I don’t get this one.
A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted instances of prominent brands’ commercials being overlaid over questionable content.
Here’s the link to the original article
Ya know, to read the full article at the link above you have subscribe and pay ‘as little as a $1 a week‘. YouTube’s content is free. So, immediately I suspect based just on that mere observation that perhaps the Wall Street Journal had motivations to find fault with YouTube?
(Aside: I detest the Wall Street Journal for crimes against journalism and $1 / week is still too much to pay for toilet paper. I do far better at Costco.)
YouTube is aware of the problem and is constantly trying to keep some semblance of a level of quality before videos are monetized. The problem is that YouTube gets 1000’s of new videos per second and it’s virtually impossible to keep up with them all. They are now using enhanced artificial intelligence to determine the videos that contain questionable content. That’s probably the scariest sentence that I’ve ever casually written. I’m dusting off my copy of 1984.
Anyways, in response, many large clients pulled their ads from YouTube in fear of any appearances of impropriety.
In a snap decision that didn’t request or receive any youtube community input, YouTube unilateraly prevented monetization (displaying ads) on videos with less than 10,000 hits.
This has cut revenues Youtube-wide and has caused an uproar.
The solution is really, really simple.
All of you affected by the issue: Just tell your viewership to stop consuming the brands who pulled their ads from YouTube.
In the US, here’s the list:
AT&T
Beam Suntory Inc.
Dish Network
Enterprise
FX Networks
General Motors
GSK
Johnson & Johnson
Nestle
PepisCo
Starbucks
Verizon
Walmart
So YouTubers, there you have it. Is it fair to boycott these companies? No, but it doesn’t really matter because the boycott will last about 2 seconds as soon as these companies realize they are losing their target market.
“Boycott them on what grounds?” you ask. “They are infringing on my right to support myself while expressing my free speech.” If anyone retorts: “that’s not a right” you retort with: “who are you to determine my rights?”. If they say “it’s not even grammatically correct” just retort with “who are you to define my grammar?!” Trust me, it works. Just keep fomenting meaningless controversy, driving up the hit count until you win one way or the other.
Next, YouTube will panic in reverse that the punishment they’re inflicting on their under 10,000 hit crowd is making the problem far worse and now threatens to drive away even more advertisers.
Dollars is the only language you can use when speaking with these companies, YouTube included. It’s just a mild injustice to convince two competing idiotic bureaucracies to quickly play nice again.
Meanwhile, even as we speak, the YouTube (Google) engineers are coming up with the Hal 9000 computer (the one from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Oddessey”) to detect hate speech and it’ll work because Google is good at stuff. The problem is that we now have a computer that can detect hate speech. Could this algorithm also detect Democratic speech? Hateful against who? Hateful it what way? What is the error rate of this algorithm? Even if it’s under 5%, why should a discourse titled “Hitler was a dick.” be potentially lost to the world being flagged as profane and about a questionable topic? I’m using a simplified example but if you fall into that 5% category, what is being lost? The questions go on and on. I keep reaching for my copy of 1984.
But, we’ve solved the YouTube AdPocalypse.
Simple as that. I don’t get why this continues to be an issue?
I’m not making a video about this. I’m in a writing mood these days so forgive me for being quaint. It certainly doesn’t pay well.
“Read our blog about a possible solution to the Adpocalypse””
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