YouTube’s new paid promotion disclosures
Transparency is cool, right? Your fans deserve to know when you’re getting cash for a product placement, don’t they? YouTube thinks so, which is why they’re making it easier for you to disclose right at the beginning of your videos whenever they contain paid promotions.
Why is this important?
Well, YouTube is now one of the most powerful media sources, and brands are finding interesting ways to partner with “creators” (man, I hate that term) to get their message to new audiences in ways that hopefully seem authentic and entertaining. But viewers aren’t stupid, and you definitely don’t want YOUR fans feeling like you’re trying to manipulate them. So, be upfront and honest about your promotion partnerships.
If you’ve partnered with a brand to feature their product or service in a video (in exchange for $$), you need to notify YouTube by checking the “this video includes paid promotion” box in your Video Manager’s Advanced settings tab. That helps YouTube limit the advertisements served on the video to ads that won’t compete with your partner.
But in addition, you can now also place a short text disclosure at the beginning of any of your videos to tell viewers about a paid promotion.
Here’s how: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2016/10/a-new-optional-feature-for-paid.html.
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.