Abiding YouTube’s Fair use but still being demonetised.
Uploading to YouTube with a video you know is following the fair use rules or any other local rights you have, but you get hit with a copyright claim and demonetisation for a piece of work that may have taken you weeks. With the platform reaching over hundreds of hours worth of content to every minute that goes by, each day, every day; it’s completely impossible to stay on top of the mass of content being published. Their solution : robots to scan your videos. This can scan whether copyright material was used through your video. It’s a good way of blocking users from uploading full studio films onto YouTube, a way for musicians, authors, etc. to stop piracy. However doing this, can infiltrate good will users’ abilities to criticise, review, report, teach, or display research. As a side note, many people speculate whether YouTube takes away favourability of your video using their algorithm to recommend to more users and therefore a larger fanbase. If your video gets copyright claimed, it can cause you to not make money from your work and may subtract favourability with the platform itself.
So, how could you get around it? Assuming that you are a user with the best intentions and following law surrounding fair use; i.e. film criticism, news reporting, teaching, etc. If the problem with monetisation is surrounding the visual aspect of your video, there are a few ways you’d be able to possibly sidestep the algorithm.
Here are just a select handful :
Of course, you’re juggling the ability to make money from your content directly impacts the viewers enjoyment and experience of your videos. You could embrace a certain few of these to create a visual style to your channels identity, or you could completely overdo it, and ruin peoples opinions of your content. For instance if you were to stack all of these effects together : 9 - stacked. Don’t do that. Not all at once. It’s completely uninviting and is clear what all the filters are being used for.
Another handful of ways to subvert the robots in terms of audio can be :
1 - distort
2 - reverb
3 - reverse
4 - lowpass / muffle
5 - overlay remix
6 - talking over
This can be helpful if you were playing a piece of music in your video.
Watch out : even if you are a lifestyle / vlog channel, you should take good effort to review your content and focus on the background noise of the public area you’re in; you don’t want car radios that are playing an artists song to creep its way into your video; it is completely possible for demonetisation to occur this way as-well.
These online platforms are amazing; it allows people to make money while following the rules, but can be exploited with bad actors or plain misunderstandings.
Be careful, be smart, and always double check.
If you are playing within the boundaries of fair use and can provide proof of following it, there can still be a buffer between your content not making money, and the case at hand being resolved, so overall, it may benefit yourself with putting a filter on here and there.
If you were to make a 60 minute video full of slides, animations, transitions, etc. This could take you a substantial amount of valuable time, and if you were to put on a 5 second clip from a film for any point you were analysing, but that gets flagged, in current day YouTube, all of that video is worth the 5 second clip, you get nothing from that video. Remember, do not do this to exploit the system; only to add content to this that you are entirely positive are following the rules.