YouTube insists that “inauthentic” content has never qualified for monetization, a point echoed by Rene Ritchie, YouTube‘s Head of Editorial & Creator Liaison. In a video posted July8, Ritchie described the update as a clarification meant to help creators “better understand” what qualifies as original and monitizable. He also stressed that this is not a crackdown on reaction videos or legitimate transformative content.
“If you’re seeing posts about a July 2025 update to the YouTube Partner Program monetization policies and you’re concerned it’ll affect your reaction, clips, or other types of channels and here’s the deal,” said Ritchie. “I’m Rene Ritchie. I’m a creator who works inside YouTube, and I want to clarify what this update really means. This is a minor update to YouTube’s long-standing YPP policies, aimed at helping the platform better identify when content is mass-produced or repetitive. This type of content—mass-generated, low-effort, and often spam-like—has already been ineligible for monetization for years. It’s not new. In fact, it’s the kind of material that viewers themselves frequently report as spam. That’s it. Nothing’s changing for creators who make original, transformative, or authentic content.”
What he did not say is how badly YouTube has been overwhelmed by AI sludge, a content of farms using generative tools to churn out low-quality, misleading or outright fake videos at scale. So we will see what happens here but it is nice to see a company taking a stand against the ongoing wave of that total AI generation.
