Making a video site. Can you use youtube videos?

robertsz · Mar 17, 2014

I read the youtube site in regard to embedding videos within a website. Am I able to take a video off youtube and place it on my site? Are there any certain rules of thumb? I wasnt sure if there was any gray area to consider.

dcristo · Mar 17, 2014

Absolutely. In fact it is encouraged. Hence the reason they provide the video embed code.

vivid · Mar 17, 2014

There are some restrictions. One of the interesting points is that you can't use youtube videos for "the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions on any page of an ad-enabled blog or website containing Content delivered via the Service, unless other material not obtained from YouTube appears on the same page and is of sufficient value to be the basis for such sales.". Per my understanding, this means that when you want to monetize a page with their video embedded, you should provide something more useful to a visitor than just this video.

You can check there terms of service for more details.

robertsz · Mar 17, 2014

Do you think that an adsense banenr would be considered (advertising)?

vivid · Mar 17, 2014

I can't say for sure what Google would consider in this case, but I would answer Yes to be on the safe side. Anyway, this policy matches the Adsense one in terms of content quality guidelines, so it's better to add some original content.

4u-domains · Apr 21, 2014

Yeah, no problem.
http://ps4videos.com uses their videos. The best thing is that it is easy to use for people and has very little affect on your server bandwidth and space.

Charles Harmon · Apr 30, 2014

I hope there is no TOS problems using youtube videos and also having AdSense on the same page. I have lots of pages on different sites doing just that. But in each case there is other content on the page related to the videos.

And let me just say that if Google doesn't like it they will shut off the AdSense and won't tell you why. It's happened to two of my sites and those sites did not have youtube videos on them. I still have not got either site reinstated. So far, I've spent untold hours trying to find the problems on one of them. I gave up after two tries of getting it reinstated. So I created another site and moved about 150 of the same articles over to the new site and have had no problems since then over a year ago. It has AdSense on it.