On May 31, 2019 Twitch streamer and content creator Jaime Staples broke the news that several of his gambling content YouTube videos were removed from his channels overnight.
At first, two videos were missing related to his My Ultimate Sweat Challenge where he was giving away a seat into the PokerStars Players’ Championship in the Bahamas in January of 2019. This number ballooned to a staggering 150 videos out of around 1,000 total in just a couple of days. Staples currently has one ‘strike’ from YouTube against his channel.
“The strike means you can’t upload (videos) for a week, and if you get three strikes, you’re out,” Staples told PokerNews.
According to Staples, YouTube sends out an email giving the channels an alert when they’re getting a warning or a strike. The email essentially lays out the Community Guidelines that were violated to merit the strike, and identifies the video in question that is linked to the violation. Staples has two YouTube Channels, PokerStaples and Jaime Staples, and has one strike on each channel as of today.
Poker pro and coach Evan Jarvis woke up on the morning of June 1 and found he had one strike against him. He didn’t think much of it and carried on with his day. By the evening, Jarvis had a second strike and that’s when he began to worry. “Am I gonna wake up and have a third, or a fourth?” asked Jarvis.
Jarvis had a series of YouTube videos scheduled for release this week during the World Series of Poker and those plans have been halted. Now, a total of 100 videos have been removed from Jarvis’ channel titled Team Gripsed Poker Training – Evan Jarvis, which has almost 70,000 subscribers to date.
Both Staples and Jarvis have submitted appeals for the strikes against their channels and they are hoping to leverage the community to come to a solution. They are getting pulled because of their connection to a gambling site.
On Tuesday, the poker vlogging community got the personalized response they were seeking from YouTube, and overall that interaction appears to have been productive. Staples tweeted about the feedback he received, explaining that he was informed that links to gaming sites in the video descriptions are in violation of YouTube’s TOC policy.
As suspected by some content creators, channel owners should have gotten a warning and an opportunity to remove the links to get their videos in compliance. According to Staples, they will be getting that chance moving forward, and a chance to get their videos back up.
“So my videos will be reinstated and their team is working on speaking with the YouTube poker community affected so that they have time to fix the offending content,” Staples shared on Twitter. “It doesn’t appear as if YouTube has an issue with poker content at this point but that could always change in the future. It is recommended that all content creators avoid putting links to gaming sites in their descriptions.”
Any poker YouTubers with gaming links in their descriptions are advised to get out in front of the issue and remove them immediately. Considering how grim the situation appeared to be for poker content creators on YouTube just hours ago, this development seems to be the best the community could hope for.
Read more about the crackdown on gambling content YouTube at the Poker News
