Tax Form Updates for YouTube Partners & YouTube "Hype" Under Fire

Transcript

Last week was the “made on YouTube” event. We already discussed the announcement in our Q&A stream, in case you missed it—feel free to check it out! There’s another update though: As a product expert, I receive pre-brief information, which means I get details about the event beforehand. These can, of course, still change, and that’s exactly what happened here. The “Hyp” feature, which was originally planned as a free action for viewers to rank videos, was supposed to be usable three times a week. That’s all good so far.

But YouTube has now left open the possibility for viewers to buy additional Hypes. Hypes would then effectively have a monetary value for the corresponding Creators who are hyped. You can now view this positively or negatively. If I want to support a Creator, I can also do that through Super Thanks, Super Chats, or Super Stickers. But it turns a fundamentally good, free feature for everyone into a “pay-to-win” function, in my opinion. If I can simply invest money to get hyped by 50,000 people and then be at the top of the playlist or leaderboard—I don’t know if that’s a good idea. But feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Let’s move on to our next topic: Taxes or tax forms for our YouTube partners who have been around since 2021. Those of you who are familiar with this already know the so-called W8BEN form (for natural persons) and the W8BENE form (for legal entities). These US tax forms need to be filled out in Germany. I can only speak for Germany at the moment and can’t look at your individual cases. I’m not an accountant, so I can’t help you directly with this. I can only describe my own situation.

Of course, for natural persons, it’s the W8BEN form, and for legal entities, it’s the W8BENE form. These expire after a certain period, and the first batch who filled them out in 2021 now needs to resubmit them by December 10, 2024. Get your paperwork done! There is a tax treaty with the US and one with Ireland, known as double taxation agreements. If you pay taxes in Germany, you don’t have to pay additional taxes in these countries. You can find more information about this in the video description.

Please check if you live in Austria or Switzerland—there are likely agreements there as well. But I’m not familiar with them, so please ask your accountant. Or generally, ask your accountant for such topics. If you say, “I want to figure all this out myself and don’t need an accountant,” then I’ve also provided some informational material below where you can check what you need and what you don’t.

Important: You must include a certificate of residency. For natural persons, a copy of your ID card with your address on it is sufficient. That means if you’re in Germany and state on the form that you live here, are a citizen, and pay taxes, you must be able to prove it. Your ID card usually covers this.

For legal entities (LLCs or Ltds), it’s not as simple because they don’t have an ID card. In this case, you need to fill out a form for a certificate of residency for double taxation agreements, Form 034450. You can get this from the Federal Finance Administration’s form management system (FMS) and submit it to your local tax office. But it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

You first need to go to the corresponding website, which I’ve linked in the video description. Then navigate to “Businesses > Double Taxation > Certificate of Residency” or “Certificate of Residency Form.” There you can fill out your information. Important: You might think it’s only one page, but it’s a government tool and is accordingly designed to be confusing. You have to manually click on page 2 to see the second side. Please fill out both pages; otherwise, your certificate of residency will not be issued.

I explicitly don’t want any questions about this topic in the comments because I’m not allowed to answer them anyway. Please ask your accountants. And if you’re still so arrogant and think you don’t need an accountant to fill this out, then please do your own research. It’s just an administrative matter.

Recent Changes Regarding Community Guidelines Violations

There’s an interesting development regarding community guideline violations: Normally, you can appeal YouTube’s decision to apply age restrictions or remove content (also known as an “appeal”). Currently, however, a test is being conducted where creators have the opportunity to adjust parts of their videos that would result in age restriction or removal directly in the YouTube Studio Editor. This means you can cut out content, blur it, or make other necessary changes.

This process is intended as an alternative to the appeal procedure. When you edit your videos, you essentially admit automatically that there was a violation of the community guidelines. That makes sense, right? Please keep this in mind when making changes: You won’t be able to appeal after editing, at least not during this current test phase.

Ideally, of course, you wouldn’t have any violations of the community guidelines at all. As responsible creators, you should pay attention to this. Thank you for watching! If you have questions about YouTube topics (excluding taxes), feel free to leave them in the comments. See you next week for more YouTube updates!