Dear patrons,
It's with a heavy heart that I'm currently contemplating deleting my ‘instruction manual for life’ as a result of the new COPPA YouTube regulations. These regulations state that any video considered to be 'made for kids' needs to be marked as such by the user or a $42,000 fine can be imposed. Although this video was made for a general audience, under criteria from the FTC — the enforcing body — videos can be considered 'made for kids', whether the creator likes it or not, if they have aspects that strongly appeal to children; that use language understandable by children; that use child cartoon characters — particularly animated ones; that tell stories, etc.. As I say, even though this video was meant for everyone I can see that in the simplistic either/or system YouTube has now implemented — for kids or not for kids — I will have a fight on my hands making a defence case to black-and-white thinkers.
An irony here is that the video has at various points been demonetised as unsuitable for advertising because of its religious themes. And here we have an example of the convoluted contradictory nonsense creators are faced with. Make it too child-friendly, you're fined. Make it too adult, you're demonetised. I really feel for all the creators who explicitly started taking a more family/child-friendly direction in response to the 'ad-pocalypse' disincentives months ago, demonetising anything not considered child-friendly.
It's not yet clear whether a solution might be to age-restrict videos — mark them as adult content. Requiring people to sign in as adults to watch would seem to put them out of reach of children. But this crazy ill-defined legislation — crossed with hopelessly over-generalised A.I. detection methods — means there's no guarantee that move would work.
The alternative is to mark it 'made for kids'. Apart from the frustration of falsely marking a video that wasn't for kids as 'made for kids', this operation would effectively bury the video from views anyway. The video would become instantly unsearchable, comments would be deleted, it couldn't be added to watch lists, etc.. For this reason, I've also decided to ditch a set of three animated child-friendly pieces I've been writing and creating models for, exploring various themes like democracy.
The new legislation is enacted at the start of 2020. YouTube could have decided to respond to the FTC's regulation by instituting an age limit on new accounts — but it seems this would hurt their profit margins, so instead we have this mayhem.
Other videos on the channel should be safe from criticism — they're clearly adult-themed. Supporting that is hard data — audience engagement starts at 18-24 yrs and is virtually non-existent in the 13-17 yrs bracket.
I don't expect the situation will be rescued or clarified by YouTube in the intervening time before 2020. Their utter disconnection has shown itself in so many ways — a prime example being their encouragement to creators to consult lawyers over their channels’ content. In exactly what world are millions of creators going to pay to retain lawyers to review their videos?
If I do delete the video, it'll be a huge part of the channel's significant history gone.
But onwards with the adult content!
Peace,
Link