It’s YouTube’s turn to crack down on the gamba meta

It’s been a couple years since Twitch was inundated with the “gamba meta,” where offshore, online casinos like Stake.com were paying streamers like xQc millions of dollars to gamble live in front of their viewers. Twitch later cracked down on gambling content, driving prolific creators of it to rival sites like Kick and Rumble.

Now it’s YouTube‘s turn. The platform announced this week that it’s no longer allowing content creators to direct users to “unapproved” gambling websites, and it’s also age-restricting all videos that depict and/or promote online gambling sites, so no one under the age of 18 will be able to watch them.

YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told CNN the platform has “strengthened our policies that prohibit content directing viewers to unapproved gambling websites or applications.”

According to YouTube, “unapproved” gambling sites are those that don’t meet local legal requirements and haven’t been reviewed for legitimacy by YouTube or its parent Google.

If a site isn’t approved, creators aren’t allowed to direct their viewers to it at all. That means their videos can’t contain any verbal references, URLs, affiliate codes, images, text, or logos related to the site. Creators who link out to an unapproved site will likely get a TOS violation. Rack up enough of them, and it puts your channel in danger of permanent deletion.

It’s worth noting that even if a site is approved, YouTube still bans creators from using “sensational language” that promises things like guaranteed winnings or loss prevention. And, as we mentioned above, any content that promotes online casinos (even approved ones) is now age-restricted, meaning it can’t be watched by viewers who are under 18 and/or not logged in to a YouTube account.

Overall, this policy sounds close to what Twitch instated in 2022. Rather than wholesale banning all gambling websites, it only banned those “that aren’t licensed either in the U.S. or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient customer protections,” as it described at the time. Though limited, the policy was enough to oust players like Stake.com, which is based in Curaçao (and whose owner Ed Craven also owns Kick).

We expect there will be a similar ousting at YouTube, where content about sports betting and other kinds of betting–like the growing use of sites like Polymarket and Kalshi, where people can wager on everything from U.S. presidential election outcomes to whether we’re all going to die to that asteroid in 2032–has become more common.

Obviously people are free to do with their money what they please, but we’ve already seen how watching content creators splash millions of dollars on digital slots can negatively affect viewers. And while YouTube’s policy doesn’t curb gambling content entirely, it might limit viewers’ exposure to sketchy sites that encourage them to place risky bets.