YouTube API Services Terms of Service - Revision History

This page provides a revision history for the following documents:

Subscribe to this changelog. Subscribe

Note that, in all cases, the legal documents themselves are the authoritative source of information.

June 18, 2019

The link to the form that you would use to apply for a quota extension, which appears in section D.3 of the Developer Policies, has been updated.

December 18, 2017

Section III.E.4.h of the Developer Policies has been updated to clarify that in addition to not replacing API Data with independently calculated data, you also must not access or use API Data to create new or derived data or metrics. In addition, the updated policy explains a requirement on API Clients to clearly disclose that any information, data, or metrics that are not based on API Data but that display alongside API Data are not from YouTube and are part of your own product.

February 10, 2017

The updated YouTube API Services Terms of Service and related documents such as the Developer Policies, which were originally published on August 11, 2016, now collectively constitute the effective set of Terms for YouTube API Services. The current set of Terms was originally published 180 days before it would become effective to ensure developers had sufficient time to review and comply with the updated set of Terms.

The Terms and related documents, such as the Developer Policies, have been updated so that they no longer mention old and new sets of Terms. To avoid confusion, the prior set of Terms has also been removed.

January 27, 2017

The following changes have been made to the YouTube API Services Terms of Service and Developer Policies that are scheduled to go into effect on February 10, 2017.

  • Section 23 of the YouTube API Services Terms of Service has been updated. The changes limit the length of time and circumstances when the non-assert provision in the Terms is applicable.

  • The following forms linked from the Terms and Developer Policies are now active:

    Document Section Form
    Terms of Service 25.9 Change of control
    Developer Policies III.D.3 Quota extension
    Developer Policies III.F.1 UI approval
    Developer Policies III.G.1 Commercialization approval
    Developer Policies III.J Report noncompliance

  • Developer Policies, section III.E.2.a has been updated to clarify the conditions under which you may aggregate API Data.

  • Developer Policies, section III.G.1.d has been updated so that the provision applies to YouTube API Data rather than YouTube audiovisual content. As noted in the Terms, YouTube API Data includes YouTube audiovisual content.

  • Developer Policies, section III.G.1.d has also been updated to not mention subscriptions, which are already covered under the restrictions in section III.G.1.b.

  • Developer Policies, section III.G.2.c has been updated solely to note that the restrictions in section III.G.1, particularly section III.G.1.d, are particularly relevant to that section.

August 11, 2016

The newly published YouTube API Services Terms of Service (the "Updated Terms") provides a rich set of updates to the current Terms of Service. In addition to the Updated Terms, which will go into effect as of February 10, 2017, this update includes several supporting documents that explain YouTube policies to help guide developers who are integrating YouTube API Services into their API Clients.

This update includes the following documents. All documents are in English unless otherwise noted.

  • The Updated Terms. Versions are available for the following regions and countries:

  • The Developer Policies explain policies that you need to follow when accessing or using YouTube API Services in your service, product, or application.

  • The Required Minimum Functionality defines minimum functional requirements for API Clients that implement or provide access to specific features of YouTube API Services. For example, API Clients that enable video uploads to YouTube must enable users to set a title when uploading a video.

  • The Subject API Services document identifies the Subject API Services discussed in section 14.3 (Special Terms) of the Updated Terms. The new document also explains how that section of the Updated Terms would affect actual deprecation dates for Subject API Services.

  • The Branding Guidelines are not a new document, but they will apply under the Updated Terms just as they apply under the current Terms.

  • This revision history and its accompanying RSS feed.

The following changes were made to a previous version of the Terms of Service.

In addition to these changes, there are a couple of other changes related to the current Terms of Service:

  • Section 7 (Deprecation) has said for a long time that, following a deprecation announcement, Google would use commercially reasonable efforts to maintain YouTube API versions and features identified at https://developers.google.com/youtube/youtube-api-list until the later of (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015. The text has been updated to remove the reference to the April 2015 date since any deprecation announcements yet to occur are certain to be after that date.

  • We have removed the set of Monetization Guidelines that talked about guidelines for building commercial applications. Those guidelines, which were originally written in 2008, contained references to features that were deprecated years ago as well as to sample implementations that were no longer relevant. The link from the Terms of Service to those guidelines has also been removed.