Editorial Standards

This page explains who writes the articles on YTGrid, how they are researched, what we will and will not claim, and how to tell us when we have got something wrong. It exists because writing about YouTube attracts a great deal of confident nonsense, and the least we can do is be explicit about our own limits.

Who writes this

Articles published under the YTGrid Editorial Desk byline are written and edited by the small team that builds and maintains YTGrid's tools. We are not a media company and we do not employ a roster of contributors; the byline is collective because the work genuinely is.

Our background is in building things for people who use YouTube as a working tool rather than as entertainment — first the multi-stream dashboard, then the looper, notepad, focus viewer and thumbnail grabber. The writing came out of that: the questions our users kept asking were about how videos are constructed and distributed, not about how our buttons work.

Where an article draws on a specific area of expertise we do not hold, we say so in the piece rather than implying authority we lack.

How articles are researched

• Platform behaviour is described from publicly documented mechanics and from consistently observable patterns. Where the underlying system is not public — which is often — we say we are describing a model rather than a schematic, and we do not dress up inference as fact.
• Techniques — hook construction, editing patterns, packaging analysis — are described from direct examination of real videos, using the same methods we recommend to readers.
• Commercial topics — rates, contract terms, campaign measurement — are written as frameworks for reasoning, not as market data. We do not publish specific price benchmarks, because they vary enormously by niche, region and year, and a wrong number does more damage than no number.
• Numbers we cannot verify, we do not print. If you see a percentage or a benchmark on this site, it is either illustrative and labelled as such, or it comes from somewhere we can point to.

What we will not do

• We do not promise outcomes. No article here will tell you how to get a million views, because nobody can tell you that. We describe mechanisms and let you decide what to do with them.
• We do not recommend anything that violates platform policy — no engagement pods, view manipulation, sub-for-sub, or artificial signal inflation. Beyond being against the rules, these things do not work, and we explain why where it is relevant.
• We do not republish other people's content. Every article on this site is written for it. We do not run syndicated, spun, or scraped material.
• We do not present opinion as measurement. Where a claim is our judgement rather than an established fact, the writing says so.
• We do not give legal, financial or tax advice. Articles touching contracts, disclosure rules or revenue are general information. Rules differ by jurisdiction and change; for anything consequential, consult someone qualified in your country.

Advertising, sponsorship and affiliate disclosure

YTGrid's tools are free to use. The site is supported by display advertising, which may include Google-served ads. Advertising is sold and served programmatically — advertisers have no involvement in, influence over, or advance sight of our editorial content, and no article is written to serve an advertiser's interest.

We do not currently run sponsored articles, paid placements, paid links, or affiliate links. If that changes, sponsored content will be labelled clearly at the top of the article and any affiliate relationship will be disclosed in the piece where it occurs — not buried in a footer.

Our articles link to our own tools where a tool is genuinely the fastest way to do the thing being described. Those links are always to free tools requiring no account, and we try to describe the technique well enough that you can do it however you prefer. If an article reads as though it exists to sell you something, it has failed and we would like to hear about it.

For details on cookies, advertising cookies and how data is handled, see our privacy policy.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. YouTube changes, our reasoning is sometimes poor, and some of what we describe is inference that may turn out to be mistaken.

If you find an error, tell us — a specific description of what is wrong is more useful than a general complaint, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all. When we correct something substantive, we change the article and update its modification date rather than quietly editing and pretending it always said that. Trivial fixes — typos, broken links — are made without ceremony.

Use of AI tools

We use software assistance in our workflow, as most publishers now do — for drafting support, editing and proofreading. Every article is directed, reviewed, fact-checked and edited by a human before publication, and we take full responsibility for everything published here. We do not publish unreviewed generated text, and we do not publish articles produced at volume to fill a keyword list.

How to reach us

Corrections, disagreements, requests for topics, or questions about anything above: get in touch. We read everything, and we reply to most of it.