In compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), YouTube has just officially announced that all creators must categorise their videos as “made for kids” or “not made for kids” before publishing a video. Starting today, 8th January 2020, YouTube will stop showing personalised ads, comments, stories, live chats and the notification bell among other features, to videos that are categorised as “made for kids”.
These new updates will help protect children’s privacy on YouTube and address concerns raised by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If any of your previous videos were made for children, you must go back to YouTube studio and categorise the video appropriately.
Even if you have never made videos for children, you are required to categorise your previous videos as “not made for kids” to ensure that you are not inhibited from using all of YouTube’s features. Do note that categorising your video incorrectly could result in serious legal complications and penalties against your YouTube channel.
If you need help with categorising your videos, check out our previous blog post How To Handle COPPA The Right Way where we show you how to categorise individual videos as well as categorise all your videos in bulk, in a step by step process. Our post also breaks down the COPPA terms and conditions and helps you determine what types of videos in specific must be categorised as “made for kids”.
YouTube uses its machine learning system to identify content that is potentially targeted towards children. You don’t want YouTube’s bots flagging videos that aren’t categorised correctly so if you haven’t categorised your videos yet, this is the perfect time to get on the job. Make sure you head over to your YouTube studio right now and make the required changes pronto.