YouTube restores Blender videos after confusion about monetization and new YouTube Premium Terms and Conditions

[AlTech]

YouTube has unblocked The Blender Foundation's videos after the confusion regarding monetization has been resolved.

 

YouTube were pushing Blender Foundation to accept a contract regarding YouTube Premium as the Blender Foundation has monetization enabled even if they don't enable ADs on their videos.

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Last night the Youtube Support team contacted Francesco Siddi by phone. As we understand it now it’s a mix of coincidences, bad UIs, wrong error messages, ignorant support desk staff and our non-standard decision to not monetize a popular Youtube channel.

The coincidence is that Youtube is rolling out their subscription system in Europe (and Netherlands). This subscription system will allow users to stream music and enjoy Youtube ad-free. They updated terms and conditions for it and need to get monetized channel owners to approve that. Coincidentally our channel was set to allow monetization.

 

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The bad UI was that the ‘please accept the new terms’ button was only visible if you go the new Youtube “Content Manager” account, which I was not aware of and which is not active when you login to Youtube using the Foundation account. The channel was also set to monatization mode which has no option to reset it. To make us even more confused, yesterday the system generated the wrong agreement to be signed.

(Image: after logging in to the Foundation account, only the menu “Switch Accounts” – has the option to login as “Content Manager”).

Because of not accepting the new terms, the wrong error message was to put all videos on “Not available in your country” mode, which usually signals that there is a copyright issue. Similar happened for Andrew Price’s video last year, which (according to our new contact) was because of a trademark dispute but that was never made explicit to us.

All support desk people we contacted (since December last year) couldn’t find out what was wrong. They didn’t know that not accepting ‘terms and conditions’ could be causing this. Until yesterday they thought there was a technical error.

After reviewing the new terms and conditions (which basically is to accept the subscription system, I decided to accept that. According to the new Youtube contact our channel then would be back in a few hours

 

So yeah. They were asked to accept the new terms because of the introduction of YouTube Premium and the fact that their channel was technically eligible for this. 

 

In the end, the Blender Foundation did accept the new terms after they realized what it actually was all about.

 

The lack of communication from YouTube Staff throughout this process did not help matters. Blender Foundation only understood what had happened because they were able to eventually talk to Staff because of their channel size. Any channel with less than 100,000 subs would never have received clarification from YouTube regarding this matter.

 

I'm still not sure why YouTube Staff are so hesitant to talk to creators.

 

Source: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/

[Delicieuxz]

"Don't be evil"

[williamcll]

15 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

"Don't be evil"

I don't see it anywhere on google :^)

[Beskamir]

Good to know outcry and bad publicity still has an effect.

 

Edit: oh nvm looks like Google got it's way

[Serin]

This mildly inconvenienced my watching of the Blender 2.8 development videos.
*grumbles inconveniencedly* 

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'm still not sure why YouTube Staff are so hesitant to talk to creators.

 

Source: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/

Umm I think it is extremely self evident on this news item: Their platform is so shittily designed not even the support staff realizes you can get locked out of your account for not accepting terms and conditions that you were never presented with to begin with.

 

This means that:

 

1) The terms and conditions page is so poorly designed it doesn't takes into account what happens when someone navigates away without clicking yes when it should have locked the account forcing users to be able to do nothing until those new terms are acknowledged if it's so damn important

2) Their interface is so poor even experienced content creators routinely fail to notice important settings like that one time LMG failed to publish a video because they forgot to select that option

3) Points 1) and 2) do not exist in a vacuum and compound with each other since it goes to show Google has like 30 different things that are extremely poorly integrated operating under youtube instead of actually taking the time to properly integrate their fucking shit that is not only poorly integrated but literally conspires against the user inadvertently

 

Case and point: someone should tell me, from memory and without struggling to remember, how do I view direct messages if I start from the youtube page. Hell forget about you or even content creators, I doubt youtube support staff can even answer this coherently and giving the same answer 100% of the time.

[LAwLz]

Wait, how can people still be pissed at Google for this?

It seems like a honest mistake.

 

Blender did not accept the new terms and conditions so the videos were automatically blocked until they did.

Having such a large channel and not monetize your videos seems to be very rare, so the support staff was not aware of what was going on.

The GUI caters to people who monetize their videos (since that's the vast majority of people at this size) so Blender missed the TOS change.

[mynameisjuan]

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Wait, how can people still be pissed at Google for this?

It seems like a honest mistake.

This is LTT. Google, Facebook, Intel are and will always be the bad guy. 

 

This does seem like a story blown out of proportion with an account locking out because of not accepting the terms. Almost any other service will not let you proceed with out accepting. 

 

I see nothing wrong here.

[IAmAndre]

3 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

This does seem like a story blown out of proportion with an account locking out because of not accepting the terms. Almost any other service will not let you proceed with out accepting. 

 

I see nothing wrong here.

That's definitely a real user interface issue and the fact that not even the staff can communicate or even have a clear understanding of the issue only proves how badly designed their system is.

[LAwLz]

6 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

That's definitely a real user interface issue and the fact that not even the staff can communicate or even have a clear understanding of the issue only proves how badly designed their system is.

Blender is a pretty big edge case though. Most channels of that size do run ads, and it's fairly unreasonable to expect the support to know about very rare situations like this one.

Bad situation? Yes. But I think it's an understandable one that can't really be blamed on anyone.

Besides, Youtube reached out to them and explained the situation in a couple of days. Blender first made a statement the 18th, and on the 20th it was fixed.

 

You could argue that it should not have happened in the first place, but remember that it is an edge case which seems to have been a honest mistake, and Youtube seem to have acted quickly and responsibly. What more do people want?

[Zodiark1593]

45 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Blender is a pretty big edge case though. Most channels of that size do run ads, and it's fairly unreasonable to expect the support to know about very rare situations like this one.

Bad situation? Yes. But I think it's an understandable one that can't really be blamed on anyone.

Besides, Youtube reached out to them and explained the situation in a couple of days. Blender first made a statement the 18th, and on the 20th it was fixed.

 

You could argue that it should not have happened in the first place, but remember that it is an edge case which seems to have been a honest mistake, and Youtube seem to have acted quickly and responsibly. What more do people want?

People are really attached to their internet pitchforks and torches.

[AdmiralMeowmix]

Also the blender foundation had monetization disabled they never had it enabled but youtube forced enabled it for them.

[IAmAndre]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Besides, Youtube reached out to them and explained the situation in a couple of days. Blender first made a statement the 18th, and on the 20th it was fixed.

Well it's not exactly how it happened. I've been following the case for the last few days and on the Blender side they had really no idea what was going on and even started hosting their videos on their own platform. In the community they all knew it was somehow related to the ads and based on the exchanges with YouTube, it's like the staff was saying "enable ads so the problem is solved and we are both happy". Basically the whole YouTube thing is a black box and as it's been mentioned earlier in this thread, it's basically YouTube doing whatever they want since they have the biggest user base, and content creators can either comply or go away.

[Sniperfox47]

3 hours ago, AdmiralMeowmix said:

Also the blender foundation had monetization disabled they never had it enabled but youtube forced enabled it for them.

And where exactly did you hear this? I don't recall Blender Foundation making any allegations of this. I believe their exact comment was:

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Coincidentally our channel was set to allow monetization.

I.e. we had earlier set our channel to allow monetization, though we don't actually monetize and that resulted in this issue.

 

Not remembering previously enabling it is not the same thing as having it enabled on you.

 

1 hour ago, IAmAndre said:

Well it's not exactly how it happened. I've been following the case for the last few days and on the Blender side they had really no idea what was going on and even started hosting their videos on their own platform. In the community they all knew it was somehow related to the ads and based on the exchanges with YouTube, it's like the staff was saying "enable ads so the problem is solved and we are both happy". Basically the whole YouTube thing is a black box and as it's been mentioned earlier in this thread, it's basically YouTube doing whatever they want since they have the biggest user base, and content creators can either comply or go away.

Yeah because normal channels that have monetization enabled have ads enabled. Enabling ads is the normal workflow for a monetized channel so if you're troubleshooting a channel of course the solution is to go through that normal workflow. If Blender foundation had gone through that workflow to test, which would have had them log into the content manager account, the issue would have been resolved, and they could have turned off both ads and monetization after the changes propogated.