Partner Program Policies

YouTube provides our partners with a unique platform that has enormous reach in the U.S. and globally. As a YouTube content partner, we expect you to comply with YouTube’s Terms of Service, Community Guidelines and AdSense Agreement when you create content and build your audience. Failure to comply with any of these policies may result in YouTube disabling ads from your content, disabling your AdSense account and/or suspending your YouTube partnership agreement, or suspending or even terminating your YouTube account.

Program Policy Guidelines

To support your growth and success on YouTube, we expect our partners to follow these program policy guidelines when they build their brand presence on YouTube. Violating these guidelines may result in your videos being removed, AdSense account being disabled, and/or your partnership or even your YouTube account being suspended.

The most important ground rule is to respect YouTube’s Terms of Service and AdSense Agreement. This means the following:

• Do not click on your own ads or use any means to inflate video views, impressions and/or clicks artificially, including manual methods.
• Do not encourage others to click your ads or use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks, including clicks on your videos to inflate views. This includes commissioning third party agencies that advertise these services to increase your viewership. The purchase or gaming of subscribers, views or any other channel features is a violation of our Terms of Service.
• Do not manipulate or incentivize others to click on video features, such as “Like” or “Favorite,” to improve your standing and visibility across the site. We consider these to be fraudulent clicks and/or queries.
• Do not employ third party sites and tools to automatically generate artificial subscribers or views.
• Do not embed third party advertising, sponsorships, or promotions placed on or within your video content. YouTube does allow you to upload paid product placements provided you give us notice first. Learn more about paid product placements.
• Do not sell your YouTube account and/or partner channel via third-party sites for monetary profit.

Content Policy Guidelines

To support your growth and success on YouTube, we expect our partners to follow YouTube’s Community Guidelines when they create content for YouTube. Below, we’ve provided more detail around these guidelines. Following them will increase the visibility of your content on YouTube which could mean more views, more user engagement and ultimately more revenue. Violating these guidelines may decrease the success of your video since it may not be applicable for monetization and may be age-restricted or removed from YouTube.

The most important ground rule is keep your content clean and appropriate for a general audience of all ages. This means the following:

• Do not upload content that may be copyrighted where you haven’t obtained the explicity permission to use it in that video.
• Do not upload content with sexually explicit or strongly sexually suggestive material.
• Do not upload content with nudity or partial nudity.
• Do not upload content with hate or abusive speech against any individual or group
• Do not upload content with excessive profanity.
• Do not upload content with graphic violence.
• Do not upload content with drugs or drug use.
• Do not upload content depicting cruelty to animals.
• Do not upload content that may put that minors at risk or exploits them in a negative or harmful manner.
• Do not upload content that promotes and encourages an illegal or dangerous activity.
• Do not upload content promoting eating disorders.
• Do not upload content with misleading or inaccurate metadata including video thumbs, titles, tags, and category. This abuse leads to a bad user experience on the site.