YouTube's stricter ad rules still wouldn't have stopped Logan Paul's 'suicide forest' video

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption YouTuber Logan Paul 'sorry' for video of dead body YouTube star Logan Paul came under fire for posting a video of an apparent suicide victim in Japan’s “suicide forest," Aokigahara.

LOS ANGELES — Google's YouTube network on Tuesday announced stricter rules for video creators hoping to be compensated for their work, its latest reaction to criticism that it encourages increasingly dangerous and exploitive videos by enabling their creators to make money off viral videos.

But the rules, if they had been in place, wouldn't have stopped a video that generated the most recent backlash — YouTube star Logan Paul's video blog journey into a Japanese forest known for suicides, where he showed a victim and joked about seeing a dead body.

In a blog post, YouTube said it was tightening rules to stop "bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube." The company didn't name names, but the video network has been stymied by a wave of extremist videos, adult-themed videos aimed at kids and videos of children that became grounds for predators — all attracting millions of viewers and escalating criticism that its oversight is too lax.

YouTube changed eligibility requirements for what it takes to become a member of the YouTube "Partner program," which splits ad revenues with video creators, saying the video maker needs to have at least 1,000 subscribers and watchtime of 4,000 hours during a 12 month period. The previous metric was at least 10,000 aggregate views of the channel.

"These higher standards will also help us prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing which can hurt revenue for everyone," said the post, signed by YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan and Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl.

Paul, one of YouTube's most popular personalities, apologized after his posting of video of a suicide victim was met with a massive outcry.

The company responded by yanking him from the Google Preferred program, which marries high-end advertisers to the top 5% of YouTube performers, meaning he no longer had access to the extra income that came from Preferred.

However, his channel with more than 15 million subscribers remains in place, and he still gets revenue from the Partner program.

One new change announced by YouTube on Tuesday is manual oversight of the Preferred program, a move aimed to appease advertisers who are wary about appearing next to work such as Paul's suicide video.

Currently, anyone can submit a video to YouTube and have it go up immediately. It will be taken down if it's flagged for content reasons. But now, in order to qualify for the extra income from Google Preferred, members will have manual oversight to all videos submitted. So Paul's suicide video would still have been posted, it just wouldn't have received as much income (even though it came down in a day) under the new rules.

"Moving forward, the channels included in Google Preferred will be manually curated and ads will only run on videos that have been verified to meet our ad-friendly guidelines," said a separate post, signed by Paul Muret, YouTube's vice-president of Display, Video & Analytics.

Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham

