YOUTUBE CONTENT ID

Uncover how YouTube Content ID works

Content ID automatically compares user uploads to third-party content. Here’s the overall flow for how rightsholders get their assets set up in Content ID (key terms in bold):

1. Partner creates an asset to reflect ownership information and delivers reference material
2. Content ID generates a digital fingerprint from the reference
3. Content ID scans user videos against the fingerprint and identifies any matches
4. Content ID claims matching user videos and applies the partner’s match policy
5. Partner views claims, monitors analytics, and accesses revenue reports from YouTube

If users have one of their videos claimed, they’re notified in the copyright notices section of Video Manager. Users can accept the claim, or take actions such as:

• Remove claimed segments from the video
• Replace claimed songs with free music and sound effects from YouTube’s Audio Library
• Share revenue for eligible covers (not available in all situations)
• Dispute the Content ID claim if they have rights to use the copyrighted material

Content ID continuously scans new user uploads and compares to our database of partner references. In addition, Content ID takes any fingerprints generated later and scans the archive of previously uploaded videos, with priority assigned to recent videos and popular videos.

Apply for Content ID

Over 8000 partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube.¹ To qualify for Content ID, you must own or control exclusive online rights for the content you submit in the territories in which you assert rights. Common examples of items that may not be exclusive include mashups, remixes, video gameplay, unlicensed music or video, and recordings of performances. If you’re eligible for Content ID, you’ll be required to complete an agreement explicitly stating that you’ll only use content with exclusive rights as references. You’ll also need to specify the geographic locations of your exclusive ownership.

While Content ID automates much of the process, you may want to consider allocating adequate resources to deliver references, review claims, and handle other rights tasks. If you don’t have the resources internally, you can also work with a service provider that specializes in Content ID. In addition, any channel may submit a copyright takedown notice to request removal of a video that makes use of its copyrighted content. Which is a key step for partners who use Content ID? Delivering and monitoring assets and references.

An asset is the representation of your intellectual property in the YouTube rights management system. Assets are not the same as videos, which can be uploaded by partners or users and shared on YouTube.com.Assets are containers for metadata, reference material, ownership information, and policies—all connected with a specific piece of content. YouTube stores critical information in the asset, so you can promote your content, collect revenue, and run reports to drive your business.

• Custom IDs are unique identifiers per asset that partners can provide to correlate YouTube assets with their own digital asset management system.
• When creating an asset, make the name specific to that piece of intellectual property (such as the episode number of a TV show).

It’s important to select the correct asset type because some asset types have different properties that impact claims and monetization.We recommend you only select the Web asset type when none of the others apply. If you’re not sure which asset type to choose, read more. (Only music partners may deliver music assets.) For music partners, note that an Art Track is an automatically generated YouTube version of a sound recording. It consists of the sound recording, album art, and metadata about the recording. The Art Track provides a single label-sanctioned YouTube version of every sound recording when no official music video is available.

• Music Video – Represents an official music video for a sound recording; embeds a sound recording asset
• Sound Recording – Represents an audio recording; the underlying publishing ownership is represented by all the embedded composition relationships
• Composition Share – Represents an ownership share of a musical composition; multiple Composition Share assets can be embedded within a Sound Recording asset
• TV Episode – Represents an episode from a television show
• Movie – Represents a feature film
• Art Track – Represents a video of a sound recording with still images
• Web – Represents video content not covered by other asset types
• Specify the ownership for an asset directly in the Content ID interface, or when you deliver it using spreadsheet templates or DDEX (music only). For newly created or existing assets, you can view or edit the ownership information from the Ownership & Policy tab.

Partners may wish to use asset labels for easier organization. You can create labels for attributes such as genre, artist, music label, name, and location. You can also use keywords that are helpful for you and others who manage your content. Asset labels are only viewable to the partner who created them.You can apply up to 30 asset labels to an asset for more granular organization. When you’re searching for assets, you can enter labels and select either “Include all” or “Include any” from the advanced search filter options.nYouTube has a limit of 5,000 asset labels per partner. What report would help you resolve asset ownership conflicts? Asset Conflict Report

What happens to revenue earned by a non-music asset when there’s an ownership conflict? YouTube suspends monetization in territories with an unresolved conflict.

What is a benefit of creating Asset Labels?

They assist in organizing and managing your asset library.The reference is the actual visual and/or audio material for which you own exclusive rights. Because Content ID matches user videos based on partner references, you should choose references carefully for accurate claiming.

The following examples should not be used in a reference:

• Content licensed non-exclusively from a third party
• Content released under Creative Commons or similar open licenses
• Public domain footage, recordings, or compositions
• Clips from other sources used under fair use principles
• Video gameplay footage (unless you’re the game publisher)

Select the “Enable Content ID matches” checkbox from a new or unclaimed video. Assets can have more than one reference. References need to be material for which you own exclusive rights. Your asset can have more than one reference. For example, a movie asset can have separate references with 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios. Remember to include precise asset metadata, such as the ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) or EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry Association) and director, to identify your intellectual property. Typically, references are created from videos uploaded under a channel you manage. You have the option to create references from claimed partner uploaded videos—one-by-one or in bulk. In some cases, you may want to give us a reference for a video you don’t want on YouTube. To do this, you can use a CSV template to deliver a reference-only file and associate it with one of your assets.

How might you deal with third-party content in your reference?

Exclude segments in your spreadsheet templates. What happens when you have an “invalid reference”?

You must manually review the flagged reference. What is the relationship of a reference to an asset? Assets contain reference files that match videos for claiming.

These are the categories of claims:

• Active – All active claims associated with your Content Manager account
• Potential – Possible claims, short matches, low confidence claims, and claims routed for review because of a partner-provided policy
• Disputed – Claims disputed by users who uploaded the claimed content
• Appealed – Claims appealed by users after a dispute and reinstatement
• Takedown – Claims for videos removed pursuant to a copyright takedown
• Inactive – Claims that have become inactive (e.g., if a user deletes a claimed video, or a disputed claim isn’t reviewed within 30 days)

Claims may come from two sources:

• Partner Uploaded is content uploaded to a YouTube channel that you own
• User Uploaded (also known as User Generated Content or UGC for short) is content uploaded by users to YouTube channels that you don’t own

YouTube has more than 50 million active reference files in our Content ID database. YouTube is unable to mediate claim disputes. You should reinstate or release claims based on your ownership rights.

This “block outside ownership” is done at the claims level and only applies to the claimed partner-uploaded video. Using this will block your video in all territories where you haven’t set your ownership on the asset. YouTube only looks at the ownership from the video provider to determine this.

This is different from managing ownership of an asset, since assets can have multiple owners across different territories. You can only set “block outside ownership” for partner-uploaded videos, and you would need to set this flag for each video you wish to block.

You would accomplish this by whitelisting the designated channel, thereby instructing Content ID not to claim any videos uploaded to this channel. The channel doesn’t have to be linked to, or have an exclusive relationship with, you or other copyright owners.

Whitelisting would be a good technique when you’ve licensed your content to other channels, or approved how those channels use your content. Since you won’t be claiming their videos, the channels themselves could decide whether to run ads on eligible content.

When do potential claims expire? 30 days. Why would you select “block outside ownership”? Prevent access to your partner-uploaded video where you don’t own it. Why would you want to whitelist a channel? So a channel can use your material without getting automated claims.

These policies essentially are instructions for Content ID to handle any claimed content. Having the wrong policy—or no policy at all—may prevent you from properly controlling your copyrighted material.

Let’s say you’ve uploaded a video of an epic drone racing battle. In addition to running ads on your own channel, you probably want to control how this content gets shared on other YouTube channels. When people watch content from your video across YouTube, that represents a great opportunity to earn revenue.

You set a policy by choosing it in the Video Manager (shown below) or via the bulk update tool. Remember, because assets specify your territorial rights, YouTube applies your policies only in countries where you’ve asserted your ownership. If other partners own rights to the content in different territories, their policies will be applied in those countries. Distinguish usage and match policies.

You can set two types of policies in Content ID:

• Usage policies define how YouTube handles claims on Partner Uploaded content (your channel)
• Match policies define how YouTube handles claims on User Uploaded content (other channels)

What’s a good reason to create a custom policy? It gives you more granular control over how your policies are applied. How can you prevent your uploaded video from being viewed on YouTube? Change its privacy setting to Private

Associated with the Monetize policy: Allows video to be viewed on YouTube, Tracks viewership statistics, Places ads within or next to your video

While everyone with a channel on YouTube can use the Creator Studiodashboard, only content owners who’ve been approved for Content ID can access the Content Manager CMS. This tool can save you time when managing large repositories of videos, assets, or collections of channels across multiple YouTube channels.

Some of the most powerful actions you can perform with Content Manager relate to managing Content ID assets. The CMS allows content owners to aggregate reporting across channels, and to set and apply policies across channels and assets. Here’s a comparison of both interfaces:

1. Channel managers can only access the Creator Studio: they can upload and edit content and can access YouTube Analytics for a single channel.
2. Content owners can access the Content Manager: they can be given access to assets, Content ID policies, and hard financials.

Invited Content Manager users may be permitted to perform (or may be restricted from performing) any combination of the following tasks:

1. Manage video uploads.
2. Add, remove, and change permissions for linked channels.
3. Manage Content ID claims, assets, and reference files.
4. Manually claim videos with Content ID.
5. Access Analytics and reports.
6. Deliver video, metadata, and references.
7. Set content owner-level settings, permissions, defaults, and manage users.
8. Access revenue data.
9. Perform bulk actions.

Key data analysis tasks that can only be performed through the CMS include:

1. Track asset performance to see how specific assets are performing, based on metrics like viewer engagement or ad revenue. You can filter assets by partner-uploaded or user-generated content to keep track of how much Content ID contributes to your revenue.
2. Track channel performance when you’re managing multiple channels through the Content Manager.
3. Make more powerful comparisons of videos, assets, channels, or groups. Discover your top channels, assets, or content categories.
4. Download reports to give your business the flexibility to adjust how you want to analyze your data. Large enterprises that prefer to conduct analysis in their own databases can download reports in CSV format, to analyze with SQL or present as spreadsheets.

Which task can Content Manager help content owners perform? Regulate intellectual property usage. Which is true of all the versions of a song you own the rights to across YouTube? Content Manager is an efficient way to provide access to data about many: Channels. Another upload solution that’s built into the YouTube interface is the Package Uploader. You have access to it from the Content Delivery section of your CMS or Content Manager. This method includes a simple drag-and-drop interface, which allows you to:

• Validate your metadata.
• Upload your media files.
• Deliver and associate your metadata.
• Process your package, which completes the delivery and gets the content onto your CMS.

SFTP and the Aspera Dropbox solution both give you the flexibility to manage content at scale by allowing your in-house content management system (CMS) to connect directly to YouTube. With both of these methods, you’ll need to create a CSV spreadsheet (all verticals) or a DDEX feed (music partners only) that contains all of the metadata associated with each video. And if you choose the Aspera Dropbox solution, which is a high-speed file transfer method, you’ll also need to purchase a license from the vendor.

What is a benefit of managing your content with SFTP or the Aspera Dropbox solution? Ease of scalability. Where would you go find the most accurate technical details about ingestion for YouTube?

• Creator Studio allows channel managers to monitor data for a single channel.
• Content Manager permits content owners to monitor performance across many channels—and, if they use Content ID, also set and apply default policies across all claimed content.
• YouTube Analytics in Creator Studio contains revenue estimates, useful for identifying trends or making projections.
• Final revenue is available through the downloadable reports in Content Manager, available as .csv files on the tenth of each month. These figures reflect end-of-month adjustments. Content owners can use these reports for accounting purposes.
• Sometimes a standout video can provide guidance. But, more generally, once you can determine how well content performs at the video level, you have a better basis for making recommendations around content, upload schedules, and creative strategies.
• Revenue by Channel – Analyze a single channel’s revenue with Content Manager’s downloadable reports to determine payments to that channel’s contributors or creators.
• Channels ranked by revenue”: If you manage a Multi-Channel Network (MCN) or track content across multiple channels, Content Manager can identify top earners—and help determine where there’s room to improve.
• Asset by usage: Once you’ve uploaded an asset and its references, YouTube’s Content ID system tracks third-party usage of that asset for you. Understanding the popularity of content you own, where it is watched, and by whom—especially when you didn’t upload the videos containing it—can provide insights around producing, supporting, or distributing content in the future. You may gain additional insights based on how frequently—and by whom—your content is uploaded to YouTube.
• Assets by Revenue: Beyond helping protect your intellectual property, Content ID can also help protect your assets so you can earn the most revenue. Use Content Manager to track revenue earned by your content across the YouTube ecosystem, regardless of uploader.

Break down the data

Metrics—the number of views, likes, shares, or comments your content earned—become even more powerful in combination with dimensions—qualitative characteristics of users, sessions and actions. You can investigate many metrics along dimensions such as geography, date, YouTube product, and more. For example, the Demographics report includes the metric “views” and the dimension “gender”—together, they can indicate whether more men or women watch your videos. As a content owner with access to Content Manager, you can perform all of those standard analyses, plus, you can:

• Manage multiple channels: look at aggregate metrics across all connected channels.
• Leverage Content ID: examine individual assets to get performance metrics both on your own videos and any user-generated content you’re claiming. Knowing where, when, how, and by whom your content is being consumed offers infinite opportunities to refine your offerings and your processes. Watch time provides the best insights into content consumption.
• The Watch time report could surface that one of your channels outperforms the others during a specific time period; or, compare time periods to one another.
• The Traffic sources report could reveal that two of your channels have similar audiences; consider cross-promotions, collaborations, or calls to action to boost both channels’ viewership.
• The Demographics report might surface a multinational audience, leading you to consider producing content in another language.
• The Audience retention report will reveal your most-engaging content; what facets of successful channels may be reproducible?
• The Devices report could help you determine which ad formats to display on which channel.
• The Playback locations report identifies websites that embed your videos to share with their audiences. If you get a lot of attention from a specific site, consider reaching out to its administrator and asking them to promote similar channels.
• What’s the name of the product that only content owners can access?
• What metric might you target to lift ad revenue? – Longer watch sessions

1. Know what question you’re trying to answer, or define the problem you’re trying to solve.
2. Look at your data to measure your baseline and benchmark where you currently are. From there you can determine whether performance improved or declined as a result of actions you took.
3. Decide how long to run the experiment, and implement adjustments to your creative or promotional strategies.
4. Once a meaningful period of time has passed, you can evaluate the success of your decision with data.
   
   

For example, if you’re trying to determine whether or not displaying non-skippable ads on your videos will increase revenue, first find out what your revenue and watch time has been for the last three months. Then enable the ad type. Recording a starting point can tell you whether or not they boosted revenue.Grouping data allows you to organize and aggregate information into more useful sets. If you want to compare how well a singer’s new track is performing compared to other songs on the album, you may want to create a group by album. If you aggregate all of her songs by album, you can then more easily find out how the new album is performing in its first week compared to her last three albums.

You can group assets by language or on-camera personality; topical groups, like football or skateboarding may help you decide whether to spin those videos out into their own channel. Apply asset labels to create groups, or manually aggregate groups in Analytics.There are several options outside of Content Manager with downloadable reports. You can pull CSVs into a spreadsheet, and use functions like “SORT” or “GROUP” to surface useful data. In a database language like SQL, statements like SELECT and WHERE can create manageable datasets by setting conditions that information has to meet in order to be included in a solution.

YouTube Analytics allows you to perform some basic analyses directly in the interface. You can manually aggregate groups of up to 200 assets, videos, playlists, or channels.

Compare information to determine causation

Data comparisons are a powerful tool. You can compare audience engagement with videos from different creators, compare channel performance over time, or compare revenue across assets. Comparisons are really good at answering common “why” questions:

• “Our newest anime makeup tutorial video is receiving abnormally low view counts compared to all of our previous anime makeup videos. What’s going on?”
• “May’s top-performing video dropped 90% in views in June: why?“

o identify similar videos that performed well in the past, compare the Traffic Sources, Playback Locations, and Demographics reports. In each of these three reports, specifically look for where data about the video you’re investigating is different from data for earlier videos to answer the following questions:

Answer complex questions

You can mix grouping, filtering, and comparisons to answer many questions about how well your content is performing. Check out these two scenarios:

• How is a singer’s latest album performing compared to their last one?
  • If the album name is in the Custom ID field or asset metadata, you can group (or filter) by album.
  • Or else, select each track from the album to manually create a group.
  • Then you can compare the two groups along performance metrics of your choosing: likes, watch time, or shares.
• Is more revenue coming from partner-generated content, or from user-uploaded versions of the same content?
  • Since there’s no revenue data in the Asset report, you may want to pivot or join on the “Asset ID” field that it shares with the Ads Partner Revenue Asset report to run the comparison.
  • Then, narrow down the amount of data you’re dealing with.
  • Filter to only assets associated with that specific artist.
  • To distinguish between who put the videos on YouTube, you can create two groups based on the fields “Video Uploader” and “Is Partner Uploaded.”

A singer represented by your company has released a single in a new market. Which answer best represents how you can benchmark its performance? Filtering and comparison. Can you compare pieces of information from two different reports?

Yes, when the reports share a field name. When is the best time to take a first look at analytics data?

Before making a change.

As a business on YouTube, to open up opportunities for maximizing your revenue, you’ll want to devote sufficient resources to copyright management. By doing so, you can protect your intellectual property and (if you have access to Content ID) effectively monetize user-generated content that uses your copyrighted material. If you have Content ID enabled for your business, we recommend completing the “Rights enforcement with Content ID” course.

Content ID claims

Content ID is an industry-leading copyright technology that provides rightsholders with new ways to manage and monetize their content on YouTube. Launched in 2007, Content ID compares videos uploaded to the site with reference files provided by rightsholders. Think of this as a digital fingerprint that Content ID derives from a source and then compares against potential matches.

When a video matches a source, it is “claimed”, and rightsholders can choose to make money from it; leave it up and track viewing statistics; or block it from YouTube. The majority of partners monetize their claims, but if you choose to block, we immediately block the video from being viewed and alert the uploader.

Copyright takedowns

YouTube complies with notices of copyright infringement pursuant to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and in line with the notice-and-takedown provisions of applicable national law. DMCA takedowns are formal, legal requests that require specific elements in order to be complete and actionable. The fastest way to do this is via our webform. We also accept free-form copyright infringement notifications, submitted by email, fax, and mail.

Remember to verify your rights and consider factors such as fair use or fair dealing before submitting a copyright takedown notification. You must include your contact information, signature, video URL, and other specific elements with your notification.

Content ID Claim

• You apply for access to the tool
• Scans an unlimited number of videos
• Immediate enforcement of policy
• No copyright strike for user
• Content ID system won an Engineering Emmy in 2013, cited as a “unique achievement that operates at unparalleled scale.”

Copyright takedown

• You must be signed in to complete the webform
• 10 URL limit per complaint
• Quick removal per DMCA/notice-and-takedown process
• Copyright strike for use

Copyright infringement—violating any of the exclusive rights granted by copyright—can have serious consequences. On YouTube, partners get one “partner strike” for every copyright strike issued to a managed channel. Repeated violations may result in the suspension of your YouTube partnership. From a legal perspective, if found guilty of copyright infringement, someone can receive substantial fines (up to $150,000 per work infringed in the U.S.). Violations of copyright law can result in other civil or criminal remedies. For these reasons, it’s essential to educate your teams about copyright and YouTube’s policies.

What is a key difference between Content ID claims and copyright takedowns? Copyright takedowns are official legal requests. If a user disputes a Content ID claim, which option is NOT available to the content owner in response? Retract disputeWhat happens if you release a claim during a dispute? The claim becomes inactive. Why should you monitor copyright strikes for all your channels? Why should you monitor copyright strikes for all your channels? Multiple strikes may impact a partner’s access to features. Did you know that 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? That’s more than 6 hours of video every second! Because of this vast scale, YouTube has invested more than $60 million in automated content management technology. And we work hard to ensure that rightsholders can make money from uploaded videos.

YouTube has paid out over $3 billion to the music industry—and that number is growing significantly year-on-year. Content ID scans videos uploaded to YouTube against more than 600 years of audio and visual reference content. YouTube has more than 50 million active reference files in our Content ID database.