YouTube Community Guidelines Update

YouTube has made updates to its Community Guidelines and is now enforcing them via Strikes on creators who link out to certain sites via their video descriptions.

One of the guidelines updates sits under Spam, deceptive practices & scams policies:

Incentivization Spam: Content that sells engagement metrics such as views, likes, comments, or any other metric on YouTube. This also includes content where the only purpose is to boost subscribers, views, or other metrics (e.g., “sub4sub” content).

Based on this update you are no longer allowed to link to a Gleam campaign that asks users to Subscribe, Comment or perform any other action that boosts metrics on YouTube.

We've contacted YouTube for more clarification on these policies before we make changes to the platform, we do feel this update (& enforcement) causes a number of problems for Creators (and YouTube):

• Creators will no longer have a precise & legal way of drawing winners for giveaways
• The Community Guideline & Contest rules conflict with each other (are Creators still allowed to ask for subs on giveaways that don't link externally, if so how can they fairly draw a winner?)
• Creators may get a Community Guideline strike for campaigns in descriptions that already exist
• These rules only appear to be enforced inside YouTube, there's nothing preventing a Creator running their campaign on Twitter and ignoring YouTube completely
• Gleam campaigns will mostly consist of ways to enter that don't involve YouTube anymore
• Creators will no longer be sending traffic to their YouTube video externally from campaigns
• It will be much harder to partner with other creators or brands and run giveaways

For now we recommend that you remove any Actions that incentivize users to perform an action on YouTube if you are linking to a Gleam campaign from your YouTube descriptions - until we have more clarity on what is & isn't allowed.

We're currently working on changes to bring campaigns into compliance & will send out an email to all Creators once they are ready to roll out.

Once that happens we'll try to roll out more features for Creators to continue running compliant & legal campaigns on YouTube.