Early last week Nintendo announced the Nintendo YouTube Creators Program, which is an attempt to reign in the advertising dollars YouTubers are able to make off of Nintendo’s hard work. There are several popular YouTubers who have commented that the revenue share program is stiffling and does not benefit the content creator, but the most recent announcement from the program will likely have more people agreeing.
According to Nintendo, the Creators Program will only accept channels that are 100% dedicated to featuring Nintendo products. That means if your channel started off as a Minecraft channel and then you started showing funny bits from Super Mario 3D World a few years ago, your channel will be ineligible for this program until you remove the Minecraft videos. In fact, the channel cannot have videos from games that are not whitelisted in the program’s requirements. That severely limits the scope of channels that will be able to benefit from this program. Here’s the full statement from Nintendo:
“If you have already submitted your channel for registration and it includes video(s) that contain game titles outside of the list of supported games, please remove those videos from your channel within two weeks of the submission date,” the company writes. “If the video(s) are not removed from the channel within this time, your channel will not be registered with the program. You may resubmit your channel for registration at a later date.”
If you’ve already applied for the Creator’s Program, you’ll need to delete any videos that aren’t on Nintendo’s whitelist. This is a pretty limiting measure on Nintendo’s part, but it’s a legal measure to make sure Nintendo isn’t profiting off of another publisher’s work. Either way, the limited scope of the program means those dedicated to Nintendo all these years will be the ones impacted most by the decision, as they’ll either have to join the program or be forced to deal with copyright complaints against their channel.
