Monetize Questions and Answers
Channel: ThreeDigitIQ
Date: 25/03/2013

Now to answer some of the more common questions I receive about monetization:
Q) Why doesn't YouTube just trust me to monetize my own content?
A) Not long ago, they did trust users... But YouTube got sued by Viacom. Since Google has the technology to detect copyright content and the ability to track how "trustful" a video uploader is, they settled with Viacom and promised to be less trusting in order to not get sued again.
Since YouTubers clearly did not care about copyright content laws, we lost that trust privilege.

Q) If YouTube allows me to monetize copyright content, am I safe?
A) NO, you are actually a part of the problem and making the metric worse for everybody.
Also, you are now open for a lawsuit directly from the copyright holder. 
Eventually, that holder will register their content and you will get a strike at the least and banned at the worst. 

Q) What do I do if I can't find the license for the content I want to use?
A) Don't use it. 
If you cannot receive permission from the owner, you do not have any rights to the content.
Imagine you find a car you like and want to take it for a drive... But you cannot seem to find the owner of the car to ask if you can take the vehicle on a road trip. 
Would it be OK if you just took the car on a road trip anyway?
 If you get arrested for GTA, do you think the defense of "I would have asked the owner if I could find them" would work in a court of law?


Q) Why doesn't Youtube trust me?
A) They will if you build up that trust. 
If you can provide the required info for your videos, your trust metric will reflect it. 
Over time, fewer videos will be marked "under review"

Q) How is the trust metric calculated?
A) Youtube will not divulge that data. 
However, you can bet it is based on the number of videos you post and have proven content ownership. 
This is also combined with the number of views you have and number of copyright complaints.
Remember that the money Youtube would pay for a lawyer to defend your unverified content is more than they would make from advertising on your 20 videos with less than 100k views. 
For those of you that would say it is not worth the effort, youtube is saying the same thing about you.

Q) Where can I find Creative Commons music?
A) My two sources are Kevin MacLeod and Flembaz. 
They both have easy to find and reference licensing on their web sites. 
Most of their music is already marked as Creative commons in the YouTube database and do not get flagged for Under Review.

Q) My video of me just talking is marked under review, why?
A) It is similar to other videos that are copyright. 
My favorite way to avoid this problem is to add a low volume background song (usually at 2% volume). 
It causes the audio to be unique enough to not trigger any review flags.
 
Q) How long will it take for my channel to get popular enough to gain a decent trust level?
A) Every channel is different. I personally started 6 different channels with different topics. 
My favorite channel barely gets any views or subscribers. 
However, this channel took over a year and a half of mixed video content to get over the 100k views and 100+ subscribers. 
Now I have a steady 1000+ combined video views a day on this channel alone.

I encourage everyone to share your experiences, both good and bad, in the comments of this video. 

Please don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video.

Thanks, and have fun out there.