YouTube: The Confused Sentinel

A few people have asked where the Rainbow/Rosie and Jim/Sooty videos have gone, and outside a quick Bsky post, I never really went into detail about why they were removed from the channel and why they're subsequently being added here, so I thought I'd make it a little clearer for those who don't quite understand the reasoning. As most of you will know - YouTube is now my full time "job". I put "job" in quotes because most people wouldn't really see it as a "job" because you don't put things on shelves or type things into a spreadsheet or answer phone calls from angry customers. I've done all those things for 25 years and I decided, you know what? I don't like putting things on shelves or typing things into spreadsheets or answering angry phone calls, I like making stupid videos about random crap, and it seems to be able to pay the bills at the minute so sod it, I'll take that risk. I'll take that incredibly risky risky stupid risk. YouTube has no safety net, but it also has no ceiling. One month you can do amazingly, the next you could flounder and it's not necessarily always your fault that it happens. Sometimes it's just luck, sometimes people simply get bored and move on, but if you can manage to keep your base level at a "this is good, it pays the bills" level then you're alright. You can move on month to month. I don't necessarily want to live in a mansion, but I do like being able to switch the lights on. This is why you'll often see YouTube folk with Patreon and, sometimes, YouTube Memberships. It means people who love what you do can provide that base level support that helps you get through to the next month. It's a brilliant signal that you must be doing something right because people are willing to chuck you a coin or two for the relatively meagre offering of seeing some videos a few weeks in advance of everyone else. For someone who is doing this full time, that safety net helps you breathe at night. All of that would be fine - the knowledge that income may fluctuate and potentially one month could see you eating lobster and the next month could see you eating gravel, but all things considered, once you reach a certain audience size, once you're disciplined enough to keep working and keep pushing out videos that bring in even more of an audience, you're alright, you're fine, you're free to go another month and keep at it. Unless you're not. Unless you're not, because YouTube decided to cut you off.

The Sentinel The first time this happened was at the back end of 2024. I woke up one morning to find an Email. "We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube.

We know that this is probably very upsetting news, but it's our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think that a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform – but if you believe that we've made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You'll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below."

This came just months after the channel hit its first serious growth in 6 years. Views had hit figures I previously found impossible. This silly lark on the internet had suddenly become a thing that could possibly become something that actually become something, it could actually go somewhere, it could actu... And it's gone. Everything. Absolutely everything wiped out. 6 years worth of work. I had some back ups, sure, but where to even put them? 6 years worth of trying to find something that works, to kickstart the growth that I'd finally just discovered and it had all gone. Every last bit. And all due to a policy that made absolutely zero sense to me. I appealed, I was almost instantly denied. I asked people to speak to people who would speak to people who would speak to someone else. Nothing worked. Everywhere you turned, it was an automated response. "Sorry, nothing we can do, we've definitely checked this with real life humans and everything, and it's definitely correct. We are totally, 100% right on this. Swear down. Not even lyin' bruv" All in all, the termination lasted maybe 3 or 4 days. In that time, I barely slept. I would swing between anger, then sadness, then total and utter numbness before going back through it all again. Reading that email over and over, reading those policies over and over. None of it made sense. Then, one night, an email came through. No apology, simply a message to say that the channel had been reinstated. 4 days of tearing my hair out was met with an "Oops" and not even a "my bad". I sobbed for a 30 minutes. I had kept it together for 4 days and knowing it was finally over, all that anger and sadness and numbness boiled over into a weird mixture of relief and fury. From that point on, and to this day, any email I get from YouTube is met with a feeling of dread. That little digital envelope grabs my gullet and pulls it down, and then I open it up and it simply says something like: "New feature" or "Here's a summary of your last month" - until, eventually, it doesn't say that. It says the thing you've been paranoid about for a year. The Sentinel Returns "Our team of policy specialists reviewed your channel, RoseTintedSpectrum. We found that some of the content on your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Programme (YPP) policies. As of today, your channel is not eligible to monetise and you will not have access to monetisation tools and features.

While your channel is demonetised, you should not try to monetise new (or existing) channels to get around these restrictions. This includes using any of your related channels to apply to the YPP or directing viewers to your other channels that may already be monetising – doing so could lead to the termination of all your channels." It had happened again - perhaps not as severe this time, perhaps not as nuclear as an all out wipe, this time it was simply the removal of any way to make money through YouTube whatsoever, including YouTube Memberships, who (while this was all going on) would simply drop off the subscription role. YouTube, in the meantime, could monetise those videos, that was fine; but you? No, not for you. You violated a policy, see. A policy that means we get all that now. In effect, they said I had violated the "reused content" policy. Not a policy I was familiar with but the name had the shits knocking at the door; "Reused content"... I do reuse content. My whole fucking channel is based on taking content and using it in a different way to how it was initially broadcast. Is that what this is? Surely that's insane? Is that not a staple of a hell of a lot of YouTube channels? So I looked into their guidelines. Nothing matched. Absolutely none of the policies they said I had violated were violated, and all the examples of "things you can do" were exactly what my channel was already doing. This time, I was well prepared for the inevitable; no contact with anyone, automated responses, you name it. I knew what was coming. I submitted an appeal video, then I waited. And waited. And waited. During this, I was getting closer to the time YouTube would normally pay out the money I'd earned. Would I still get that? Every search online yielded different answers, and YouTube, of course, kept quiet about any of it. I waited some more... Turns out the answer was no. Not only was I demonetised, I had also lost over 7 weeks of income that I'd already accrued. Wiped from my adsense account retrospectively. Completely gone. I scrambled. I replanned household budgets, I started stacking things up to sell to cover the expenses I'd already put into the channel, I started trying to plan other ways of potentially monetising, maybe I'd have to just host elsewhere, maybe this, maybe that, plan plan plan plan. 2 weeks of holding it together and thinking of any possible way I can get around this when the inevitable rejection comes through. I'd built this fucking thing and if I had to do it for fucking free somewhere else then fuck you, fuck you and your stupid fucking rejection you emotionless robot fucks... Then, by some miracle, after just over 2 weeks, I was remonetised. No apology. Barely an "oops". The money I'd previously earned was reinstated to my account, but paid a month later than it was initially due, meaning I had to scramble funds together in the meantime and sell off a pile of things because, through sheer horrible miserable luck, my partner had also just lost her job. Yes, a double whammy. Beautiful stuff. And while I was demonetised? Well YouTube got to keep all that bit. 2 weeks worth of ads playing, but not for me. I wasn't part of the programme you see, because of those rules I hadn't violated. That money was theirs now, but anyway, welcome back, good luck, tally ho. Hope this doesn't happen again, lol. What are we like? Bear in mind that throughout all of this, I was also working a full time job. YouTube was a side gig, but it was a meaningful one and it was starting to become one that was slowly overtaking the income from that job, but most importantly, YouTube was also the thing I loved doing more than anything else. The first time in my life I had a job that paid well and gave me joy from the start of the day to the end of the day. The first job where I felt like I was doing something that actually had meaning, even if the meaning was just to make people go "Haha" or "Please can you stop doing that music thing it's really annoying". It was something. The Sentinel Watches So, cut to current day. I now do this for a living and I'm seeing all these videos about another wave of demonetisation. This time, the dreaded policy note is "Misleading Family Content". I watch them all, every video that pops up, this animation channel has gone down (1 million subscribers), this one has gone down (2 million subscribers) this one has gone down (3 million subscribers). Holy fuck. If those guys are getting it in the neck, I need to check out this policy. As ever, it's wishy washy at best, and when comparing those policies to the channels that were getting stomped? Well, as usual, they didn't fit. The common theme, however, was animation and/or discussions of animation, or sometimes children's shows, or sometimes this or sometimes that and honestly - the link between who was and wasn't getting demonetised was so nebulous that I just thought... Fuck it. I can't risk this. I can't risk this for a third time. I need to protect myself from going through this same shit all over again as best as I possibly can, more now than ever because it's literally all I have. And so I wiped them. I have no idea if they were going to trigger something. I have no idea what the confused sentinel that is YouTube's AI is even looking for; most of the time you're not even trying to ensure you're within the policies (You generally always are), you're trying to ensure that you're within what the sentinel thinks you've made, and what it thinks those policies are. Two unknowable things that you have to dance around and ensure that no invisible flags are speared into the sandcastle you've spent years putting together. I'm slowly adding them here, and once they're all back up - potentially, I'll even look to make more. They were a fun little diversion from the bigger videos (for me, at least, I can't read your mind. Yet) and they let me practise stupid shit I probably wouldn't do anywhere else. I could get weird with them. I could make them make no sense at all because it didn't really matter. They were a great canvas to paint on - and unfortunately, they become another terrifying paranoia landmine that I simply couldn't leave in the soil. The solution to all of this is to walk away from it all and simply get a real "job". To leave it all behind and say "It's too risky, this could all fall down at any second". And it is. And it could. But I'm going to keep doing it anyway. So, basically, that's why. Bye.