Several guntubers woke up to unwelcome but possibly-not-unexpected emails from YouTube on Wednesday morning, wherein YouTube told these creators that their channels were going to be permanently demonetized.

A Brief De-Monetization History:

Those of you who consume firearm-related content on YouTube are probably aware of YouTube’s constantly escalating economic marginalization of gun content on the platform. The increased scrutiny of gun channels began around the 2016 election cycle, when YouTube faced backlash from advertisers who took issue with their ads being run on certain YouTube channels. Based on public knowledge, none of these complaints were about gun-related channels, but advertisers were upset to find their product being endorsed on (and thereby associated with) channels that harbored extreme political views. YouTube took a substantial financial blow from the ensuing boycott, and this motivated YouTube to categorize content and channels for advertising purposes.

That’s when guntubers began to see the ominous yellow dollar sign show up next to their videos:

This is YouTube Creator Studio’s way of showing creators that their videos had been demonetized by YouTube, meaning that there would be either no ads or limited (i.e., cut-rate) ads run with the video, thereby decreasing revenue and traffic. As an example, TFBTV AdSense revenue went down approximately 80% per subscriber after 2016, requiring TFBTV to turn to viewer support through Patreon (www.patreon.com/tfbtv) in order to keep content running. Here’s a screenshot of only a small portion of those videos:

Initially, the de-monetization policy was enforced through a poorly-defined guideline about “offensive content” that did not mention guns specifically, but YouTube subsequently modified the guidelines several times after the initial wave of content demonetization in order to make the guidelines more specific. More recently, YouTube’s detailed guidelines prohibited the monetization of videos showing how to reload ammunition, and they even forbid monetizing videos that show a magazine capable of holding more than 30 rounds of ammunition.

Notwithstanding these new, more specific guidelines, content monetization is arbitrarily enforced by YouTube. As an example, this recent video about the top five guns of the NRA Annual Meeting was demonetized, in spite of the fact that it does not break any of the specific guidelines:

Both of TFB’s appeals to YouTube to have the video restored were rejected because, in YouTube’s words:

Thanks for waiting, James. I know you want to get your content monetized the soonest. As promised, we’ve taken a closer look at your video and based on what we’ve seen, we regret to inform your that we are to monetize it as it was deemed that the content includes Prohibited content. YouTube uses technology and policy enforcement processes to determine if a video is suitable for advertising. We continually work hard to make our algorithms as accurate as possible and to understand nuances, including for categories like music, gaming, and news. Our intention is to treat each video based on context, including content that is clearly comedic, educational, or satirical in nature. We want to help keep people safe both online and offline, so we don’t allow the promotion of weapons-related content that may lead to damage, harm, or injury. For this reason, Google ads may not be placed on pages that contain the following weapons-related content. I hope this helps and let me know if any question pops up.

That’s right. A video containing only vanilla and, frankly, quasi-boring interviews with representatives from different gun companies at a convention was deemed the “promotion of weapons-related content that may lead to damage, harm, or injury.”

At this point, it is clear that any gun content whatsoever could be construed as “promotion of weapons-related content that may lead to damage, harm, or injury.”

Not that that matters. YouTube is a private website. They can make their own rules and break their own rules. The Firearm Blog could point out that nearly all of the hundreds of demonetized TFBTV videos are perfectly within the published guidelines, but YouTube has no duty to abide by their own guidelines when evaluating content for AdSense revenue.

The Most Recent Development:

We could gripe for pages about YouTube’s capricious approach to content regulation, but at least TFBTV is still earning revenue. Numerous gun channel creators woke up to the following email on Wednesday:

Mark of FitnFire, who was one of the creators who received the foregoing message, had this to say about the sudden message from YouTube:

My channel is all about my passion for personal protection and living a healthy lifestyle. I have been producing content for about 2 years and while Adsense was not a lot of income, it was enough to offset the cost of ammunition. I first received an email yesterday saying that I was not eligible for super chats and about 5 minutes after I received a second email which I posted [see above]. Since then the outpouring of support has been overwhelming from not only my subscribers but also people like Guns and Gadgets and Sootch. The specific policy they cite is “harmful content” that shows creation, modification or sale of weapons that may result in injury to others which none of my videos do.

And William of The Wound Channel also received the letter. He says:

I think my channel was demonetized due to links to outside companies, in part because they are firearm related and in part because YT hates when you send traffic away from their site. I think they have had a global demonetization strategy in place for years now, and that any time they can justify cutting off an entire channel (especially one that doesn’t share their political views) they will. YT is purposefully hard to reach with questions, hard to get a resolution or answer from, and ambiguous or unclear in their rules as well as the enforcement thereof. YT is leveraging their monopoly status to make things up as they go along and apply discipline at their discretion. Rather than donate money I would prefer a subscription to my channel and sharing my videos [click here] far and wide to let YT know they can’t simply squash channels they don’t like. Our reach is our power.

What Can We Do? Do I Get My Pitchfork Yet?

So what can we do about this? The most typical suggestion is “why don’t you just list on [insert low traffic video streaming channel]?”. Note first that YouTube hasn’t banned videos about guns yet, they’ve just tinkered with the revenue formula. While many of us may be quick to pick up the torch and pitchfork because YouTube is anti-gun, which would be a fair reaction, bear in mind that YouTube would only be hurting itself financially for the sake of attacking gun owners. It’s just as likely that YouTube still feels the sting from the 2016 ad boycotts, and it is probably worried about upsetting potential advertisers who don’t want their widget in a pre-roll for “Can You Sink a Boat with an AK-47”:

(And, yes, that incredible video has been demonetized, sadly). This is likely a business decision, albeit one that could also be a pretext for content discrimination.

Even with limited monetization, creators are still making more money and reaching (far, far) more people with YouTube than they would at whatever the biggest gun-friendly streamer is, and getting gun content to the masses is vitally important to a content creator, whether the goal is money, influence, or just getting the word out. This is why many guntubers simply avoid the headache and don’t monetize their videos at all. These creators know that because YouTube has a larger audience by a tremendous margin over its competitors, even making no money whatsoever with a big audience is better than making no money whatsoever with a small audience. Further, from a marketing perspective, potential advertisers want to know how many YouTube subscribers and impressions you have, not how many people watched your Ruger LCP II review on PornHub. YouTube has become the de facto measuring stick for judging creator influence, and that’s not likely to change.

It seems that at present, YouTube is tolerating gun content (even if drastically reducing its profitability, whatever the motive) and gun creators are tolerating YouTube – at least for now. On paper, YouTube is still the most effective place to stream gun content at this moment. Even after taking away as much as 80-100% of AdSense creator revenue, creators still get better results from YouTube than they do elsewhere: A bigger audience, more money, and more influence through the platform. Is YouTube anti-gun? It seems that way, but it’s also the case that YouTube has more gun video content than all other sources combined, and is still permitting a very wide variety of gun content on the site, monetized or not. Shockingly, YouTube allows creators to promote their own gun-product/service advertisers. This borders on unfathomable since creator-run ads compete directly with YouTube’s exact business model, advertising.

In view of all of this, it seems highly unlikely that even the most politically-minded gun content creators are going to abandon YouTube. Hopefully, creators that stick with YouTube will tap into the mainstream YouTube audience and show them that guns are awesome, and not something to be ostracized.

At time of publication the best way to support creators like TFBTV and Fitnfire is through Patreon: