Youtube are consistently inconsistent. As much as I admire some youtubers and think making short films would be a great way to make a living, I am so glad my income is not dependent on the increasingly arbitrary whims of google.

For example, Brady Haran of Numberphile made a video about "derangements", a concept in combinatorial mathematics. Fairly dry stuff unless you're a math geek. YouTube flagged the video and even when he submitted it for "manual review" it was still deemed inappropriate for advertisers.....

although the problem has apparently since been resolved. Nothing to do with Brady also having an immensely popular podcast where he complained about it, I'm sure. (For the record, Hello Internet is awesome!)

To be honest, I did not expect them to be as open a platform as they were for as long as they were.

Once the platform had enough content that was interesting to enough people out there to make it a noticeable alternative to "old media", it was clear that it's only a matter of time until the corporations buying the ads had to choose between TV and YT, since TV "news" was going down. So they did. Bam, no more business model for news and political/religious commentary on YT. Good luck getting commentary on war crimes in Jemen or apartheid in Israel monetized.

And now that so many content creators get their income through Patreon, it'll be interesting to see how long Patreon remains neutral.

TLDR at 5:10

"It's just about control and politics and money"

Youtube's policy as succinctly put as possible.