[awein999]

a more thoughtful post:

here's the 42k in context quoted from part of their statement:
'The Rule allows for civil penalties of up to $42,530 per violation, but the FTC considers a number of factors in determining the appropriate amount, including a company’s financial condition and the impact a penalty could have on its ability to stay in business.'

personally i have a video that has 3.2m views from 4 years ago with ads on it that is gameplay of a cartoonish game that has ~1,300 dollars of ad revenue accumulated with no other videos coming close. if they really wanted to go after me they could, but they wouldn't fine me 42k. they'd fine me a portion of 1,300 worst case scenario. but it wouldn't be worth their trouble. there are so many other people who make more who is more worth their time.

point being they aren't just going to go crazy on small time people who don't make a living from it. there will likely be people made examples of who are rich from youtube but would survive outrageous fines like logan paul or pewdiepie (logan paul is way worse than pewdiepie but pewds is the face of yt of grey area) etc. who will approach the 42k per video as stated above. those are extreme outlier cases and waving that number around without context is fear mongering.

if i made significantly more from youtube or was a regular content creator i would be very very worried. luckily for me this was never my livelihood. in fact i've never even claimed any of the money lol. personally moving forward i see no need to delete my yt channel but i won't monetize any new content i make because the sheer gray area leaves so much open to interpretation it's not worth the stress of seeing if pennies can be made from it on the side while it's done as a hobby.