Update: Improving Content ID for creators
Update, 11/1/2016: In April, we announced that we’ve been developing a new solution that allows your videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. We’re excited to share that this is now available to all creators in the YouTube Partner Program! Here is a refresher on how this works: If both you and the Content ID claimant want to monetize your video, we will continue to run ads against it and hold those funds separately while the dispute is resolved.
While you can dispute a Content ID claim at any time, the vast majority of disputes are made within the first 5 days of a claim being placed on your videos. Our new system is designed accordingly: If you choose to dispute a claim within the first 5 days of receiving it, we will hold revenue from the day the Content ID claim was placed. If you choose to dispute a Content ID claim after 5 days of the original claim, we will start holding the revenue on the date the dispute is made. Read more about how this works here.
As always, thanks to everyone for sharing feedback about our copyright processes. We’re always working to improve our systems, with the goal of empowering creators with the freedom of opportunity to build a business and succeed on your own terms.
-David Rosenstein, Content ID Product Manager
Original post from 4/28/16: At YouTube, one of our core values is a belief in the freedom of opportunity. We believe anyone should have the opportunity to earn money from the videos they create and turn their channels into successful businesses. That’s why we opened up the YouTube Partner Program nine years ago and why we remain the only platform where anyone with an idea and a camera can turn their videos into full time jobs.
We understand just how important revenue is to our creator community, and we’ve been listening closely to concerns about the loss of monetization during the Content ID dispute process. Currently videos that are claimed and disputed don’t earn revenue for anyone, which is an especially frustrating experience for creators if that claim ends up being incorrect while a video racks up views in its first few days.
Today, we’re announcing a major step to help fix that frustrating experience. We’re developing a new solution that will allow videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. Here’s how it will work: when both a creator and someone making a claim choose to monetize a video, we will continue to run ads on that video and hold the resulting revenue separately. Once the Content ID claim or dispute is resolved, we’ll pay out that revenue to the appropriate party.
We’re working on this new system now and hope to roll it out to all YouTube partners in the coming months. Here’s a closer look at how it’ll work once it’s live:
We strongly believe in fair use and believe that this improvement to Content ID will make a real difference. In addition to our work on the Content ID dispute process, we’re also paying close attention to creators’ concerns about copyright claims on videos they believe may be fair use. We want to help both the YouTube community and copyright owners alike better understand what fair use looks like online, which is why we launched our fair use protection program last year and recently introduced new Help Center pages on this topic.
Even though Content ID claims are disputed less than 1% of the time, we agree that this process could be better. Making sure our Content ID tools are being used properly is deeply important to us, so we’ve built a dedicated team to monitor this. Using a combination of algorithms and manual review, this team has resolved millions of invalid claims in the last year alone, and acted on millions more before they impacted creators. The team also restricts feature access and even terminates a partner’s access to Content ID tools if we find they are repeatedly abusing these tools.
We will continue to invest in both people and technology to make sure that Content ID keeps working for creators and rightsholders. We want to thank everyone who’s shared their concerns about unintended effects from Content ID claims. It’s allowed us to create a better system for everyone and we hope to share more updates soon.