse during the video, along with the earnings from the ads that play before and during the video.

Unfortunately, Google is not quite happy with that. You see, when people have sponsors for their videos, it leaves Google out of the loop, unable to earn anything from the revenue that people are generating on YouTube. So Google has now decided to stop people from having sponsored content on YouTube with its new policy change.

Google’s official stance is that it prevents a potential conflict between the ads that YouTube might be displaying and the sponsors for the video. For this, Google will no longer let you have sponsored content in your videos. If you do, the video won’t display ads from Google. On top of that, Google won’t let you have graphical ad-rolls before or during the video, and any product placement, if at all, has to be very basic text-only. Google feels it already offers a competitive platform that advertisers can use to show ads before the videos.

Essentially, Google wants YouTube partners to only use Google ads in their videos, so essentially any money you earn from YouTube video will be coming through Google and Google only, where the company can take its share. This is severely restrictive and bad news especially for smaller channels, who may not have enough subscribers and views on their videos to generate any significant amount of revenue through ads but who could have otherwise done well through sponsorship revenue.

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