Okay, so today, guys, I will be talking about something I would really rather not be talking about, but needs to be, unfortunately.
We're going to be talking about YouTube's new policy on gambling content or anything of the like.
There is a good chance—ironically, and we'll get into this further later—but there's a good chance that I use some words in this video describing what's going on that could get this video also struck. So hopefully it doesn't, for reasons that will become clear later on.
But yeah, it's not just me. This isn't just a personal story. I'm going to use my personal experience to hopefully explain to you what's going on, but we're also going to be drawing on other people's experiences. This is a community-wide problem. A lot of people are having issues with this, and it is not a small thing. This genuinely could be pretty much the end of some channels.
Without further ado, we need to get into where this all started. This was on the 4th of March, which I didn't even see, to be honest with you.
Okay, so how does that affect me? Well, basically my content is going to be age-restricted. Now, I want to reiterate something very important: none of my content is for the viewing of anyone below the age of 18. It never has been. Every time I've uploaded a video, I click the box that says it's not for kids. There's never been any intention of mine to show my content or make my content for anyone below the age of 18.
In that sense, I completely agree with this policy. Brilliant—make it so people under 18 can't watch my videos. That's great. Guarantee that they can't. Awesome. No problem. I don't have a problem with that at all. I support that.
But—and we'll get on to my email first. So let's go and find that. This is when I first received notice of something that might be going on with my channel, because it's not every channel—it's most of the bigger to medium-to-bigger ones. So let's look at this.
– ""Hi Nick Eastwood, we have reviewed your content and determined that some content on your channel may not be suitable for viewers..." Blah, blah, blah. As a result, we've age-restricted these videos."
Anyone reading this who's reasonable would agree with this. I agree with this. We realize this may be frustrating news. If this was the only news, then this would be absolutely fine. I'd have no frustration. If that was the only thing that was happening, no one would have a problem, and we'd all get on merrily with our lives.
But unfortunately, we cannot, because what is not mentioned here is what I'm about to show you now. If I go to my channel—you're going to get a little look behind the scenes, guys—I'm trying to be as transparent as possible. So they went through all my videos, and they decided which ones they thought were not acceptable.
Now, if anyone could tell me why some of these are acceptable and some of these aren't, you are a complete and utter genius, and I would love for you to tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong. But for all intents and purposes, it looks like this flagging—I'm calling it flagging—is completely random.
So you'll see here, this is the important thing: this video is age-restricted. Viewers must be signed in and at least 18 years old to watch it, and that is what you're allowed to review. But in every single one of these cases, you see "age-restricted plus one or more." I can go through all of these. You can see how many I've had limited and how many are apparently fine.
Some of them are like "pardon our punts" that have no casino games in them or whatever, but we may say something in there. I'd have to watch the whole video back and find out what I've said. There is no direction on this. But every single one of them is age-restricted plus more, and this is the important part. You can see this here: "Ad suitability confirmed by review. This video has been confirmed by manual review as not suitable for most advertisers. It remains fully playable and is eligible to earn subscription revenue from YouTube Premium."
Now, what does this mean? It means that every single video that's age-restricted—which should be, according to their policy, every single video—is also confirmed by review to be ad-suitability flagged, which means you can't make money off it, other than from YouTube Premium.
Which I estimate, for the sake of this video, to be about 10% of my total YouTube revenue. Most of my revenue is from midroll ads, skipped ads, or pre-roll ads, which you don't get on YouTube Premium. And not a lot of people have YouTube Premium, even though I do and I think it's great.
So every single video that's age-restricted—which I believe will be every single video—is also ad-suitability flagged. I can't make any money off of it, or barely any money off of it.
And a lot of other creators are having the same problem.
(Brad Owen recently became involved and took to Twitter.)
So the reason I'm making a video is because I assumed, when I saw Brad was having a problem, they’re not going to leave Brad high and dry. But they have—so far as I'm aware. Not that I've spoken to him.
Another popular streamer GazzyB1233 recently posted a 30-second video for which he received a strike. Here's what he wrote on Twitter:
– 26 identical streams this calendar year, all of me streaming online poker on the same site, all instantly uploaded to YT so they can be viewed after. 25 streams with no issues at all, but this 30 second clip apparently breaks YT's community guidelines and is worthy of a strike.
In another tweet, Gazzy asks YouTube:
– Hello @YouTubeCreators, a lot of poker youtubers are having issues with random warnings/strikes for incorrect reasons. It is most vexing.
Why on earth is there not an option to upload a video onto an unlisted link and have it vetted before it goes live? This would eliminate all risk to creators and keep YouTube happy. We shouldn't have to gamble with your AI system which is completely random and often just plain incorrect.
Please set this up ASAP, it should already be there and shouldn't be hard to do.
While you're here @YouTubeCreators I'll give you a million dollars if you can tell me which community guidelines this clip was allegedly in breach of that resulted in this video being removed. pic.twitter.com/EChDXtfJ3a
— Gary Blackwood (@GazzyB1233) April 16, 2025
So I thought, right, there was a time before where they upgraded their profanity settings and said, "Okay, guys, no more swearing in the first 30 seconds, and if you consistently swear, then we're also going to ad limit that." So you couldn't make money on videos where you were swearing in the first 30 seconds or swearing a lot. Obviously, that meant I was screwed.
I got a lot of flags, and I thought, "Wow, this is really bad." But I guessed all we had to do was make sure I didn't swear in the first 30 seconds and then bleep everything out. So that's what we started doing.
What I would do is, before the video went up, I would upload it a week early. I did a post on my community page on YouTube explaining that there might be a delay in content because I didn’t want there to be gaps. I hate gaps. I never have gaps.
Yesterday was supposed to be the first-ever tournament PUNT with Lucas Robinson—Robin Poker. I couldn't upload it because no one would have seen it. So I uploaded it in my infinite wisdom and thought, you know what, if I just upload it early, they'll do the checks. YouTube does the checks when it uploads, and then I'll know whether or not it's passed. Then I'm happy to upload it.
And hopefully—because you can see here, guys—none of the last 10 videos for some reason have any flags on them. And if you can tell me how they're different from the ones down here, I would love to know. YouTube, I would love to know from you. That would be great.
So I uploaded it two days early. It passed checks, and I thought, "Fine, I'll upload it on Sunday." Then, half an hour into it being uploaded, it was age-restricted and thus ad suitability flagged, which meant that I could no longer make any money on the video. Usually, I make—not a lot of money—but the money I make off YouTube pays for some running costs, and it's definitely not insignificant to me.
So if I don't have it, I'm not going to go broke, but at the same time, it's really nice to have—as with any money. I make about 10% of the revenue, all other things being equal, on this video that I normally would. I made two pounds on this video. Two.
And not just that, but as soon as it was age-restricted, the discoverability—i.e. the algorithm showing it to new people or even my subscribers—was completely nuked. So what happened was, it went from doing normal things to doing this: flatlining.
You can see here—views: 2,844. It's always about 5K, give or take. Sometimes 6K, sometimes 7K, if I get particularly lucky. But 2.8K is unheard of. Absolutely unheard of. And here is the supporting evidence for this.
Basically, you cannot upload early and figure out whether your video is going to be demonetized. It only happens after you upload it, which is absolute nonsense. So even if we tried to figure out what's going on and uploaded a few test videos to make sure we haven't done anything wrong—which we don't even know what we're supposed to do to not get ad-restricted—I don't think there is a way. Because it's poker tables. What can you do?
Even if you could do that, it would just not tell you. Then it would demonetize it as soon as it went up. And then the video is already up—you can't just take it down. You know what I mean?
So, half an hour into my video, it was performing normally, and then it fell off a cliff. Because of that.
And your boy Weazel_1991 uploads on a Sunday as well at 4:00, one hour before me. Being a man of immense integrity, he decided to upload his automatically—as you can pick an option that says 18+ only. I actually didn't even see this until recently. You can upload it as 18+ only.
So Weazel went, "Fine, I'll just get ahead of it and upload it as 18+."
What did YouTube say? They said, "How would you like to not only make no money, but have absolutely nobody see your video?"
And he went, "Thank you very much. That sounds absolutely wonderful."
So that's exactly what he did. And you can see here—this is the first two and a half hours of his video on Sunday. Usually about—you can see—1.5K to 2K at least. A bad video, 1K. A bad video. These two might be performing worse. I mean, this one is a little more niche. These are all tournament runs, and nearly every tournament run he's had is pretty much 1.5K plus.
This one—uploaded as 18+, ad suitability struck, age restriction struck—157 views in 2 hours and 23 minutes. And you tell me how he's supposed to upload ever again under these circumstances. It's literally impossible.
There is no way around it. This is a 43-minute-long video that I'm sure took a long time to put together—and nobody has seen it. His subscribers haven't even seen it. I had a message from someone on my Twitch while I was explaining what was going on, and they said, "I've been subscribed to Mark on YouTube for years. I always get his Sunday vids on the homepage. Just looked, and it's not there. Searched his username, and it still didn't appear. Had to go right into his channel and click this week's vid." Horseshit. Horseshit indeed.
This is what I mean. If this stays in its current state, it will be the death of many, many poker creators—maybe Mark, maybe me—unless we can find a way either to reverse this or adapt our content. Things will not be the same. If this doesn't change, things will not be the same. It won't be a Top 10. It just won't be. I mean, I know only 5K of you watch it a week, but some people do like it, watching it every week. And I like putting it out there every week. It's fun for me.
This is something I've worked on for four years of my life—this channel. I've given it everything. Four videos a week. Rarely miss an upload—unless Dan's being a prick, which he rarely is, to be fair. And it is all at risk at the moment. In its current state, it's all at risk.
And it gets better, guys. So I decided that it would make sense to—well, I might as well, because the video is already up and there's nothing I can do at this point—review it. You can review it once. They'll manually review it. I don't know if a human being actually watches it, but you can click this button. I can't do this anymore. My appeal was rejected, as you can see. So I can't do this anymore.
Let's just pick a random video—completely random. I have not set this up. Let's just pick any video. This one. Fine. Analytics. Okay. Audience. Wow, guys. It's a good job they stepped in, because there was a whole 0% of my audience under 18 watching this video.
Then they come in and say, "We're protecting people, guys." Great. But why am I not able to make ad revenue off of people over the age of 18? Why does it mean that I can't make any money, YouTube, when no one below the age of 18 was watching my videos before anyway? Nothing has changed.
It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. So it's a complete and total shitshow. Age restriction equals ad suitability flag equals zero discoverability on YouTube equals zero revenue for YouTubers and zero views. And thus, no more subscribers. No extra exposure. You cannot have a YouTube channel under these conditions, guys. It's not possible.
- Increased first deposit bonus
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- Access to private freerolls
- Round-the-clock support
We asked several non-English speaking poker streamers to tell us whether the bans affected them and how they plan to work under the new YouTube conditions.
Lorem:
Like everyone else, I immediately had some random video deleted (apparently YouTube had changed something in the algorithm before that), after which we decided to test on left-wing channels what videos are deleted for, and there they deleted everything in a row – a video with poker rules, training, just a recording of a WCOOP replayer with open cards without sound.
In general, it is written in the rules that any advice on poker is a ban, even poker software cannot be shown or advised.
For about a week, YouTube itself tried to figure out what they had done, after which they rolled back the changes and restored the videos. This is not the first time I have had this scenario – my channel was already deleted, as was GipsyTeam, but then they restored it. In the West, one of the Staples brothers was deleted, and Kevin Martin
Overall, it looks like YouTube has had some fun and then calmed down.
Brdz, co-host of the A-Game channel:
One-time blockings started quite a long time ago, as far as I remember, the first “gambling” tick flew into Aurora’s stream in the fall of 2023 (if I’m not mistaken)
Then they started banning the highlight format on YouTube – this is already the beginning of 2024. They caught several strikes on different channels, completely removed links in the description and began to be more careful with advertising + blurring parts of the screen where something potentially dangerous could happen (since YouTube itself does not give clear recommendations, you have to guess based on signals from space)
Not long ago, our streamer channel was completely taken down. It was quite sad, because it had already managed to gather quite a large audience
And recently, a hard wave of strikes began for almost any poker content on YouTube. For now, we are looking at the situation and trying to find some logic in this.
GreenLine:
The channel received 2 warnings for "violating community rules" for streams. However, the stream itself was not blocked and continued to run. We hid old videos and stopped rebroadcasting them.
Nothing arrived on the main channel, although highlights were released there at about the same time. It seems that YouTube does not have any algorithm, they just started checking and everyone got caught in the crossfire. We also suspect that special attention is paid to complaints from users.
What did we decide to do? We simply indicate in the description that the video is educational in nature and we do not encourage gambling.
Minton :
Hello, Gypsyteam!)
Not much has changed since the last article about Twitch, except that my cautious optimism that all this would be for a couple of months, they say, “they’ll go crazy and leave”, left me and it became clear that new realities have firmly come into our home)
As it affected me – I got a tick "gambling", which can not be removed for 90 days. Now 69 are left. It's quite a shame, the appeal was rejected, but as before it is understandable, formally I obviously violate the rules, streaming without a tick. Another issue is that the rule, to put it mildly, is controversial. Ticks are given randomly and not to everyone.
In general, Twitch is being hit on the head by RKN or similar structures (maybe private activists), Twitch is hitting us on the head.
On YouTube – they also rolled out new rules, it hasn't affected us much yet, online is +- normal, some videos and shorts are marked 18+. But in general, I try to look at these things without unnecessary stress. I'm marathoning with a tick, actively developing Kik, I don't forget and try to support Twitch and YT, we do what depends on us and come what may)
I started uploading videos to VK)
Their platform, they do what they think is right, we adapt. Fortunately, there are plenty of mysteries on PokerOK , and when you deep-run Mysteries, even with all the checkboxes and 18+, online 2.5k+, which is good news!)
We'll get through it)
Dmitry spr3216:
Plus or minus, everything is the same as everyone else. I've been getting strikes for 3-4 years now, randomly, more actively in the last year. YouTube has already deleted one of my channels without the possibility of recovery. The only thing that definitely decides is the overall reach, be it overall channel views or online on a stream. The more, the greater the chance of a strike.
To avoid this, I think you should stream Heroes 3 instead of poker, then it will be fine.
KOT-MTT:
In the poker segment, gambling ticks are now being actively distributed, they cannot be avoided, you can cheat, for example, put a tick for the first 10-15 minutes of the stream, and then remove it, but there is still a chance of getting caught, which is what actually happened to our channel on Twitch.
Regarding blocking on YouTube, videos/streams where at least some mentions of poker sites, banners or registration links are posted are being actively banned. The time for reviewing appeals has increased from the standard 2-3 days to 10+ days, apparently many are suffering.
How do we deal with this?
We eliminate trigger situations in our videos as much as possible, remove banners, remove poker room logos, release content aimed at education/entertainment, plus indicate (insert a disclaimer in the video itself and in the description) that the content is entertaining/educational in nature and is aimed solely at raising awareness of the problem of gambling.
RYSHER, head of video editorial at GT:
Starting March 2025, YouTube has tightened its rules regarding gambling content. Many YT channels have received strikes, one of our channels was removed. This does not mean that poker is banned on YouTube and all such content will be removed. No, poker videos are still allowed, but they must be published with extreme caution.
What has changed?
The key point is that if YouTube previously prohibited “direct calls and links that lead the audience to prohibited gambling resources,” now not only direct links are prohibited, but also “methods and instructions that allow access to prohibited resources.” If we approach this strictly formally, then footage of a game in any room can be interpreted as a “method of accessing a prohibited resource.” The viewer sees the room, searches for it in a search engine, and registers.
On the other hand, YouTube specifically stipulates the format of "documentary video". This is when we show the same clips, but clearly indicate that the video is documentary and warn about the consequences of gambling abuse. That's why we added a disclaimer at the beginning of the video. It's like a beer ad with a warning about the harm of alcohol.
It is not clear how well this will work. YouTube is known for its rather liberal interpretation of its own rules. If you publish the same video on two channels, YouTube may delete it on one, but not on the other.
In any case, Gipsyteam remains on YouTube, while simultaneously developing other platforms, such as VKVideo. We will continue to publish videos, taking precautions. I wish the same for other poker content makers.
