>>If you’re dependent on YouTube for making money from video content, that’s disastrous, as even a single strike against your YouTube account can limit the acco

>>If you’re dependent on YouTube for making money from video content, that’s disastrous, as even a single strike against your YouTube account can limit the account’s functionality within the site and impact anything from the length of videos you’re able to upload to your ability to monetise those videos with advertising. Always be very careful when your business depends on the free(AFAIK, uploading to youtube is free) services & regulations of some other company. I can't help but think of the stories on Facebook-platform/API dependency. That said, I still think it's bad how Google isn't a bit more careful when considering that, intentional or not, they now hold several people's livelihood in their hands. Semi-arbitrarily dropping sites' page-rank, marking sites as phishing attempts or messing with youtube-accounts' abilities to continue their business by some automation-script is kinda harsh. It's kinda like a guilty-until-proven-innocent thing where you just wake up one day and find your youtube-channel crippled. You're losing money while trying to contact Google and get everything straightened out. The fact that Google isn't exactly known for amazing customer service adds to the problem. I certainly don't expect Google to manually check all that content, but how about instead of immediate penalty... they send an email with a warning that action will be taken in 20 business days if alleged-offending content isn't removed. At least give the uploaders a chance to fix the issue or plan for an "outage" of sorts. Perhaps even for websites & youtube channels that are well known high-traffic & monetizing, Google makes sure to white-list them so they can never be auto-penalized without a human confirming. Instead, it just triggers an alert to all parties involved so people can look at it.