If you read some news, stories or reviews on Popular Airsoft, or any airsoft related website, sometimes you will encounter that the embedded video that were placed on the page that is related to the story. In a lot of instances you get to click on the video to watch. However, these days you will see some embedded videos with this notice:

So you decide to click on it and then you get to see this:

Of course, you probably are very interested in watching the video so you click to sign, only to be greeted by this:

Well, ok you said, confident that you are probably old enough to watch this so you click to verify thinking that you just need to enter your birthday. But you’re wrong:

By this time, you probably give up, frustrated by the number of steps you need to do just to verify your age. It is a one-off thing that when you are verified, all you need to do is login and watch the age-restricted videos. But for people sharing ID or even credit-card details is something they closely guard, especially in the internet.

The reason this happens is when content creators, in this case airsoft content creators have made age restrictions when uploading a video. When uploading a video, they can indicate “It’s not made for kids” and for further age restriction, they have the option of limiting viewers to mature audiences (18 and above) and that’s where the need to the verify age of the viewer comes in.

The requirement for identification data such as credit card of government-issued ID is mainly a European thing:

For airsoft content creators who depend on revenues from their YouTube videos, the visibility of their videos when they put stricter age limits will be affected and thus, may also affect their revenues. There is also the possibility that YouTube algorithm may be flagging airsoft content to be age restricted.

Things are getting tougher for airsoft YouTubers on monetizing their content, most especially for those who made video content creation their bread and butter and not just a past time hobby. The new requirements may even make it harder for them to meet requirements to be allowed to monetize their videos such as the minimum number of subscribers and hours their videos have been watched. They can either have more patience and work harder or just give up on monetizing their videos altogether.