If you’re a marketer or an influencer disclosing paid promotion is a must. On YouTube there has been no official way to put this in your video. That is until now. This week YouTube announced they are going to make it easier for creators to disclose Paid Promotion. Up until now there was a check box for the creator to say if it was paid promotion. This was for internal use, since these videos should not show up in YouTube Kids.

YouTube’s Official Announcement says:

today we are launching a new, optional video feature that adds visible text on the video for the first few seconds a viewer watches, informing viewers of a paid promotion. Creators can also choose to add this text disclosure to any existing video without losing their view count or other video metrics.

This is a great thing. I like the fact you can retroactively add this to previous videos without having to reupload them. If you had to redo the entire catalog, creators would lose views and search placement. I feel this is a great step in the right direction for YouTube. It allows more disclosure that is consistent across the entire service. As it stands now some use a quick text overlay, introduction in the beginning of the video or at the end.  It’s always better when it’s the same across the service. That way viewers be able to easily tell what is paid and what is not.

There is currently no standard set up by governmental agencies. This is YouTube’s first step in helping creators. I welcome this change and hope to see them do more to help creators with disclosure. Also, they list other sites to help you keep in line with your countries regulations.

To learn more about disclosure rules and regulations, refer to your local legal resources, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) in the United Kingdom, or theDirection générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (DGCCRF) in France.

NOTE: You may have noticed some changes on the blog the last week. The new theme I changed the site into would not work with my podcast plug-in. This made me change it. I have had issues with all the themes I currently have. I will be going back to a similar design soon. For the time being I am using the one I had prior. It served me well and works with everything. I hope to have this worked out shortly.