The recent video has been painful to make

I make it a point to not bother my viewers with what I am feeling most of the time, especially if it's negative, but I came to the conclusion this at least somewhat concerns you, since you chose to support me on here. First, a bit of context.

I have been working on a new video about Adult Mods for almost a month now. A bit of a brave topic for YouTube, right? I knew that going in and I made a thorough sweep of any and all imagery or wording that I thought could attract the demonetization hounds. Despite my best efforts, I got slapped with the yellow dollar.

For those who aren't familiar with how uploading a monetized video works, you need to first do what's called "self-certification" basically a set of options you can tick that describe your video's contents in very vague terms. They include all the possibly ad-unfriendly things like adult content, violence, swearing,...etc.

When the video finishes uploading and processing, YouTube runs 2 checks, one for copyright and one for the aforementioned "ad suitability". While the copyright one tells you exactly where the problem is and gives you several options for dealing with the issue, the ad check gives you nothing. It simply tells you there is an issue and the video now has limited ads.

All of this is happening before publishing, mind you, sometimes even before the video leaves the "draft" state (basically isn't recognized as a video in your list of content). You can ask for a manual review, but those take time and aren't usually known for their understanding of nuance, so I opted for the only other option I had - splitting the video into parts and uploading them individually to see which ones have the issue. This was rather tedious and annoying, but it was not the worst part of the process. When I finally got everything to clear in individual clips, I rendered the whole thing anew and BAM, still yellow.

After doing this, I noticed YouTube would show a little warning I have never seen before.

"Be careful! You have made mistakes on rating some recent videos!" 

(this number has grown since and the wording of the warning has changed to "be careful")

Turns out, every one of those clips I uploaded in order to find where the issue was, that I rated incorrectly (because the algorithm found an issue where I didn't mark any in my self-certification) now counted towards my "rating accuracy". As someone who has never dealt with this before, I was a little spooked lol. As I understand it, YouTube uses this accuracy to basically soften and perhaps even mostly remove the automated "ad" check on your videos, using your judgement instead. Since they don't share any info on this in order to "discourage bad actors from gaming the system" I cannot tell for sure (Hmmm, seems like we're starting to see a pattern here). To finish off this section, I now have to not rate any of my vids badly for the next 90 days so my rating accuracy resets. If I do, the wait time itself resets. Great.

Since then I have made more and more changes to the video, stripping it (no pun intended) of any and all material that could be even misconstrued as naughty by an algorithm, leaving only the bare minimum for the video to still be fun and have the same contents. Every time the Tube would spit it right back out: "This tastes rotten, change it!" the red monster would gurgle.

Finally, I was able to get a green dollar sign. But for some reason, if I tried to change the video title or the thumbnail, regardless of what it was, it would always come back as yellow, this time at least reverting back to green once i changed it back. This of course, would not work, as the video was called "export final" and couldn't be posted as such, along with an auto generated thumbnail.

With that we have finally arrived in the present. This video was supposed to come a week ago. I have spent an entire week, increasingly nervous, going to sleep at 5 am and just being generally unhappy with how this was all turning out, only for it to not yet be resolved. I am in the process of uploading a new version that I changed so much it is not even possible to change any more without making a new video. If it does not clear, I will be forced to have it manually reviewed and that is likely gonna be a death sentence for that video.

Regardless of what happens, I wanted to thank every one of you for supporting me here and everywhere else, I truly appreciate it. The video will be coming to Patreon, uncensored, regardless of whether I can get it to clear and whether I will even post it to YouTube.

After this is over, I will be making some animations and simpler content, I'm just really tired of this whole ordeal.

I hope you are having a better week than me lol, Cheers!