YouTube publishes a contest policy and almost nobody running a giveaway on it has read the thing. It is not long and it is not onerous, but it asks for specific wording — and it has an opinion about the format most YouTube giveaways use.
The sentence it asks you to include
Your official rules have to say that YouTube is not a sponsor of your contest, and they have to include language releasing YouTube from any liability connected to it. This is the same shape of clause Twitch and Meta both require, and for the same reason: a platform hosting your promotion does not want to be mistaken for running it.
It also asks you to link to the Community Guidelines and to state that entries which do not comply with them are disqualified, and to include a privacy notice explaining what you collect and what you do with it. And the contest must be free to enter — which is the same leg that causes trouble in general consumer law, arriving here as a platform rule as well.
The rule that catches the popular format
YouTube prohibits using a contest to manipulate engagement metrics — views, likes, subscribers. That is a problem for the single most common YouTube giveaway there is: like the video, subscribe to the channel, and comment to enter.
Whether a specific giveaway falls foul of it is a judgement about intent rather than a bright line, and plenty of channels run that format without incident. But it is worth knowing that the format is in tension with the policy rather than blessed by it, and that a channel relying on it has built its giveaway on the thing the policy names.
The practical alternative costs almost nothing. Let people enter without conditions, and ask for the subscribe afterwards — to an audience that has already engaged once, which converts better than the version where it was the toll. A subscriber who joined to enter a draw is also the least durable kind you can get: the unsubscribe comes the week after the winner is announced, and the channel is left with a number that moved and an audience that did not.
What the rules have to contain regardless
Beyond the platform’s requirements, a prize draw open to the public generally needs to say who can enter and from where, any age limit, when entries close, how the winner is chosen, and who is running it. None of that is YouTube-specific; it is the baseline anywhere.
The one that catches streamers out is eligibility. Stating that a giveaway is open to a country is not the same as enforcing it, and most tools — including ours — display eligibility rather than blocking anyone. If shipping constrains who can actually win, check at the point of awarding rather than assuming the entry form handled it.
SarahStreams
is giving away prizes
Friday night giveaway
Prize
Steam key · Elden Ring
YOU WON!
Steam key · Elden Ring
If you don't claim in time, the wheel spins again.
Official rules
No purchase necessary. Open to entrants 18+ worldwide. One entry per person.
Entries close when the streamer starts the draw. The winner is drawn at random on stream. The winner must claim within 2 minutes or the draw is repeated.
Prize: Steam key · Elden Ring. Promoter: SarahStreams.
This is a promotion by SarahStreams. Twitch does not sponsor or endorse this promotion and is not responsible for it.
Generated from this giveaway's settings. Not legal advice.
The comment-picker problem
The other thing that makes YouTube giveaways awkward is how winners get picked. The default method is a comment picker — a tool that pulls the comments off a video and chooses one — and it has two failure modes that arrive together.
The first is that comments are not a clean entry list. People comment twice, people comment something unrelated, people comment after entries closed, and the picker cannot tell the difference. The second is that nobody can check the result: the tool ran on your machine, against a list only you saw, and the output is a name you read out.
That is survivable until someone accuses you, at which point you have your word and a screenshot. The fix is not a better picker — it is entry that produces a list with a boundary, and a draw that can be recomputed by somebody who does not trust you.
Live versus uploaded
Worth separating, because the two have different problems. A giveaway on a YouTube Live stream can be a moment: a code on screen, entries arriving while you talk, a draw the room watches. A giveaway attached to an uploaded video runs for days, and its entry route is whatever the description says.
The policy is identical for both. The practical difference is that the uploaded version is the one where like-and-subscribe entry is most tempting, because there is no live moment to carry it — which is exactly the case where the engagement-manipulation rule is most obviously in play.
Where the rules should live
Not in the video description alone, which is collapsed by default on mobile and is not where somebody who is about to enter is looking. Put them on the page where the entry happens, and mention in the video that they are there.
If you run the giveaway with Kloot, the rules are generated from its settings and appear on the entry page on every plan — eligibility, the age limit, how the winner is drawn, who is running it. What it does not write is YouTube’s own release clause, because the only platform-specific disclaimer it generates is Twitch’s. Add YouTube’s wording alongside rather than assuming it is covered, and say in the video that the full terms are on the entry page — one sentence, and it is the sentence that makes the rest of this reachable rather than merely written.