YouTube has a long list of terms and conditions and they are serious about it! If you don't follow their rules, you can lose your channel that you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into.
If you're just starting out on YouTube, that's great because it's going to be much easier for you to implement all of these things into your channel. However, if you've been around YouTube for a long time and produced a ton of videos, there may be a substantial amount of work involved to make your channel compliant with the long list of rules.
After reading this post, go through all of your old videos and take anything out that might not be allowed under YouTube's rulebook.
You might not have any issues when your channel is smaller. However, when your videos start to get more popular (like this video of ours), it's more likely that you're going to get a strike against your account. The reason for this is that more people are going to be seeing your video, which means more eyeballs to spot something that doesn't comply with YouTube's rules.
Don't use any content that's not yours
This one is pretty simple - if you didn't shoot a video, if you didn't play a song, or if you didn't take a picture, don't use it in your video! Unless, of course, you have a written contract saying you can use it.
YouTube's copyright hammer will come down hard on you if you're not careful. You might get a couple "Free" strikes against your account before they shut it down but it doesn't take a whole lot for this to happen.
If you're going to use a photo in your post, make sure you took the photo. If you want to use a funny clip from a Family Guy episode, don't. If you want to use your favorite Beyoncé song, don't - not unless it's you yourself performing it!
This includes background music. We, Tangerine Travels were just at a Vegan Festival in Guadalajara, Mexico yesterday shooting a video. Unfortunately, during some of the video, there was music playing in the background. It's highly unlikely that the music playing there was free for public use, so we had to do everything we could to drown out the sound of it in our editing process.
If you watch the video below, you may notice that our music is a little loud in some places. We didn't want to do this but we had to in order to avoid a copyright strike.
Let people know about affiliate links
If you have affiliate links either in your video description or within the video itself, be sure that you have a disclaimer. This disclaimer should be in the description of the video, or even in the video itself, but you should that they're affiliate links and that you may/will earn a commission if people click on them and make a purchase.
Properly source music and animations
I said above that you shouldn't use anything that isn't yours in your videos. While that is a safe advice to follow, there are websites and places online where you can get music and animations to use in your YouTube videos. Some places offer things completely free, others offer them free but with the catch that you have to give them credit in the video description, and there are plenty more who offer these services at a cost.
In this video of ours, the sources appear in the description like this:
This is not an exhaustive list of rules to need to follow but it is a start. Make sure you have these things in order on your channel otherwise you're at risk of permanently losing what you've worked so hard to grow. Stay tuned for part 2 where will touch on some additional things that you need to be aware of to avoid losing your YouTube channel.