Google introduces a tax for YouTube bloggers who receive income from American users

Not only the Russian authorities can tighten the screws. Already this June, Google is introducing a “tax on bloggers.” We are talking about rules that will oblige all owners of YouTube channels to make deductions in favor of the United States from the income received from American users. This will also affect Russians.

YouTube posted a video explaining the situation in detail. We have chosen the main thing from it:

• It’s all the fault of changes in US tax legislation. Google cannot ignore them because it is an American company;
• all bloggers who earn money from viewers from the States will have to pay taxes. Even if the content authors themselves do not live in the USA. Moreover, just American bloggers will not pay this tax (if they report their income on time);
• the tax will be collected only from the revenue that the blogger will receive from residents of the United States. At the same time, the source of income is not important. These can be ad views, YouTube Premium, superchat, superstikers and sponsorship;
• there is no way to bypass the innovation. The fact is that by the end of May, bloggers must specify tax information in their AdSense account. If this is not done, they will have to give Google 24% of all their revenue, and not just the revenue received from US residents;
• the tax is calculated separately for each channel. So if a blogger has several channels, then he needs to specify tax information for each of them;
• the amount of tax varies from 0 to 30%. The final rate will depend on whether there is a double taxation agreement between the country of the content author and the United States. Spoiler: Russia has concluded such an agreement, so it is possible that Russian bloggers will not have to pay tax. You will still have to fill out tax forms in AdSense, but there you can request to reduce the tax to 0%.

Recall that yesterday it became known about a similar initiative of the Ministry of Finance. Instagram Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have proposed to oblige foreign companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok to pay personal income tax for advertising revenues of Russian bloggers. They want to prepare this bill by mid-2021.