I noticed something changed on my YouTube account a couple of months ago. It’s a new “Checks” feature, and it seems to have now rolled out on a wider scale. Essentially it’s a new step YouTube takes immediately after you upload your videos to check for any obvious monetisation or copyright issues. It’s likely the same checks they’ve always done, except they’ve taken the status report from behind the scenes to right in front of the user during the upload process. It happens within a few minutes and means that you can publish your content sooner without waiting for unknown wait times for copyright and monetisation checks.
The new checks happen when you upload your video, after the standard definition version of the video has finished processing. YouTube says that the copyright check takes about 3 minutes and the ad suitability check for monetisation completes about 2 minutes later. So far, for me, it generally seems to have been a little bit quicker, with both coming back a positive result within a couple of minutes.
YouTube does stress that it is still possible for your video to receive restrictions after it’s processed, gone through the upload checks system and made public. Manual copyright claims can still be made and you can still receive monetisation restrictions in the future if YouTube’s policies on what constitutes advertiser-friendly content change or if manual suitability checks spot something that the AI misses. You can find out more on the Google Support website.
