Advertisers ditch YouTube over predatory comments on videos of kids

[AlTech]

On 11/25/2017 at 4:16 AM, LinusTech said:

Floatplane. 

 

That is all. 

But what about the nontechies and normies which either can't afford or don't want to pay for floatplane?

[AlTech]

I swear Adpocalypse and now Adpocalypse 2.0 is just some rich executives being triggered and losing their minds.

 

And on YouTube, YouTube itself is selectively enforcing their rules which makes things even more awkward.

[Theorak]

Tinfoil thesis: What when YouTube profits more from harmful content rather then advertisers on friendly content?

 

Either way, this shit is awful and advertisers are in every right to leave a platform that cannot handle it's shit.

[Taf the Ghost]

21 minutes ago, Theorak said:

Tinfoil thesis: What when YouTube profits more from harmful content rather then advertisers on friendly content?

 

Either way, this shit is awful and advertisers are in every right to leave a platform that cannot handle it's shit.

YouTube makes the most from music videos in a Views vs Cost vs Ads analysis. Which is mostly YouTube's problem.

[LAwLz]

On 2017-11-25 at 5:16 AM, LinusTech said:

Floatplane. 

 

That is all. 

You heard it here first folks.

If you are a pedophile and/or want to violate children's privacy then floatplane is the go-to video streaming website!

[SpaceGhostC2C]

I think the bigger story around every episode of youtube demonetization, adsense turmoils, etc, is one about Google's mediated advertisement model and the alleged¹ advantages of ad targeting. The traditional "blanket" advertisement put the sponsors in control of where their ads are shown, and the sponsored in control of who advertise in their channel. To give an LTT example, Tunnelbear chooses whether they want their product to appear at the beginning or the end of an LTT video in particular and not in others, or in other channels. Similarly, LMG can decide whether they accept a sponsored video by Asus, or to show a Synergy clip at the end of their videos. There is at least the possibility of vetting ad placement and sponsors, respectively, and that explains the potential outrage from consumers about LTT accepting money from a particular company, or about sponsors financially supporting an "objectionable" video (from the outraged's point of view).

 

In the mediated model, sponsors can't possibly know where their ads will appear, and content providers can't possibly know which ad is being shown together with their content. None of them chose each other, and because of user tracking and ad targeting, whether the ad is shown at all or not will depend on who exactly visits the site. For example, I may visit a Mexican newspaper from, say, Belarus. If the Mexican newspaper is running google ads, I'll probably see a lot of ads from Belarus in the relevant spots. For all the newspaper knows, I could be seeing an ad placed by some Easter European neo-nazi group: the typical / intended visitor won't ever see it, so it would go undetected forever, because the ad for some reason would be following me around, but not the newspaper. The link between the content and the ad would only exist for me. Similarly, the people behind the ad may hate the idea of supporting said newspaper for whatever reason, but they won't really know either.

 

However, the PR risk for both advertisers and content providers is that the general public seemingly continues to attach full responsibility for the ad-content match to sponsors and content creators, and continue to rage at them whenever they have complaints about the match.

Now, if the situation would change to everyone blaming google, you may get more relaxed creators and sponsors, but the danger is big: while I may happily sponsor some contents that other dislike, and you may happily accept money from sponsors that others consider unethical or whatever, Google makes one-size-fits-all decisions for everyone. If google rejects money from sponsor X, no one gets it. If google decides content Y is inconvenient, no one's money gets there. It's easy to understand why Mattel may not want its ad to show next to the videos in this thread, but it is also possible to imagine some Kinky Fred Pervert's Store^TM to willingly pay to associate itself to the same videos. And that's when you realize it's not just a matter of Google doing its "due diligence", but a problem with the advertisement model itself. (The fact that there are no real, functional age restrictions on the internet is a different matter).

 

Perhaps we are waking up from the hype dream that Google and ad targeting "are the future"^TM, for everyone, and realizing that model may be suitable for some sponsors and content providers, but not all.

 

 

¹ The measurable impact of ad campaigns in general, and targeted ads in particular, is limited to ad interaction and, at best and only some cases, to immediate purchase responses. Identifying the impact on revenues, long term sales, brand-building, etc, is beyond reach even for Google or the companies placing the ads themselves.

[Taf the Ghost]

@SpaceGhostC2C

 

To an extent, however this is not the first time YouTube has had this issue. YouTube has a "kids" section, which means they need both systems and paid censors. This isn't a hard issue to crack. There's clearly people working hard to game the system, but this particular set of videos had been around for a while and reported by a number of different but smaller groups. It was only when it came to the attention of people with a bigger media profile that suddenly things get done.

 

As I mentioned back in the thread, this isn't a set of videos with 150 views that were probably all bots anyway. And their excuses won't fly when most channels outside of their political perspective have pretty much all gotten demonetized. (Most of the Right and any of the anti-Corporate Left have all been removed from the platform.) And their systems are now sensitive enough to grab single f-bombs late in a video or a single clip of a violent videogame. 

 

The "best" situation I can say for YouTube in this entire issue is that their human-side management has failed pretty badly. Which is pretty much YouTube in a nutshell. Everything gets worse from there.

[dtaflorida]

I'm pretty happy with this. I really don't mind ppl working out advertising deals into their video like LMG rather than rely on google completely. 

 

What I'm especially happy with about this is that people can't say google is censoring them. They got no money to give, now we see who's just in it for the money grab and who really just does it to express their views. 

[Taf the Ghost]

https://news.vice.com/story/youtube-kills-ads-on-50000-channels-as-advertisers-flee-over-disturbing-child-content

 

The numbers in the article are brutal.