UPDATE: for the latest on YouTube's advertising guidelines, please view our updated blog post here.YouTube has recently updated their advertiser-friendly guidelines in response to the advertiser issues we first reported back in March. These updates provide more detail and clarity on what specific content advertisers will want to run ads against, and what content is too offensive. Continue reading for the full details.The main additions to the guidelines revolve around three types of content: Hateful content, inappropriate use of family entertainment characters, and incendiary and demeaning content. Below we’ll review each type of content in more detail:

• Hateful Content: “Content that promotes discrimination or disparages or humiliates an individual or group of people on the basis of the individual’s or group’s race, ethnicity, or ethnic origin, nationality, religion, disability, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other characteristic associated with systematic discrimination or marginalization.”
• Inappropriate use of family entertainment characters: “Content that depicts family entertainment characters engaged in violent, sexual, vile, or otherwise inappropriate behavior, even if done for comedic or satirical purposes.”
• Incendiary and demeaning content: “Content that is gratuitously incendiary, inflammatory, or demeaning. For example, video content that uses gratuitously disrespectful language that shames or insults an individual or group.”

You can see YouTube’s full advertiser-friendly guidelines here. We recommend familiarizing yourself with these guidelines, along with the content guidelines we wrote about in April, so you can make the best decisions for your YouTube strategy moving forward. We also recommend studying the image below, which shows some of YouTube's new content exclusion categories for advertisers to choose from (several of which are still in beta).

Finally, YouTube also reviews video thumbnails as an indicator to determine if a video is advertiser-friendly, so make sure not to include suggestive or explicit imagery in your thumbnails. We'll keep you posed as more details develop. And as always, feel free to reach out to us with any questions regarding advertiser-friendly content on YouTube.