Knowledge Bank
3 min read
Disclosures and the 30-second self-check before you publish
Paid promotion needs disclosing properly, and a quick guidelines self-check saves a strike. The honest, plain-English version of the boring safety step.
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If a video has a sponsor or a paid promotion in it, that needs saying clearly, both to your viewers and to YouTube. And before it goes live, a 30-second once-over against the community guidelines catches the accidental rule-break that could otherwise cost you a strike. Neither is glamorous. Both protect the channel you are building, which makes them worth the two minutes.
This is general guidance, not legal advice, and the exact rules differ by where you and your audience are. The principle holds everywhere though: if money or free product changed hands for the mention, be upfront about it, plainly and where people can see it.
Disclose paid promotion properly
Two things, together, when a video contains paid promotion:
- Tell the viewer in the video. A clear spoken or on-screen line when the sponsored part comes up. Not buried in the description, not a vague aside. People should know when they are being sold to.
- Tick YouTube's own box. Mark the video as containing paid promotion in the upload settings. That switches on YouTube's own disclosure and keeps you on the right side of its rules.
The same honesty applies to affiliate arrangements and free products: if it influenced the video, say so. Audiences are far more forgiving of disclosed deals than of ones they later feel were hidden, and the trust you keep is worth more than any single sponsor.
The 30-second guidelines self-check
Quite apart from sponsorship, give the finished video a quick mental pass against YouTube's community guidelines before publishing. You are not being paranoid; you are catching the honest mistakes: a copyrighted song that slipped into the background, a claim you cannot back up, a thumbnail that oversells past what is allowed, anything borrowed without permission.
Most strikes on small channels are accidents, not intent, and almost all of them were catchable in the half-minute before publish. The check is cheap and a strike is expensive, so the trade is heavily in your favour. If something feels borderline, pause and check rather than gambling the channel on it.
Why this protects more than one video
A channel's standing with YouTube is built over time, and it is fragile in the way trust always is. A clean record means a missed-call here or there gets the benefit of the doubt. A history of strikes means less room for error and, eventually, real consequences for the whole channel. The self-check is not about this video; it is about keeping the account that hosts all of them healthy.
Where Chewbr fits
Set the disclosures is step 33 of the 47, the protective step near the end of packaging: paid promotion, affiliate links, altered content, and who the video is made for. The guidelines and copyright side of the check gets its own step immediately after it, at 34. Both are boring on purpose and both earn their slot, because the cheapest problems to fix are the ones you catch while the video is still private.
Keep reading
Disclosures done, set the time it goes live: scheduling your upload for when people are awake. The reason any of this pays off over time is money, which is where sponsorships for small channels comes in.