You may include paid product placements, endorsements, sponsorships, or other content that requires disclosure to viewers in your videos. You have to let us know if you include any of those by selecting the paid promotion box in your video details.
All paid promotions need to follow Google Ads policies and YouTube's Community Guidelines. You and the brands you work with are responsible for understanding and complying with local and legal obligations to disclose Paid Promotion in their content. Some of these obligations include when and how to disclose, and to whom to disclose.
Following Google Ads policies means you can't include paid promotions of the following products and services in your content:
- Illegal products or services
- Sex or escort services
- Adult content
- Mail-order brides
- Recreational drugs
- Pharmaceuticals without a prescription
- Online gambling sites not yet reviewed by Google or YouTube
- Services to cheat on exams or tests
- Hacking, phishing, or spyware
- Explosives
- Fraudulent or misleading businesses
This policy applies to videos, video descriptions, comments, live streams, Shorts, and any other YouTube product or feature. This list is non-exhaustive. Don't post content if you think it might violate this policy.
Examples
Here are some examples of content that’s not allowed on YouTube.
- Paid promotion of an academic essay-writing service
- Paid promotion of a website selling counterfeit passports or providing instructions on creating forged official documents
- Paid promotion of software that generates fake credit card numbers
- Paid promotion of an online pharmacy that sells regulated pharmaceuticals without prescriptions
What happens if your content violates this policy
If your content violates this policy, we’ll remove the content and send you an email to let you know. If this violation is your first time violating our Community Guidelines, you’ll get a warning with no penalty to your channel. You can take a policy training to allow the warning to expire after 90 days. However, if your content violates the same policy within that 90 day window, the warning will not expire and your channel will be given a strike. If you violate a different policy after completing the training, you will get another warning. We may prevent repeat offenders from taking policy trainings in the future.
If you get 3 strikes, your channel will be terminated. You can learn more about Community Guidelines strike basics on YouTube.
In addition, we may age-restrict content if the product or service being promoted is not suitable for all ages.
Paid product placements are pieces of content that are created for a third party in exchange for compensation. This content is also where the third party's brand, message, or product is integrated directly into the content.
Endorsements are content created for an advertiser (or for a creator's own brands if the relationship between creator/brand is not clear) with a message that users are likely to believe reflects the opinions of the content creator.
Sponsorships are pieces of content that have been financed in whole or in part by a third party. Sponsorships generally promote the brand, message or product of the third party without integrating the brand, message, or product directly into the content.
Creators and brands should also understand whether specific types of paid promotions are permitted under their local laws. For instance, in the UK and EU, certain videos classified as “children’s programmes†under the Audiovisual Media Services Directive may be prohibited from including sponsorships or paid product placements.
- On a computer, sign in to YouTube Studio.
- From the left section, select Content.
- Click the video you’d like to edit.
- Select More options.
- Check the box next to “My video contains paid promotion like a product placement, sponsorship, or endorsement.â€
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Select SAVE.
Sometimes, we may replace an ad that conflicts with your brand partner’s ad with a different ad on videos with paid promotions. This replacement is done to protect the value we offer advertisers.
For example, say you upload a video with brand mentions and product placements for Company A. It wouldn’t make sense to sell ad space around that video to Company B.
When your content includes paid promotion, some jurisdictions and brand partners require that you tell viewers about any commercial relationship that might have influenced your content. It's your responsibility to check and comply with laws and regulations around paid promotion content that apply to you.
Yes. Whenever you mark your video as containing paid promotions, we automatically show viewers a disclosure message for 10 seconds at the beginning of the video. This disclosure message will tell the viewer that it contains paid promotions, and links out to this page educating users on paid product placements, sponsorships & endorsements.
Note that different jurisdictions have various requirements for creators and brands involved in paid promotion that may require you to do more. Be sure to check and follow applicable laws.
If you have an advertiser interested in serving ads specifically against your content, work with your partner manager. See more info on our policies around third-party embedded sponsorships.
This policy doesn’t apply to videos created by or for brands and uploaded to the brand's YouTube channel.
- Title cards: 5 seconds or less and static. If they’re placed at the beginning of the video (0:01s), the card must be co-branded with the creator's name/logo.
- End cards: Placed within the last 30 seconds of the video and must be static.