Creators are the heart of YouTube. Being a creator means that you're a member of a large and influential global community. You can help us to preserve and protect this unique and vibrant group.
YouTube’s Creator Responsibility Initiative
As a creator on YouTube, you agree to follow our:
It’s important that you understand these guidelines and their role in our shared responsibility to keep YouTube healthy. Violating these guidelines may result in your videos being deleted, your channel receiving strikes, or, for serious or repeated violations, your channel being restricted or even terminated.
Earn money on your content
Creators who want to monetize content have to follow more guidelines:
By respecting these guidelines, you’ll help us to prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing, which can hurt revenue for everyone.
If you don’t follow these guidelines, it may lead you to incur penalties, such as disabling ads on your content, or suspending your channel from the YouTube Partner Program .
Learn more about our monetization policies .
Protect the YouTube community
As a YouTube creator, you should remain responsible both on and off the platform. If we see that a creator’s on- and/or off-platform behavior harms our users, community, employees or ecosystem, we may take action to protect the community.
Beyond the content you upload to YouTube, here are some examples of on- and/or off-platform behavior that we may consider to be inappropriate and result in penalties:
- Intending to cause malicious harm to others.
- Participating in abuse or violence, demonstrating cruelty, or participating in fraudulent or deceptive behavior that leads to real-world harm.
- Using our features, tools, or services to create new or modified content that harms or intends to harm others, or that harms the YouTube ecosystem—for example, by creating spam.
While these behaviors are rare, they can cause widespread harm to the YouTube community, and potentially damage the trust among creators, users, and advertisers.
Severe violations that cause widespread harm to the community may have repercussions beyond standard enforcement actions. These restrictions may include:
- Monetization, partner management, and promotional opportunities:Your channel may lose the ability to serve ads and earn revenue, and could potentially be removed from the YouTube Partner Program, including losing access to partner management and creator support. Access to Studio Content Manager may be lost as well. You may also be removed from YouTube Select Lineups.
- Features, tools and services:You may lose access to certain YouTube features, tools and services.
Additional resources
Use these resources to learn more about YouTube policies:
- Terms of Service :All content uploaded to YouTube must comply with these terms.
- Community Guidelines :All content uploaded to YouTube must comply with these guidelines.
- AdSense Program Policies :To be eligible for monetization, videos must comply with these policies.
- YouTube monetization policies :To be eligible for monetization on YouTube, videos must comply with these policies.
- Advertiser-friendly content guidelines :To be eligible for advertising, videos must comply with these guidelines. If you want to upload content that doesn't comply with these guidelines, turn off ads on those videos .
- Disclosing use of altered or synthetic content :Creators must follow YouTube's policies regarding the disclosure of altered or synthetic media.
- YouTube Branded Content Policies :If your content is influenced by a brand partner in exchange for something of value (such as featuring or promoting a brand’s products or services in exchange for payment, free products, or sponsorships), you must let us know using the paid promotion declaration in Studio.
- YouTube Creators :Get tips on making advertiser-friendly content, learn best practices for family-friendly videos , and learn how to foster a positive community with your channel.
- The importance of context :Adding context to your video helps us understand background and intent. We do allow controversial videos that have educational, documentary, scientific or artistic intent.
- Learn how to report inappropriate content .
