 Today, Machinima lays off employees and shuts down its Respawn channel, YouTube for Kids launches this week, and policy changes on branded content. Hello and welcome to YouTube News for February 25th, 2015. I'm your host Alex and I'll be walking you through some of the most important and interesting topics revolving around the YouTube platform. First up, YouTube network Machinima has laid off 13 of its production staff and has decided it will be closing down Machinima Respawn. For those of you who don't know, Machinima Respawn is a channel focused on Machinima's gaming partners, providing videos such as let's plays, friends play, montages, and a lot more gaming video content. Machinima stated that the content was simply not delivering monetization that it needed to be profitable and will switch to focus on different production that they feel will help Machinima grow in the way that they want it to. So farewell to Machinima Respawn, it's been a great five years. Next up, YouTube has finally released their YouTube Kids app on Android and iOS. The app focuses on providing simplicity and colorful design so kids can easily jump in and engage with age-appropriate and family-friendly content. There are also parental controls such as a timer, sound settings, and search settings. So way to go YouTube for launching this new app and I can't wait to see what new features you guys add later as you develop it more. And last up, there's been a lot of talk about YouTube and how they've changed their policy when it comes to branded content on videos. An example of branded content would be when a YouTuber plugs a company such as Audible or Squarespace in their videos for sponsoring them and generally they provide a link in the description for viewers to follow and sign up or buy that company's products. With YouTube's recent policy change, they no longer allow the placement of graphical title cards in videos without Google's approval first. So what that means is if a YouTuber is sponsored by a company and they put that company's logo or marketing materials into their video without the company first going to Google and paying them to advertise on that channel first, they are technically breaking the rule that could negatively affect both that sponsoring company and the YouTuber itself. It seems this new policy change was also one of the reasons that YouTube channels will be soon losing their 3 second intro feature since it was being used to advertise their sponsors. The good news is that there are reports of YouTube adding a 6 second product card to pre-roll before videos that will allow companies with sponsorships with YouTubers to present a quick endorsement message before the video plays and at the end of the day sponsorships and branded content aren't completely going away, Google is just changing how they work so that they get a cut of the revenue from the sponsorships that they feel they deserve. With that, I want to hear what you guys think on these changes. Do you think it's fair for Google to step in and demand to be paid for these sponsorships provided to YouTubers? If you don't, do you think it's fair for these companies to actually buy YouTube ads to not get as much of your time as the companies that are buying straight into YouTubers with their sponsorships and advertising? I'd love to hear your thoughts guys, throw it in the comment section down below and let's have a discussion about this. Anyways, that's it for me this week, tune in again next Wednesday for the latest in YouTube news. Thank you for watching. So with that in mind, I actually kind of want to plug a project that I've been working on called Beep. You may have heard of it. It's part of the Freedom Network and it's the freedom solution to provide our partners with a whole bunch of music, awesome music by the way.