YouTube’s Advertising Issues
YouTube is a video sharing platform that was originally developed for free users to upload content and share it with friends, family, or anyone else on the internet. Since its founding in the early 2000s, YouTube has grown in popularity and influence, and has changed how it interacts with its creators. YouTube creators were given the ability to have advertisements run on their content, and the advertisers would pay both YouTube and the creator for the right to do so. This resulted in many YouTube channels generating significant revenue flow due to attracting large numbers of viewers, and let some individuals and organizations create entire careers or networks on the website.
Due to the openness of YouTube’s platform, problems started to develop. Advertisers were alerted to their advertisements playing on videos that they considered to promote ideals that did not align with their brand’s values. Examples include videos promoting violence or racism, which for obvious reasons made many brands upset and some stopped working with YouTube. In 2017, YouTube responded to this issue with significant action, changing how their advertisement-assigning algorithm works. Content that YouTube’s algorithms determined to be unfriendly to advertisers began to receive fewer ads, or even none.
As we learned in class, advertainment auctions are run in many ways, and it is not entirely clear what exactly YouTube changed, whether it was artificially changing the values of the advertising slots on these videos or simple removing them from some of their advertising auctions, but the result was very significant. These videos were receiving significantly less advertising revenue, and YouTube would also suggest these videos to fewer users, possibly by changing how their pagerank algorithm and its “deep learning artificial intelligence” works as well, altering a key component of the social network (Berkeley).
These compounded actions resulted in what some news outlets refer to as the “Adpocalypse,” playing on the terms advertisement and apocalypse, due to the severity of the actions and how widespread they were. One of the significant reasons why the incident was so widespread was due to how loose YouTube’s algorithms appeared to be. They were reported to flag innocent videos such as workout instruction videos as unfriendly to advertisers possibly because the algorithms were unable to differentiate between the clean content and unsavory alternatives.
Other notable categories that were severely impacted by this situation were channels about LGBTQ topics or certain political views. While some companies may have not wanted their products associated with what some could consider controversial topics, there are certainly other advertisers who would value these specific advertising slots over others due to their target audience aligning with the topics of these videos. For example, if a video about second amendment rights and firearms were to have its advertising stripped due to a company promoting children’s toys not wanting to be associated with the topic, another company such as a firearms manufacturer would have certainly wanted to have an advertisement on that video and would have a high value for that slot.
There has also been talk of how this policy could potentially be hurting free speech, an idea championed by a creator named Casey Neistat, when his video covering a mass shooting was demonetized while network shows’ YouTube videos on the topic kept their advertisements. This raised further concerns as many began to wonder if corporations were somehow taking advantage of the various algorithms at play. It is unclear if there is any validity to this claim but there are worries that some companies could be paying YouTube to avoid getting their advertisements stripped by the algorithms.
YouTube has continued to adjust its many algorithms since the start of this advertising crisis, but many YouTube creators are still struggling. Even though it may seem like a relatively small change in an algorithm, because many were depending on YouTube as a source of income, the network creating a large issue. Hopefully YouTube will be more transparent about its actions in the future but for now many YouTube creators will continue to protest in an attempt to regain their source of revenue.
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