YouTube thinks a more human touch will cut down on demonetization mistakes

YouTube‘s automated content review systems are a frequent cause of complaints from content creators. Those systems help review the millions of videos that are uploaded to YouTube every single day, a monumental effort YouTube likely couldn’t accomplish just with human reviewers. But sometimes machines screw up, hence the creator complaints.

Now, YouTube is trying something different to cut down on the number of mistakes made–specifically those made with monetization.

“To improve the accuracy of our yellow icon decisions and get your videos monetizing faster, we are experimenting with automatically sending videos that receive a ‘Limited or no ads’ rating for an additional review,” the company wrote on its official YouTube Help notice board.

YouTube’s system flags videos with a yellow monetization icon when it believes they don’t fully meet advertiser-friendly guidelines. Yellow-icon videos may still get some ads, but it’ll be a limited pool from a limited number of marketers. Basically, the videos aren’t deemed advertiser-unfriendly enough to completely demonetize, but they’re not given the A-OK, either, and that will hamstring their ability to earn ad revenue for their creators.

Before this change, creators who thought their videos were unfairly marked yellow would have to file a dispute with YouTube and wait for it to be resolved. That could take days, and could cut significantly into the video’s overall earning potential, since the period right after upload is when videos tend to bring in the most ad dollars.

With this change, YouTube is saying its system will automatically send yellow-flagged videos to human reviewers, so they can be manually double-checked for any ad-unfriendliness–and potentially monetized much more quickly if it’s determined that they shouldn’t be yellow-iconed.

YouTube says monetization decisions with this new hybrid human-machine review system can still take up to 24 hours. That’s still a sizable period of time, but those human double-checks will be able to do things YouTube’s automated systems aren’t great at, like seeing the full context of the video and judging ad-friendliness based on cultural differences. That may help resolve mistaken demonetizations more accurately and efficiently.

This change additionally means creators won’t have to fight YouTube to be remonetized unless the human reviewer also determines the video deserves its yellow icon. In some cases, creators won’t have to do anything; the human reviewer will decide YouTube’s system mistakenly flagged the video, will correct that decision, and the video will be fully monetized.

For now, this change in procedure is rolling out to “a small percentage of creators,” YouTube said. “[B]ut we’ll keep you posted on our plans to expand it to all creators that monetize with ads.”