Recently, a few poker content creators made posts and videos on how YouTube’s new Terms of Service (TOS) are wrongly flagging their videos and age-restricting them. Among them is Brad Owen, the biggest poker creator on YouTube with 775,000 subscribers and over 200 million views. Owen made a post saying that his videos automatically get age-restricted without real evidence of TOS being broken.
Brad explained that his videos have been flagged for profanity, even though he has “little to no” profanity in each one. Also, only 0.4 percent of his audience is under 18 years old, but the flagging of the videos is reducing the reach and exposure to the rest of the audience by 90 percent.
In one case, a human reviewer flagged his video for profanity, despite there being no profanity in the video, the title, or the thumbnail. Another video was age-restricted under the claim that it showed “harmful or dangerous activities” that could cause serious physical harm, even though it contained nothing of the sort.
Brad agrees that his videos are age-restricted but complains about wrong flagging and reducing the reach towards the 18+ audience.
Other poker content creators have experienced similar issues. Gary Blackwood, aka Gazzy B, also posted that his YouTube channel was getting strikes. He was worried that if he got a second strike, he would be restricted from posting on his channel for the next six months, and if he got a third strike, his channel would be deleted entirely.
Nick Eastwood experienced similar problems and is confused about how to fix them. Nick said that he is now getting only 10 percent of the revenue from the video he used to make before the TOS change, which was just £2 on his latest video. He also mentioned that another poker creator, Weazel, even posted his video and used the 18+ option before posting the video, and got the lowest viewership ever. He used to get from 1,000 to 2,000 views per video; in the most recent video, he got 150 views.
This will hurt smaller poker content creators, as they are making some meaningful revenue directly from YouTube. It is also going to reduce their viewership significantly, which will make them less attractive to sponsorships they have or would make in the future.
Audience Reaction
The reaction of the viewers/followers was that it is okay for gambling content to be 18+ restricted and supported the change, but they didn’t realize that some of the poker content creators, like Bead Owen, had all of his videos marked as 18+ and only for a mature audience.
Some X followers of Brad also supported him and urged YouTube to solve the problem as soon as possible.
This problem seems like it could be easily fixed, and it would save lots of poker content creators financial trouble. But the main question is, what was YouTube’s main goal with this change, and do they even want to solve the “problem”?
Poker is just a tiny piece of YouTube’s revenue, and maybe they are willing to remove it to attract more companies to advertise on YouTube. Hopefully, this is not the case, and all of this is just a mistake that will be fixed soon.
