Update: As of August 2015 the policies were updated again. Please see our most recent article on YouTube Contest Guidelines.
Earlier this year, YouTube issued a 2015 update to their contest guidelines. Basically, it explained that they were phasing out their contest gadgets that have been in place for a few years and that contests are now being governed by their simplified guidelines.
The YouTube contest guidelines give the usual contest verbiage shared by other social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Primarily, if you run a contest on their platform you are responsible for creating your own official rules, and for following all applicable laws and regulations for wherever you choose to run your contest. They also make it clear that they will not assume any legal liability and you must release them from liability in the rules you create.
Then they go into some specifics that only apply to YouTube that you may need to be aware of:
- You can only run a contest open to entrants 18 or older. Other platforms don’t address age, or allow entrants to be 13 or older. YouTube is very specific that you must limit your contests to 18+ only, which is important to consider if your demographic skews younger.
- You can’t use the platform functions, like voting or the number of video views, as part of your contest. The YouTube vote mechanism used to be the way many brands narrowed down the competition for many contests. Now you need to rely on judging entries based on pre-set criteria, or come up with another creative way to whittle down the competition.
- You can’t run a video contest on your own site using the YouTube API or embedded YouTube player. Before YouTube had contest guidelines, brands often designed their own site, asked people to upload videos to YouTube, and showed entries using an embedded YouTube player. According to guidelines, this is no longer allowed, which means that if you are hosting your own video contest you will need to collect, encode and compress, host all the entries and use your own video player (or license one) if you run a video contest on your site.
- YouTube can shut you down — at any time and at their discretion – even if your contest is in full swing. If you are not in compliance, YouTube can turn off your account or your brand channel without any warning. They also specify that they will take no responsibility for the financial or legal or PR mess that shutting you down might cause your brand.
- Videos can stay up after your contest is over (and even if you don’t approve them). Remember, videos on YouTube can stay up forever. And the user controls the content – not you. If you are a highly regulated brand, or want to control the content for a contest, YouTube is not the place for your contest.
And while that is a bit daunting, as long as you plan accordingly, YouTube is still the fastest, easiest and most popular video platform to run your video contest on! It just takes a little pre-launch planning to come up with the best solution.
If you are considering a video contest, give us a call. We have run contests with YouTube and on custom video platforms for over 10 years. We can help you figure out the best way to approach it for your brand.
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I don’t see a specific rule in the official contest guidelines the disallows running a contest on your own website. Am I missing something here?
Hi Gary,
The reason you aren’t seeing it is because YouTube recently updated their guidelines again!
They did away with the age 18+ requirement, the restriction on using likes or views for voting, and the restriction on using their API or embedded links on your own site. They also added a clear message that you can’t ask entrants to assign rights to you — so if you do run a contest you might want to keep that in mind if your goal is to collect video content from users to use on your own site. You might need to negotiate for those rights!
These cleaner requirements are more in line with Facebook’s and Twitter’s promotional guidelines so it opens the door to using YouTube as a platform. Please keep in mind, though, that YouTube can change their policies at any time, with little warning, so if you run a YouTube promotion you should check back on the YouTube policy page often before and during your contest!
Good Luck!
Hi Jennifer, so you can be any age to win a contest on Youtube now? If there are NO official rules other than the spoken video of the rules, do you have the ability to change them after the contest has already started? Or are the spoken rules set in stone once the contests begins? Can there be recourse if you don’t follow through with the rules that were stated?
Ky — Official Rules should be written and posted on the contest site, should include the ages of eligibility, and should not change during the promotion. Not knowing enough about the circumstances, we can’t really comment on the exact contest you are referring to, but if you feel like the contest may have been run illegally you could always report the channel to YouTube.
So are you not allowed to monetize your video if you are doing a giveaway?
Hi Jared, We would need more info to help you with your question. Use our contact us form at the link in the upper left of the site and let us know more specifics.
Can i conduct a contest with using prize money to increase my subscriber and viewers base.
Any contest you run would be subject to local and national laws in all countries where you run the contest. Your best bet is to contact an attorney or a firm like ours to discuss options.