YouTube red play button logo with foregrounding flames.
YouTube Adpocolypse heats up / Image credit: YouTube | Xycron

The YouTube adpocalypse has begun and some channels are going up in flames…figuratively.

For the last half-decade or so, YouTube's ad revenue option has allowed thousands of reviewers, un-boxers, gamers, make-up artists, cultural critics and just about anyone with an opinion to reach millions of people, and for the luckier few, make a pretty decent living out of it. It has also been a mutually profitable and symbiotic relationship, allowing advertisers to put their products in front of millions, as YouTubers rambled on and screamed about some video game they don't like.

But the wild west was eventually settled and so, too, was YouTube. Back in March, a number of major advertisers began complaining about their ads being placed on videos that were deemed, well, unmarketable. Among them were propaganda materials for extremist and terrorist groups like Hezbollah, as well as some of the edgier content from vloggers who have learned to thrive on controversies, like PewDiePie's now-infamous "Death to All Jews" video.

Hilarious and as that may be to some, major agencies decided that they no longer want their clients' car or cell phone advertised next to a terrorist propaganda video or jokes about the Holocaust. In turn, they boycotted the site. Looks like the days of advertisers finding genocide funny are over. 2edgy4u?

And so major players who ran branded YouTube channels for such clients such as McDonald's, Toyota, AT&T, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Verizon and Walmart began their mass exodus, and inevitably, many YouTubers at the top of the food chain felt the burn. Google, facing a projected revenue loss of up to $750 million in the aftermath of the boycott, began demonetizing videos without opening the doors for appeal. At the time of the boycott, Philip DeFranco, an influential social media critic on YouTube, claimed he expected as much as 80% of loss in ad revenue, before bouncing back to about 30%. Welcome to the “adpocalypse.”

Several YouTubers, such as h3h3productions and Jenna Marbles complained that a handful of their videos had been flagged without notification or or chance of appeal.



As a result, complaints from YouTubers and advertisers, alike, caused YouTube to rethink how to keep everyone happy. After all, what's the point of giving people a platform like this if you can't also advertise a cross-fit video. So they came up with a list of guidelines that allows brands to opt-out of specific videos they deem inappropriate. They simply check off whether the video "tragedy and conflict," "sensitive social issues," "sexually suggestive content," "sensational and shocking" and/or profanity and rough language and the video gets flagged with a little yellow icon that keeps the YouTuber from monetizing the video.

In a recent blogpost, YouTube said:

"We’ve heard questions about why the monetization status is applied so quickly after upload (including with unlisted and private videos). This is because in the first few hours of a video upload we use machine learning to determine if a video meets our advertiser-friendly guidelines. This also applies to scheduled live streams, where our systems look at the title, description, thumbnail and tags even before the stream goes live. We know our system doesn’t always get it right, so if you see a yellow icon in your Video Manager and feel our automated systems made a mistake, please appeal. As noted above, an appeal gets sent to a human reviewer and their decisions help our systems get smarter over time. Deleting the video and re-uploading won't help."

However, not everyone gets the human touch of the review. Google and YouTube have promised that, through machine learning, they can automate the process. Only videos that are generating a significant amount of traffic will be given the personal attention that almost every YouTuber would want.

"Because we’re a platform that has hundreds of millions of videos, we have to set parameters around which appealed videos get reviewed first to make sure we review those videos that are getting substantial traffic."

More experienced the same issues as before. YouTuber Florian Wittig, one of the producers of the Great War channel, an educational account dedicated to videos about World War I, weren't even given a reason for the flagging--they're simply demonetized.

Obviously, the Great War channel falls under the guidelines YouTube has laid out, but because it's left up to machines, the line between offensive and educational can blur. As a result, Wittig and his team have jumped ship to Patreon, creating a personal subscription service for revenue, instead of relying on ads.

For YouTubers, the "adpocalypse" is just beginning, but for the rest of us, who know what the future holds. For what becomes of YouTube when all the creators leave? Where will we turn for our daily fix of ASMR, covers of "Toto" by Africa and videos of other people playing video games? Could the adpocalypse be the beginning of an apocalypse? Who will scream “what’s up, guys” at us? Hard to say what the future holds, but be sure to sound off in the comments below.


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Comments 26 total

Insane_Buizel

I got a feeling that this is a 1984 scam to hide away people's opinions and let companies get THEIR videos viral and control everyone's minds

0

AL2009man

just let that sink in for a moment.

4

A Guy You'll Never Know

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the message was lost;
For want of the message, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

0

The Christmas Pyro

So, does the revenue blocking include Redtube YouTube Red? If not, they really need to push it more. Especially in other countries.
Patreon is not the solution, YouTube has to make money too, whether you like it or not

0

The Glorious Lobster Emperor

At this point, why doesn't someone just make another online video viewing service thing…

DailyMotion doesn't count.

0

lecorbak

DailyMotion is dying more and more everyday.
The only ones outside of youtube that look at least decent that I know are Rutube and NicoNicoVideo.

-1

Uboa

>Google and YouTube have promised that, through machine learning, they can automate the process.

boi don't let 4chan hear you, they might, you know, teach those machines how to appreciate distasteful stuff which i would gladly witness

4

Penultimate Keyboard Cat

Automatic learning is easy to defend against mob spam by just placing basic parameters that the machine cannot use even if it learns about them.

It's like giving your kids the talk.

1

james_w

the good news is the jump from being an attention whore to just a regular whore is not that far…

0

RemChi

So basically…

Everyones fucked…

Mostly because of shitty algorithm.

6

Megadog

An Elon Musk is worried about AI killing us all.

We don't even need the I, apparently. We won't be killing by machines far more intelligent than us, we'll be killed by bots that are too stupid to realize that not everyone is a terrorist or a nazi.

3

Evilthing

If Youtube had become like that from its inception, it would have been much easier to switch to alternatives.

0

Duke Bruh

So basically Youtube allows only content that gives a great amount of views regardless what it is.
Great,looks like it's officially becoming what we all feared the most,TV.
Remember when people chose Youtube over TV,because you had an amount of content and type of videos that you don't see on TV.This is what made it special.

Now all you get is drama upon drama,things that you could easily watch on TV and sometimes it's even worse.
Now you can't even make what you want without the system screwing you over even if your respecting the rules and you're not harming anyone ,because better give space to modern E-Celebrities who are by far some of the most despicable
individuals that you can be possibly think of.
This is as original as you can get these days,from creators that are not big corporations.

I miss the days when the worst problem was Google+.

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