UPDATE: AIW issued the following statement on Facebook:

it appears YouTube has deemed all wrestling related content not advertiser friendly and our revenue stream from YouTube is pretty much nonexistent as we type this. This has been a very important piece to the puzzle for not only us but several Independent wrestling promotions such as Beyond Wrestling for several years as we counted on that additional income to stay in business and keep our bills paid. To most this may sound ridiculous that YouTube could be such a large part of promoting Independent Wrestling but to put this in perspective we would need to sell hundreds more DVD’s and MP4’s a month to make up for this lost stream of revenue. We ask that you please support anyway you can while we figure out what our next step is.

Beyond Wrestling posted the following on Twitter:

Thankfully @beyondemand remains unaffected but it is quite the blow to the free Beyond Wrestling and @WWRProWrestling YouTube channels. https://t.co/woB5z19Gu5 — Beyond Wrestling (@beyondwrestling) April 13, 2017

ORIGINAL: If you rely on YouTube to make money online then we have some bad news for you. Cleveland’s Absolute Intense Wrestling noted that YouTube has now categorized wrestling in the “not advertiser-friendly/restricted mode” category. That essentially means that wrestling videos will make considerably less money. Just to give you an example of how bad this is for content providers, Ryan Satin noted on Twitter that one of his videos with over 100,000 views made just 14 cents.

I assume that this would not affect WWE since they have a partnership with YouTube. However, as seen below, this would affect promotions like AIW. If you are a YouTube content provider and you have been affected by these changes, we’d like to hear from you. Send us an email.

.@YouTube categorized wrestling in the not advertiser friendly/restricted mode category and killed off monetization cc:@beyondwrestling — aiwrestling .com (@aiwrestling) April 13, 2017

Since we have lost our YouTube revenue stream please head over to @smartmarkvideo and buy something! https://t.co/gEluHUwrLS https://t.co/e9EihCxt3g — aiwrestling .com (@aiwrestling) April 13, 2017

According to their guidelines, YouTube won’t monetize the following types of videos:

Sexually Suggestive Content , Including Partial Nudity and Sexual Humour

Violence , Including Display of serious Injury and Events Related to Violent Extremism

Inappropriate Language , Including Harassment , Profanity and Vulgar Language

Promotion of Drugs and Regulated substances , Including selling , Use and abuse of such Items

Controversial Related to WAR , POLITICAL CONFLICTS , natural disasters and Tragedies , Even If Graphic Imagery Is not Shown











