YouTube has recently had many of their advertisers contact them and complain about seeing their ads on very inappropriate content. This inappropriate were things like Nazi related videos or ISIS videos, with ads like Coke or Disney shown before them. This has created a big event known as the "YouTube Adpocalypse". Complaints about adpocalypse came when creators were seeing that their videos were making little to no ad revenue. Many of these videos lost anywhere from 30%-99% of ad revenue. Creators were mad because some videos they thought were appropriate were being demonetized. For example, "Military Arms Channel" complained that they lost almost all their revenue because they made videos of gun reviews.
Many of YouTube's largest creators such as Pewdiepie, Phillip DeFranco, and h3h3productions have all strongly criticizing YouTube for doing this, and the way they did it. YouTube has responded but their reasoning didn't please too many people. YouTube really has no reason to worry about losing their creators or audience because there is no good competitors out there. This is a big deal that tells YouTube and everyone else that there could be a potential problem here. This raises big questions about what YouTube and their users have to look forward to in the future.
Creators are scrambling to try and find out what to do, because they were making enough money from ad revenue to make YouTube their full time job. Many creators are being forced to change their styles to be more kid-friendly content and a lot more reserved. This has ultimately brought people to complain about YouTube censoring their creators by not making videos with explicit language monetized. Since YouTube is the biggest video sharing platform, they are paving the way for all other websites and social media sites like them. Ultimately, people fear that the whole internet will be censored because advertisements are the main source of revenue for many sites out there.
This is a very good point, and something that I've thought about too. I've really kept up with YouTube news, and this is some scary stuff. As someone hoping to break out into the platform myself, it can be quite scary knowing that the rules are constantly changing. Good article!
ReplyDeleteIt's really an interesting issue right now! The entirety of Google AdSense has left creators of restricted categories no choice but to resort to external payment methods from fans... and even those that aren't restricted. Surely we'd expect YouTube to proactively try to bring it back to what it was for their own benefit and creators', but the future is uncertain.
ReplyDeleteI did a project on this topic a couple weeks back, very interesting and also troubling to hear. When I asked my classmates if they thought it was an issue, they all said no because they don't even notice youtube ads at all, let alone watch extremist videos. I think its wrong that big companies arent getting what they paid for- but should they even be paying for ads to run on youtube in the first place?
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