YouTube to Reward Partners Who Put Ratings on Content

YouTube announced to is U.S. partners today that it has recently rolled out its content rating system to all U.S. partner-uploaded content, and giving away a prize to the first ten  partners that add ratings to all of their content by the end of July.

"Now, when you upload a video that does not have a specified content rating (i.e. MPAA or TV rating), we ask that the partner rate content in these five categories: Language, Nudity, Sexual Situations, Violence and Drug Use. Our content rating system allows you to assign ratings to your YouTube videos either during the upload process or afterwards," saysYouTube's Mahin Ibrahim. "The ratings are reversible, meaning that you can change or remove them at any time if you feel they no longer accurately describe your content."

YouTube says it is doing this because giving advertisers more options means potentially more monetized content for partners. "The vision here is that we'll be able to offer advertisers better ways to match their ads to content based on your self-assigned ratings; accurate ratings that allow for a better content-advertising match can lead to partners like yourself making more money in the end," says Ibrahim.

The prize is a YouTube t-shirt and cap. To win it partners are asked to add accurate content ratings to new videos and go back to all of their old videos to add appropriate content ratings to them as well.