YouTube and Planetside 2 Videos

There's a saying going around. If you talk over the footage, it's like.. 60% your content or something. Just turn it on and see what unfolds.

You're not a partner, you can just monetise your videos. I had the same message to me when I was allowed to monetise my content. 139 subs and 100k~ views isn't really partner worthy.

It's like, 25% or less of your content. The only time footage can be used without permission is under fair use. Fair use includes critique (reviews), news, teaching etc. Talking over extended periods of gameplay generally does not fall under this.

What you have to remember, if you took away the footage, how entertaining is it? Also, youtube does not allow monetisation of audio (albeit not very strictly), such as music, unless accompanied by a video of some sort.

Good luck getting "fair use" to work even if you put commentary over the entire video..... I had more than 70 percent of the ads pulled off of my BF3 footage BEFORE i was partnered...

Then you should understand that Fair Use does not apply to commentaries. There is a set criteria for it.

I think the best advice people have given here basically comes down to "make good videos for free until you get enough subscribers." That is pretty much the only way to do it. Unfortunately, joining a network is a must due to some very draconian copyright laws, unless your content with making *nothing* but Minecraft videos.

I make a few videos every now and then, but I would never consider making a career out of it. It's mostly just silly montages that I make just because I enjoy it. Far too lazy to jump through the legal hoops. Good luck to anybody who wants to pursue it as an actual career.

In answer to the question, I doubt any old Youtuber can monetize Planetside videos. People who have are going to be people who expressly gained permission to do so. If you have some interesting content related to PS2 that you want to monetize but aren't part of a network, it wouldn't hurt to try and contact SOE.

Here's your answer:

Read more at

Much appreciated, can't wait till this change comes through.

Smedley told me personally monetizing Planetside 2 videos is completely fine. The videos on my channel are all monetized minus the streams Higby and others did that I recorded.

This was done by email? I would like to be told the same thing.

Any word on this?

I know this thread is a tiny bit old, but after wondering about this I contacted SoE support asking about monetization and today got a reply saying that it had been approved.
I'm assuming this means we're allowed to do so.

Another point to add is that you are able to monetize videos if there is commentary along with it. You can't take, for example, 10 minutes of gameplay and monetize it. If you take 10 minutes of gameplay and are talking about features or how to perform some tactics or otherwise be creating content with it, as opposed to the content being a recording of SOE's game, then you are fine.

But as others have said, sites like machinima have agreements with game publishers/developers to take care of that. Some games don't need it. For example, Blizzard allows full monetization of all World of Warcraft videos. So in any test video clips I'm not adding to/creating content with, I use recordings of World of Warcraft.

I just noticed the post above mine. That is fantastic news.

Good news, hopefully we can see an official update on this soon.

any new official news on this? still dont really have a good link or anything in writing that I can show Youtube to allow them to monetize my stuff.

As for the viabilty of monotizing youtube videos of games without being a direct network partner:
Cough: http://www.youtube.com/user/DarkLinkWP Cough.

Admitetly, I can"t speak for the specifics as we have not done Planetside 2 or any SOE game, and sometimes we are not allowed to monitze stuff.(Castlevania Part 1 and 7 are examples) but that is about 7 vids from 400 and while the yt system has a few videos marked as using copyrighted material we have no actual copyright strikes.

Though most of our views and as such money comes in from brony fanbase games rather then big companies, but we have a few larger games on the chanel.