We were hit last night as well. About 6 videos got the yellow $ icon. One was a birthday party (again for the second time), there were also the floor is lava and the learn colors with tape, and a toy hunt. I make it a point now to go into the videos tab and run through each screen manually every night in case they sneak a yellow $ in there somewhere. Like a thief in the night, you can not trust Yt anymore....
The thing is, most of our videos that are yellow $ for weeks or months still make income. Perhaps not as much as before, but still some. It seems they are flagged as not suitable based on whatever the criteria flagging them is. Some advertisers may not care about that criteria so those ads run. Most of ours that are flagged for a while have the 'pregnant' or 'give birth' tags. So that makes sense as some advertisers may not want to be associated with those topics, and some don't care. But once again it's not a blanket application, there are videos with the same topic and tags, one is flagged, the other is not. It's a fairly ad hoc implementation of whatever they are trying to implement. I heard someone say the Yt AI is equivalent to a 4 year old child, I think it's a 4 year old on an afternoon sugar rush at the playground.
The other thing is I have seen this "mass demonetization" you mention on a monthly basis. The last time was yesterday. Prior to that it seem to be every month for us. That's when a few to a few dozen videos get hit. We had what you describe (a mass casualty event of 100 videos) twice, once about a month after the adpocalypse started, then a month later. Those two mass demonetization events are when we lost most of the current top videos we have partially demonetized (the pregnant ones). I expect they will cycle through every channel at some point, since you are established and large, you could have been later in the lineup. The top 10 channels may get hit soon with their mass events, if they have not yet been, so the like of FFP, etc, may yet to experience this. it makes sense Yt started with small channels first, less to lose, then as they tune the demonetization algo, they hit bigger channels.
To finish off, the common thread I have noticed is to stay clear of all even mildly controversial spoken words, images, metadata. So no tie-up, kill, choke, chase, scare, poop, vomit, and the like.[DOUBLEPOST=1506574195,1506573828][/DOUBLEPOST]
I will say, though, that Youtube has been really good at helping us get things sorted out.
Can you elaborate who or which team in Yt you contact. Is it the creator support dedicated email? Is it via chat? Is it your Yt channel consultant? In my experience so far, all three of those have been either non-responsive or evasive. They were very nice before the adpocalypse hit, then the relationships all went sour overnight.