YouTube Finally Shuts Down Misleading, Established Fake Trailer Creators

For many people, YouTube is the place where they can see the first trailer for something, sometimes they waited a long time for a new trailer, other times they stumbled upon it. But there is a seedy side to the platform with people deliberately uploading fake movie trailers in order to gain traction and see themselves as a “concept” or “fan trailer”. The situation has only gotten worse with advances in the field of AI. People can just trick a video generator into tinkering with something and sometimes they can look half decent.

Earlier this year, YouTube demonetized two of the most notorious fake trailer makers, Screen Culture and KH Studios, following a Deadline investigation that analyzed how they produced their trailers without, at the time, indicating that it was a “fan trailer.” The videos largely copied the marketing strategy of several high-profile films. Screen Culture, for example, published 23 fake versions Fantastic Four: first steps trailers, some even surpassing the official trailer.

YouTube reinstated this monetization after they started adding that they are not official for titles with a “fan trailer”. However, they stopped doing it lately, and now it’s past the deadline that YouTube has had enough.

The channels have been officially shut down as they revert to citing their AI-generated videos as fan trailers, violating their policy on spam and misleading content. That said, just creating fan trailers using AI generation should probably be one of them, but that’s neither here nor there, as there are good fan trailer creators who make it clear that they are not part of the marketing team for the high-profile film they are making a trailer for.

In response to Deadline at the time, the KH Studio founder claimed he wasn’t releasing it to mislead viewers, but rather to entertain them.

“I’ve been running KH Studio full-time for over three years now, and I’m putting my all into it. It’s hard to see this lumped under ‘misleading content’ in the demonetization decision, when my goal has always been to explore creative possibilities – not to misrepresent real releases,”

Meanwhile, Nikhil P. Chaudhari, the founder of Screen Culture, claims that there is nothing wrong in their unofficial videos as most people know that Screen Culture does not share exclusive trailers obtained from official sources. The problem is that they combine official images with fake images designed only to game YouTube’s algorithm.