May 29, 2019 • 45 mins
What was the YouTube adpocalypse and why did it happen? Is another on the way? And where do creators turn to when their careers are at stake?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love
all things tech. And one thing I do a lot
of these days but actually planned to reduce in the
(00:27):
future is that I watch a lot of online web series,
particularly on YouTube. I watched series about video games, pop culture,
film criticism, and vlogs a s MR Videos. I watch
a lot of stuff on YouTube, and one thing I've
seen a few times is how YouTube's monetization policies can
(00:48):
have a really big impact on the channels that I watch.
So today I want to talk a bit about the
business side of YouTube and how things have changed for creators,
particularly fairly recently. Now to understand what's been going on,
it's good to think of the story involving three major
groups or factions. First, you've got YouTube itself. This is
(01:12):
the publishing platform that enables users to share their videos
and have those videos paired with advertisers. YouTube takes a
percentage of the ad fees generated by videos, and generally speaking,
at percentage is pretty high. You know. You might have
heard that Apple in the iTunes store takes something like
thirty of all apps sales that goes to Apple itself.
(01:36):
YouTube does better than that for them, they do forty,
so nearly half of all the money generated by a
video goes to YouTube. More in that later. Then you've
got the creators. These are the people actually making the videos.
They run the range of no budget creators who rely
heavily on their own appeal to attract viewers, or upon
(01:59):
acular strategy for the type of content that they provide,
and it goes all the way up to highly produced
videos from established studios. If the creator meets a certain threshold,
they can choose an option to monetize their videos, which
allows YouTube to pair those videos with ads. A change
in monetization policy can have a dramatic impact on a creator.
(02:21):
And the third group or faction would be the advertisers themselves. Typically,
these are ad companies with many clients that offer up
different goods and services, so you'll have a dozen or
so ad companies that represent hundreds of different brands. Rarely
will such a company like McDonald's or Levi's interact directly
(02:43):
with a platform like YouTube, but it can happen more frequently,
they will rely upon a third party advertising firm to
hash all this out, And so the business of YouTube
depends upon these three prongs working together. The more views
a monetized video gets, the more it earns. Longer videos
can also have mid role ads, which creates a revenue
(03:04):
generating stream for creators and for YouTube itself. For that reason,
the platform began to encourage YouTube creators to make longer
videos a few years back. This was in stark contrast
with the early days of YouTube and which most videos
had a hard ten minute limit for running time. You
couldn't go beyond that. These days, YouTube would rather have
(03:24):
longer videos that encourage more activity on the platform, meaning
that after someone watches one video, they're likely to watch another. Now,
I didn't include viewers in those three prongs because we
don't have quite as much to do with the business
side of it. We generate the views that pull the
levers on those advertising dollars, but other than that, we
(03:45):
don't really have much involvement in the business. That stuff
lies more with the platform and the creators. Now, let
me give you a quick rundown on the history of
monetization on YouTube. So we can kind of understand where
we came from and where we are now. When YouTube
launched in two thousand five as an independent service before
it was part of Google, there was no monetization on
(04:07):
the platform. Now that changed in August two thousand six,
when YouTube launched its first ad concept, called participatory video ads,
along with brand channels. Brand channels are exactly what they
sound like, channels that are owned by specific companies and
meant to act as a type of marketing towards customers.
So you could have Nike having a Nike channel, for example.
(04:31):
The participatory video ads would appear in the upper right
corner of the screen among video choices, so you could
think of the right rail having a list of videos,
and the top one would be an AD, but there
are others would just be other YouTube videos. So YouTube
had yet to introduce a method for content creators who
(04:53):
weren't representing brands to monetize content. The only money that
was really going anywhere was going to YouTube. Google Goal
purchased YouTube for more than one point five billion dollars
in October two thou six, just a couple of months
after the rollout of this initial ad strategy. A year later,
YouTube launched in video ads. This would be August two
(05:15):
thousand seven. Instead of a commercial running before or during
a show, these were overlay ads that were flash based
and appeared on top of the video, so the lower
twenty percent part of a video could have an ad
appear after fifteen seconds of the video had already played.
The goal was to make the overlay transparent and to
(05:36):
have them run for only around ten seconds, so you'd
have a little message upp here on that bottom that
would somewhat obscure that portion of the video and would
be an ad for something. Again, YouTube restricted these ads
to run on content from a select group of partners,
and individual content creators were generally not eligible for this. So,
(05:59):
in other words, if you were Joe Schmo and you
were creating your own vlog and it was getting a
good following, you still weren't eligible to uh to have
ads run on your your videos. In December of two
thousand seven, YouTube launched the Partner program, in which individual
creators could apply to become partners, which would enable advertising
(06:20):
on their videos. It did require that they meet certain criteria.
We'll talk more about that a little bit later. By
November two thousand eight, YouTube would launch pre roll ads,
making videos more like television programs. Pre roll ad is
just what it sounds like, you have an ad that
runs before the video that you've selected to watch. But
YouTube ads work a little differently from television ads. See
(06:43):
on TV, and advertiser pays for a specific time slot.
Advertisers might say I want to run an ad during
this sporting event or during this show. On YouTube, Google
can target ads to people who appear to have interests
that align with particular brand. By analyzing user behavior, Google
can predict which brands will resonate the most and match
(07:06):
those up to a viewers experience. So, rather than Coca
Cola saying I really like those let's play videos, put
us on those, it's Coca Cola saying, show us to
people who really like soft drinks. And this would end
up being part of the problem because there's a whole
lot of folks out there who likes stuff like soft
drinks who also like to watch some pretty questionable content,
(07:28):
and thus Coca Cola's ads would show up against stuff
that maybe Coca Cola wasn't so crazy about. Now, at
this point, it became possible to actually make a living
off of YouTube if you were just a regular person,
if you were a creator with an engaged, large following,
you could conceivably have enough views to earn decent money,
and eventually this would grow beyond decent money to a
(07:51):
metric crap ton of money if you were one of
a few mega popular creators. As still sort of the
wild West at this point. You two grew largely as
an alternative to classic television services, and in the earliest days,
people were uploading a lot of copyrighted work that would
land YouTube in hot water with various publishing companies, particularly
(08:12):
music labels and movie and television studios, But that gradually
gave way to more user generated stuff, which is what
the platform was envisioned as. Now. It's interesting to point
out that in the early days of YouTube, a lot
of the popular videos were unauthorized uploads of more traditional media,
because if you go to YouTube today, you're going to
(08:34):
see a lot of authorized uploads of that same sort
of traditional media up on YouTube. So everything comes full
circle eventually, and here's where we run into the first
points of friction. YouTube is primarily a publishing platform. The
company does produce some of its own content, but it's
mostly known as being the place where creators can publish
(08:57):
their works, so YouTube is the video store, not the
studio producing the videos. Generally speaking, the video producers developed
their own voice, their own style, their type of content.
They find what works and they build an audience on that.
Some content creators do music, some tutorials, some do let's
play videos, some do scripted works like sketches, and some
(09:21):
incorporate pretty edgy material in their videos. Or sometimes they
might include intentionally offensive material knowing that controversy will result
in more views and that results in more money. Now,
initially that benefits YouTube because YouTube only makes money as
videos earned views, So as those videos rack up the views,
(09:43):
advertisers fork over more cash and YouTube takes that healthy
slice of all those revenues. Now. One example YouTubers pointed
to as a problem of this kind of philosophy, this
idea of YouTube being totally cool with controversial material as
long as it was bringing money in was a channel
(10:05):
that was run by Mike and Heather Martin. The couple
created a series of videos in which they would pull
what they called pranks on their young kids, but others
saw these pranks as borderline or sometimes beyond borderline abuse.
And it was this that the parents were profiting from.
In other words, they were mistreating their children, at least
(10:26):
in the eyes of these critics, and they were using
that as a form of entertainment through which they were
making money. Um Rose Hill, who was the biological mother
of two of the children in the Martin household says
that she had been flagging videos as being in violation
of YouTube's standards as early as October two thousand sixteen,
(10:46):
and yet little appeared to be done about it. YouTube
did not seem to take any of the videos down
or demonetize them or anything. It was only after the
channel made the news and a massive negative backlash mounted
against the Martins that things seemed to be set in motion.
It reinforced the perception that YouTube was loath to move
against a creator that's getting a lot of views because
(11:07):
those creators are a healthy source of revenue for the company. So,
at least initially, there's very little incentive for YouTube to
do anything about offensive or questionable content if it's driving views,
because that would hurt its revenue. But then we have
the third point of that triangle, and I'm going to
use a lot of different metaphors for things with three components.
(11:29):
Maybe at some point I'll use tricycle. The third part
is the advertisers. Now, advertisers are understandably sensitive about the
types of content they run ads against, the association of
the advertiser with questionable content could be harmful for the brand.
Protecting a brand is an important part of advertising. So
(11:49):
if a soft drink company executive suddenly finds out then
add for their company's flagship product is running against a
video that contains racial slurs or hate speech, calls for
violent or other objectionable material, there's a good chance someone's
about to get fired. So we've got YouTube and creators
pushing the envelope and driving lots of views to videos
of questionable content. This powder keg just needed a spark
(12:12):
to set it off. The spark first arrived in late
two thousand sixteen, and the powder keg blew in February
two thousand seventeen. That's when advertisers began to take note
that their ads were running against videos that had hate
speech and extremist content in them, particularly in the UK.
The advertisers, in an effort to protect their clients and
mitigate the fallout of such associations, began to pull ads
(12:36):
from YouTube. Their main objection was that they had no
control over what types of videos could run their ads,
and so they could end up being associated with ideologies
and messaging that was in conflict with their public image.
And that was just the beginning. I'll explain more in
just a second, but first let's take a quick break.
(13:01):
I mentioned before the break that advertisers were pulling their
spots from YouTube. They represented some really big clients, including
Coca Cola, The Guardian, Johnson and Johnson, and the Government
of the United Kingdom. Their move began to create sort
of a domino effect, and one domino to fall was
a reassessment of Google itself. Analyst Brian Weezer moved Google
(13:26):
stock from a buy recommendation to a hold recommendation based
off the February two, seventeen scandal. He pointed out that
Google had quote a serious issue in the UK with
brand safety issues end quote, and that they could end
up devaluing the company. Now. Suffice to say, this was
(13:46):
a lot of incentive for YouTube to do something about
all this. One high profile case where YouTube did act
involved Felix Kilberg, better known by his screen name as
Beauty Pie, Kilberg published a video that showed two men
holding up a reprehensible message written on a sign and
(14:06):
I'm not going to repeat it here. This prompted Disney
Maker Studios, which had been producing Pautie Pie shows, to
cut all ties with the creator. YouTube canceled a YouTube
red series called Scared Pauti Pie. YouTube Read is a
subscription service that, in return for a monthly fee unless
you watch videos without ads and view special content. Just
(14:28):
for those subscribers, Google removed kale Berg from the preferred
premium ad tier as well, which cut back how much
he could make on his videos. It was a pretty
pretty extreme punishment. UM, I don't know if it was
completely unwarranted. I have some pretty strong feelings about it
in general, but there were other YouTubers who felt like
(14:49):
that was a particularly harsh judgment against another creator, and
other people said no, he got exactly what he deserves.
So it kind of runs the gamut. Now. I've placed
a lot of the responsibility for how things have shaken
out at YouTube on the platform and the creators, but
I want to make it clear that advertisers were also
(15:10):
somewhat responsible, with some pretty bad choices of their own.
In April two thousand seventeen, PepsiCo had an ad featuring
Kindall Jenner handing over a can of Pepsi to a
police officer during a protest. This was at the height
of the initial protests in the Black Lives Matter movement,
and so PepsiCo was widely criticized for trying to exploit
(15:31):
a social movement for the purposes of advertising a soft drink.
Pepsi would pull the ad after just a few days,
including pulling it from YouTube. The move of a major
company pulling more advertising from YouTube fueled even more companies
to follow suit. Even without the public image issues that
Pepsi faced. The sudden departure of numerous big money advertisers
(15:53):
prompted YouTube executives to make some pretty hasty and broad decisions,
leading to what was called the ad PoCA lips. Now essentially,
YouTube effectively demonetized any channels that were not considered to
be family friendly, but the definition of family friendly was
left rather vague, and YouTube began to rely heavily on
(16:14):
algorithms to determine whether or not a channel's content qualified
for the tag family friendly or not. Now, to be
fair to YouTube, the company had little other choice than
the hand things over to an automated protocol. Today, around
four hundred fifty hours of video are uploaded to the
platform every single minute. The site racks up a billion
(16:37):
hours of you time every day. With that much content
being added every minute, it's impossible to put human beings
in charge of vetting all of it and making sure
none of it contains material that violates YouTube's policies or
will upset advertisers. For that reason, the company has developed
programs that try to do that automatically. Part of this
(16:59):
depends upon the metadata that's connected to the videos in question.
A metadata is data about data, so YouTubers build out
metadata like tags and descriptions so that their videos will
show up in search results. That way, when you pop
into YouTube search and you're searching for a specific thing,
like the other day, I search for Gauntlet to play
(17:21):
through because I was feeling nostalgic, then it gives you
the results that are relevant. It helps boost the video's
visibility and makes it more likely that people will find
the video. And since you only make money if a
lot of people are viewing your stuff, it's important to
include the information and your metadata. If you don't your
(17:43):
video is not likely to be seen by very many
people at all, so the algorithms look for the tags
that could indicate whether or not a video contains objectionable material,
and again, the term objectionable isn't terribly well defined here.
YouTube did create a checklist for advertisers in an effort
to win them back, and the checklist would allow companies
(18:05):
to select the types of material they did not want
their ads to support. Categories include stuff like profanity and
rough language or sexually suggestive content, which is stuff similar
to what you would see in a film's m p
A A rating description. But there were other categories as well,
such as tragedy and conflict or sensational and shocking that
(18:27):
raised questions and it could mean that people doing valuable
work in fields that need coverage would find themselves without
a means of earning enough money to pay for production costs.
And you do painted with a pretty broad brush. People
who had never had an issue with demonetization found themselves
hit hard by it. YouTube pointed out that the company
(18:50):
had an appeals process that creators could follow if they
felt that their work had been unfairly targeted, and there
were a lot of people who definitely felt that way.
For example, people advocating for human rights for people in
the LGBTQ community saw some of their videos demonetized, and
the message seemed to be that their goal, that of
(19:11):
extending human rights to a vulnerable population of people, was
somehow not add friendly or it was taboo, which is
a pretty crappy message to get. It reinforces the idea
that the world is against you when your video series
that's all about trying to extend human rights to people
is demonetized because the people in question somehow fall into
(19:36):
a category that isn't advertiser friendly. Uh. It's dehumanizing, really,
And that's just one example of the types of videos
that were targeted. YouTube was seen as being overly cautious
in order to appease the advertisers that were pulling out
of the platform, and the appeals process wasn't exactly a
(19:56):
smooth one. Creators who had a flagged video would get
a notification that their video was in a sort of
limbo in which it was not currently counting towards monetization,
but an appeal could, in theory, overturn that, and the
flagging process was based on machine learning, which also meant
that the appeals process was effectively part of the training
(20:18):
model for the system. You have a computer system that
identifies what it believes to be a video that has
objectionable material, It flags the video. The videos immediately demonetized,
and then by appealing the decision and having a human
go over the result and either uphold it or overturn it,
(20:38):
you train the machine learning model. That's great if you're
doing it in a lab, but when you're doing it
out in the real world, where it's actually affecting people's
ability to earn money, it's less great. So the content
creator was meant to send an appeal request, and in theory,
that would push the video to a human staffer at
(20:59):
YouTube whose of it was to manually review the video
to see if in fact the demonetization was justified. That
was the theory. However, that could not really work in
practice because the number of videos being uploaded each day
and the number getting flagged would have made that almost
as impossible as having humans view all the videos in
(21:20):
the first place, and so YouTube put in some additional rules.
Appealed videos would only go to human reviewers if those
videos had more than one thousand views in the most
recent seven days, or if you had a subscriber base
of at least ten thousand people, then a human would
review a flag video even if it hadn't yet met
(21:40):
the metric of one thousand views in seven days. Besides
the fact that YouTube was having to deal with an
enormous number of appeals, the company also wanted to make
sure it was addressing the concerns of the big earners first,
the most popular channels on YouTube. Many videos performed best
in the short term after uploading to the site, no
(22:01):
big surprise there. Right a new video goes up, people
flocked to it. There are fan bases who eagerly anticipate
the next video or episode, and so you see the
vast majority of activity hit those videos right away. YouTube
wanted to prioritize those videos over ones that might get
a lot of views over a very long span of time,
(22:21):
you know, the sort of stuff that tends to do
well on search. It might be more evergreen, so the
earnings month to month may be low but consistent. So
if I did a video that was sort of a
how to guide on something that would remain relevant for years,
I might not have a ton of traffic to that
video on any given month, but I would have consistent
(22:42):
traffic throughout the whole run of the lifetime of the video. Meanwhile,
someone else who's posting a new episode of a web series,
they're going to see the vast majority of activity on
their video in the in the near immediate fall health
of uploading it. So those first few days are critical
(23:03):
for those kind of series. And worse, there was a
growing concern among creators that this would mean a really
big drop in revenue, since the time they need monetization
would be shortly after the video goes live. So if
you upload a video, algorithm decides its objection it's got
objectionable material in it, flags it, and then you're not
(23:25):
You're demonetized and your video is just now live. It
could be the sweetest spot to earn money, and you
can't earn anything because you've been demonetized. The longer you
your video spins in limbo, the more money the creators
would lose. And as for older videos, there was a
concern that creators wouldn't even see that those had been
(23:45):
demonetized because all the focus would be directed towards the
latest videos that they're posting, So older videos typically don't
earn a ton individually, but collectively they can still act
as a pretty healthy source of revenue. So if you're
a creator who has been active for several years and
you have a big back catalog of videos, you might
have a decent amount of money coming in from views
(24:07):
on those videos, And if an older video suddenly becomes
relevant again for some reason, you could stand to benefit
from that. But if it's been demonetized, you never see
that money, and there's a good chance you wouldn't even
know about the demonetization because your focus is on what's
going up next instead of what you uploaded years ago.
This pushed many creators to consider leaving the platform altogether.
(24:30):
Some looked at alternatives like Twitch, where they can live
stream and use in platform features as a means of
earning money. Others moved to Patreon, in which users could
pledge a recurring amount of money to the creator, either
on a scheduled basis such as a monthly payment, or
on a per upload basis. But these methods meant the
creators had to rely upon fans who were able and
(24:52):
willing to pay for something actively. They were only passively
paying for earlier asked in the fact that they were
watching ads as opposed to actually handing over money to
view videos. Now, if we are to believe some of
the top creators on the platform, the initial fallout was
pretty dramatic. Phil DeFranco said add earnings on his channel
(25:15):
fell by eight percent following the flight of advertisers, though
by mid April those earnings had leveled out to a
thirty percent drop from the average. It's still not great, obviously,
but better than others stated less extreme drops in revenue,
but a lot of people said, yeah, it took a hit.
Making things worse was an overall feeling that YouTube wasn't
(25:37):
very good at communicating out the changes to creators or
explaining how their work was falling into one of these
categories that advertisers were opting out of, or presenting a
sort of best practices approach so that they could make
certain their work wasn't being demonetized. There seemed to be
a lack of communication on YouTube's part, which made the
creators feel truly abandoned. Then things got really crazy. I'll
(26:02):
explain more after the break. In late two thousand and seventeen,
yet another YouTube controversy made headlines. This time it was
all about how several channels creating videos ostensibly for children
(26:22):
had bizarre, disturbing, and sometimes blatantly inappropriate material in those videos.
They inhabited YouTube Kids, which is a standalone app and
it's marketed as a safe space for kids entertainment. The
idea was that you, as a parent or caregiver, could
download the app on a mobile device, hand that mobile
(26:44):
device over to a kid, and feel safe in the
knowledge that the child was only going to see family
friendly content through that app. The general belief was that
YouTube would have a system in place to block any
material that didn't meet the app's family friendly standards, but
that's not what happened. Some people made really disturbing videos
(27:07):
using popular characters to lure kids into watching popular trademarked characters,
a lot of them Disney characters, and tricking kids to
watching them, and these videos were trending. They were popular
enough so that they were showing up on related videos
or recommended videos when kids were watching other stuff, and
kids tend to watch a lot of stuff, and they
(27:29):
will often watched the same thing many times, so these
videos were racking up views, which meant more ad dollars
for YouTube. Now the videos were getting flagged. There wasn't
much activity to show for it, not much response from YouTube,
at least in the early days. But then these stories
broke about these videos and YouTube had another pr disaster
(27:50):
to deal with. This is the same year when the
apocalypse thing had started, so creators throughout their hands and
essentially said they're preventing us for making money while you're
also allowing this kind of stuff to go on on
your kids app. It wasn't a good look. It made
YouTube look like hypocrites. Now. Adding to that scandal was
(28:13):
one in December two thousand and seventeen when Logan Paul,
who was is an extremely popular YouTuber. He had really
made his fame on Vine and then when Vine closed down. Uh,
he had already done some stuff on YouTube, but he
managed to kind of leverage his popularity over to YouTube's
platform anyway. In December two thousand seventeen, he posted a
(28:35):
video that showed a hanging corpse in it. Uh. Logan
Paul was walking through an area in Japan known as
the Suicide Forest and encountered this corpse and caught it
on video and uploaded it. The video received millions of views.
It ended up trending on YouTube. It became the focal
(28:56):
point for a huge blowback from the YouTube community. Here
was a video that clearly violated YouTube's policies. Numerous people
had flagged it for review. YouTube didn't remove the video.
Logan Paul or someone on his staff removed the video,
but YouTube, the platform, seemed to do nothing, and that really,
(29:20):
in many people's minds, cemented the idea that YouTube's rules
didn't apply to people if they were at a certain
level of success and were seen as the future of YouTube. Moreover,
advertisers didn't pull their spots from Logan Paul's videos, which
seemed to suggest that it was the financial aspect of
the platform's rules that matter, not the ethical ones. So
(29:44):
there's a lot of blame to go around here. Advertisers have.
They have some of the blame, a lot of the
blame because while they reacted strongly to Beauty Pie, they
did not react strongly to Logan Paul, and so YouTube
was given a very strong incentive to react to the
Pauti Pie scandal by punishing Pauti Pie. But because the
(30:06):
advertisers didn't freak out, YouTube didn't have a whole lot
of incentive to uh, punish logan Paul because they were
making money. No One, no one on the let me
give you a check side of the equation was complaining.
Video viewers and other content creators were complaining. But since
(30:27):
they're not the ones handing checks over to YouTube at least,
as is the way the argument goes, YouTube just didn't care.
One thing YouTube did do, though, was to restrict its
Partner program, which allows content creators to opt into monetization
in the first place. This is the criteria you have
to meet in order to be considered in a part
(30:49):
of the partner program. So you have to meet these uh,
these requirements first before you can actually join. Before the
new restrictions were put in place, the general rule was
that a channel had to hit ten thousand views to
qualify as a YouTube partner across the channel. So if
you had a thousand videos and they each had ten
(31:12):
views each, you hit ten thousand views, that's It may
be that you only have ten people watching, but you
still have ten thousand views across your entire channel. That
would be enough for you to qualify as YouTube partner
under the previous rules, but the update changed that. They
changed it to four thousand hours of watch time over
(31:33):
the previous twelve months, which clearly favored longer videos over
shorter ones, since you could create very short videos and
rack up ten thousand views relatively quickly. But if you
have short videos, accumulating four thousand hours of view material
would take a lot longer. If your average video is,
you know, two minutes long, just getting an hour makes
(31:57):
mean that you have to get a whole lot of
views on that one video. But if your average video
is an hour and a half long, then it doesn't
take as many full views to hit that four thousand
hour water mark. Now, in addition, a channel would need
to have at least a thousand subscribers before it could
be considered for the Partner program. Existing channels that had
(32:18):
previously qualified for the Partner Program under the ten thousand
views rule but had not yet hit the four thousand
hours one thousand subscriber benchmark would end up being demonetized.
So there were people who had been qualified under the
Partner program previously, they did not get grandfathered in when
(32:39):
these changes were made, they were affected to Now YouTube
claimed that of those affected by these changes them were
making less than a hundred bucks a year on videos
that it was a very small amount of money that
wasn't being paid out and therefore was not having a
meaningful impact on people. Fast forward to February two thousand nineteen.
(33:04):
That's when Matt Watson, a former YouTuber, posted a video
showing that there was a disturbing trend on the platform
in which Skivie people were uploading videos showing kids doing
just stuff like nothing bad, just kids being kids. But
in the comments section, people were posting time stamps of
(33:27):
specific moments of the video that, out of context, would
sexualize the content, and that was where the huge issue was.
Watson demonstrated that YouTube's recommendation algorithm could quickly pull up
one of these videos, and he started with a bikini
hall video in which a woman was showing off bathing
(33:49):
suits she had purchased, and using only the recommended videos
that appear alongside the one you're watching, Watson quickly navigated
to a seemingly unrelated video of a young girl playing
in two clicks, and the comments were full of disturbing,
awful content that was enabling some truly hideous behavior. Watson's
(34:12):
point was that YouTube's algorithm was actually facilitating this sort
of behavior, making it easier for predators to seek out
each other and the content they wanted. The Verge ran
their own test after seeing Watson's video post, and they
used his methods, and they found that it took at
most six clicks to get to one of those videos
(34:35):
from the recommendation page, so they would start with a video,
and it found that if they just followed enough times
that being at most six, they would hit on one
of these. While Watson was adamant that he didn't want
another apocalypse and that he still had many friends who
were dependent upon YouTube for their living, he did want
(34:56):
something done about this problem, and he urged people to
reach out to the advertisers whose ads were being displayed
against this sort of content to have that content or
to have those ads pulled, because he was concerned that
YouTube wasn't going to do anything. So essentially he was saying, hey,
did you know that the ad for your product is
(35:18):
showing up on videos that are sexualizing children and don't
you think that's a bad thing? Then you want to
have your your ads pulled. And since YouTube had developed
a bit of a reputation for not responding to issues
like this in a timely or consistent manner, Watson decided
he'd go public with this discovery to create that pressure. Now,
(35:40):
some YouTubers disagreed with that strategy. Many said that Watson
simply should report incidents rather than try to get views
out of the issue. Some feared that the publicity would
prompt AD companies to pull out of YouTube altogether, creating
another round of the apocalypse. Personally, I find it hard
to figure out where I stand on this particular issue.
(36:02):
I do think reporting the incidents is important. Posting a
video about it could very well be in the best
interests of the people using YouTube, particularly if the YouTuber
chose not to monetize the video. So, in other words,
if Onston comes forward and says there's this terrible practice
that's going on and his video is not being monetized,
(36:23):
then at least you remove the criticism of, hey, you're
just trying to profit from this because you know it's
going to be a big controversy. It's going to drive
a lot of views, and therefore you can make money
off of it, and it removes that criticism. But if
the video pointing out the problem itself is monetized, then
you're like, well, you're now you're just trying to stir
up a hornet's nest for your own personal benefit. Even
(36:46):
if that's not the case, it's enough to create the
seed of doubt. On the other hand, YouTube definitely has
a history of turning a blind eye to problematic behaviors
on the platform, typically taking action only when the pressure
is too gray to ignore, and so I can sympathize
with Watson's point that this was something that needed to
be brought to light to create that pressure necessary to
(37:07):
enact change. At the same time, I also sympathize with
all the creators out there who are depending heavily on
YouTube for their living. They've spent countless hours shooting, editing,
and uploading videos for their audiences. They face challenges like
sweeping changes to monetization policies, which is sort of like
(37:27):
coming into work and learning that your paycheck has been
cut by and they can't tell you why or how
you can fix it. That's how people who depend upon
YouTube feel, and they face burnout as they try to
create more videos to meet demand and to earn money.
You know, knowing that each new video that comes out
earns most of its money on its initial release means
(37:51):
that for you to keep making money, you have to
keep producing videos, and that takes its toll. As someone
who makes his living creating content week to week, I
can tell you it's not always easy. Sometimes it requires
a lot of work to scrape up the motivation and
energy to do the job. You can ask Tari sometimes
pitch a fit before I come into the studio, and
(38:11):
by sometimes I mean pretty much every time. Having a
capricious platform doesn't make it any easier now. It also
reminds me of what Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth would
point out pretty frequently. I've heard him say this in person,
I've heard him say it on podcasts and videos, and
I think it's a really important point. When you rely
(38:34):
on someone else's platform, you are creating a recipe for
things to go wrong sooner or later. So in other words,
it's the old adage don't put all your eggs in
one basket, because when that platform changes, you may find
yourself a disadvantage with no recourse, no solution. It's much
(38:56):
better to spread that risk around. Having your own platform
is helpful too, if you can do it, because you
have ultimate control over your own platform. So, for example,
with the Rooster teeth. They have their own website and
they host all their videos on their website. They also
host them on YouTube because that's where the audience is.
Then that's the flip side. Getting people to come to
(39:17):
you remains a huge challenge. It's hard to get people
to come to your owned and operated site. People go
where the content is, and as YouTube gets hundreds of
hours of content each minute, it's definitely that destination. So
it's easy to say, don't put all your eggs in
one basket, but it's also hard to build your own
(39:38):
platform and then convince people to go to it, so
it's not like there's a one size fits all solution. However,
it does again reinforce the point that depending entirely on
YouTube means that whenever there's a change, you're gonna be
affected by it and there may not be much you
can do about it. The same thing is true as
(39:59):
certain and I've seen this in my actual professional career,
where you might have articles that do really well in
Google Search because of the algorithm, and then Google will
change the algorithm and now those articles don't do so
well in search anymore, and you'll notice as a result,
traffic to your website drops dramatically. That impacts revenue and
(40:21):
impacts how much money you make from advertising. And again
it shows that if you're beholden to a third party
for traffic to your stuff, for people to actually get
their eyeballs on it and to consume it and thus
to generate revenue for you, then you could be up
(40:42):
the creek. And as The Verge points out, YouTube's own
course doesn't seem to have original content creators in mind
at all. YouTube seems to have kind of moved away
from that d I Y you know, home video content
creator model. When YouTube presents pitches to advertisers, they're not
(41:05):
typically showing these individual content creators, even the really popular ones.
More and more of the sizzle reel that the company
shows off includes stuff like music videos and clips of
television shows and movies, clips of celebrities, uh, stuff from
popular late night TV shows. In other words, it's that
stuff I was talking about at the beginning when YouTube
(41:26):
first started and people were uploading pirated content and the
industry was freaking out. Now that's what YouTube is relying
on in their in their sizzle reels, because now they
have these working relationships with these these big production studios
it's no longer adversarial now it's you know, a sort
of a symbiotic relationship, and the content is always more
(41:50):
highly produced than what d I Y video content creators
can do, even though YouTube build its business around those
content creators. And so the feeling among a lot of
creators is that they've been completely left out in the cold,
that they've been abandoned by the platform they helped build.
And so that's where we are right now, with content
(42:10):
creators concerned about their livelihood and looking at possible ways
to offset their dependence upon YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube continues to
court big names and entertainment and groups that can create
highly produced content, and there's still the worry that another
apocalypse could be coming. So it's, uh, it's kind of
a concerning time if you're a content creator. UM. I
(42:31):
know a lot of content creators who, even fairly recently,
have expressed a lot of concern about this, some of
whom have gotten out of the content creation business pretty
much entirely. And it's a shame because they made really
good stuff. But they were also affected by these moves.
Some of them had content that wasn't at all objectionable,
(42:55):
but for one reason or another it would get flagged
that way, they'd have to go through the whole appeals
pro sess and it would happen with all their videos.
And if you've created you know, more than a hundred videos,
going through that process again and again just to just
to have monetization turned back on, I think it's demoralizing.
So it's a pretty rough landscape out there for the independent,
(43:19):
you know, small creators. There's some some of the big
names who are still doing quite well. Um you know,
they're they're big enough where they can operate on a
level at least, you know, similar to the established studios.
But for a lot of others, they feel like they've
been completely abandoned and left out, so they're looking for alternatives.
(43:41):
A lot of folks have moved to Patreon or to
Twitch in the hopes that perhaps they can at least
convince their audience to follow along with them. It's tough,
and it's one of the reasons why I've never spent
a huge amount of time trying to develop my own
YouTube video series, because I know that at the challenges
(44:01):
would be beyond just your average production challenges. You know,
even after something has been produced and published, you still
have challenges making sure that it remains monetized and that
you recapture the costs of production. Anyway, that wraps up
this episode about the apocalypse and YouTube's demonetization practices, and
(44:25):
maybe they will change over the course of twenty nineteen.
We'll have to take a look again in the future.
If any of you have suggestions for future podcast topics,
you can reach out to me by email the addresses
tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
can drop on by our website that's text stuff podcast
dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all
(44:46):
of our shows, links to our social media, as well
as a link to our online store where you can
purchase stuff that's got tech on it. Deck stuff Stuff
and you can be super duper cool and remember that
every purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you again
(45:08):
really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love
all things tech. And one thing I do a lot
of these days but actually planned to reduce in the
(00:27):
future is that I watch a lot of online web series,
particularly on YouTube. I watched series about video games, pop culture,
film criticism, and vlogs a s MR Videos. I watch
a lot of stuff on YouTube, and one thing I've
seen a few times is how YouTube's monetization policies can
(00:48):
have a really big impact on the channels that I watch.
So today I want to talk a bit about the
business side of YouTube and how things have changed for creators,
particularly fairly recently. Now to understand what's been going on,
it's good to think of the story involving three major
groups or factions. First, you've got YouTube itself. This is
(01:12):
the publishing platform that enables users to share their videos
and have those videos paired with advertisers. YouTube takes a
percentage of the ad fees generated by videos, and generally speaking,
at percentage is pretty high. You know. You might have
heard that Apple in the iTunes store takes something like
thirty of all apps sales that goes to Apple itself.
(01:36):
YouTube does better than that for them, they do forty,
so nearly half of all the money generated by a
video goes to YouTube. More in that later. Then you've
got the creators. These are the people actually making the videos.
They run the range of no budget creators who rely
heavily on their own appeal to attract viewers, or upon
(01:59):
acular strategy for the type of content that they provide,
and it goes all the way up to highly produced
videos from established studios. If the creator meets a certain threshold,
they can choose an option to monetize their videos, which
allows YouTube to pair those videos with ads. A change
in monetization policy can have a dramatic impact on a creator.
(02:21):
And the third group or faction would be the advertisers themselves. Typically,
these are ad companies with many clients that offer up
different goods and services, so you'll have a dozen or
so ad companies that represent hundreds of different brands. Rarely
will such a company like McDonald's or Levi's interact directly
(02:43):
with a platform like YouTube, but it can happen more frequently,
they will rely upon a third party advertising firm to
hash all this out, And so the business of YouTube
depends upon these three prongs working together. The more views
a monetized video gets, the more it earns. Longer videos
can also have mid role ads, which creates a revenue
(03:04):
generating stream for creators and for YouTube itself. For that reason,
the platform began to encourage YouTube creators to make longer
videos a few years back. This was in stark contrast
with the early days of YouTube and which most videos
had a hard ten minute limit for running time. You
couldn't go beyond that. These days, YouTube would rather have
(03:24):
longer videos that encourage more activity on the platform, meaning
that after someone watches one video, they're likely to watch another. Now,
I didn't include viewers in those three prongs because we
don't have quite as much to do with the business
side of it. We generate the views that pull the
levers on those advertising dollars, but other than that, we
(03:45):
don't really have much involvement in the business. That stuff
lies more with the platform and the creators. Now, let
me give you a quick rundown on the history of
monetization on YouTube. So we can kind of understand where
we came from and where we are now. When YouTube
launched in two thousand five as an independent service before
it was part of Google, there was no monetization on
(04:07):
the platform. Now that changed in August two thousand six,
when YouTube launched its first ad concept, called participatory video ads,
along with brand channels. Brand channels are exactly what they
sound like, channels that are owned by specific companies and
meant to act as a type of marketing towards customers.
So you could have Nike having a Nike channel, for example.
(04:31):
The participatory video ads would appear in the upper right
corner of the screen among video choices, so you could
think of the right rail having a list of videos,
and the top one would be an AD, but there
are others would just be other YouTube videos. So YouTube
had yet to introduce a method for content creators who
(04:53):
weren't representing brands to monetize content. The only money that
was really going anywhere was going to YouTube. Google Goal
purchased YouTube for more than one point five billion dollars
in October two thou six, just a couple of months
after the rollout of this initial ad strategy. A year later,
YouTube launched in video ads. This would be August two
(05:15):
thousand seven. Instead of a commercial running before or during
a show, these were overlay ads that were flash based
and appeared on top of the video, so the lower
twenty percent part of a video could have an ad
appear after fifteen seconds of the video had already played.
The goal was to make the overlay transparent and to
(05:36):
have them run for only around ten seconds, so you'd
have a little message upp here on that bottom that
would somewhat obscure that portion of the video and would
be an ad for something. Again, YouTube restricted these ads
to run on content from a select group of partners,
and individual content creators were generally not eligible for this. So,
(05:59):
in other words, if you were Joe Schmo and you
were creating your own vlog and it was getting a
good following, you still weren't eligible to uh to have
ads run on your your videos. In December of two
thousand seven, YouTube launched the Partner program, in which individual
creators could apply to become partners, which would enable advertising
(06:20):
on their videos. It did require that they meet certain criteria.
We'll talk more about that a little bit later. By
November two thousand eight, YouTube would launch pre roll ads,
making videos more like television programs. Pre roll ad is
just what it sounds like, you have an ad that
runs before the video that you've selected to watch. But
YouTube ads work a little differently from television ads. See
(06:43):
on TV, and advertiser pays for a specific time slot.
Advertisers might say I want to run an ad during
this sporting event or during this show. On YouTube, Google
can target ads to people who appear to have interests
that align with particular brand. By analyzing user behavior, Google
can predict which brands will resonate the most and match
(07:06):
those up to a viewers experience. So, rather than Coca
Cola saying I really like those let's play videos, put
us on those, it's Coca Cola saying, show us to
people who really like soft drinks. And this would end
up being part of the problem because there's a whole
lot of folks out there who likes stuff like soft
drinks who also like to watch some pretty questionable content,
(07:28):
and thus Coca Cola's ads would show up against stuff
that maybe Coca Cola wasn't so crazy about. Now, at
this point, it became possible to actually make a living
off of YouTube if you were just a regular person,
if you were a creator with an engaged, large following,
you could conceivably have enough views to earn decent money,
and eventually this would grow beyond decent money to a
(07:51):
metric crap ton of money if you were one of
a few mega popular creators. As still sort of the
wild West at this point. You two grew largely as
an alternative to classic television services, and in the earliest days,
people were uploading a lot of copyrighted work that would
land YouTube in hot water with various publishing companies, particularly
(08:12):
music labels and movie and television studios, But that gradually
gave way to more user generated stuff, which is what
the platform was envisioned as. Now. It's interesting to point
out that in the early days of YouTube, a lot
of the popular videos were unauthorized uploads of more traditional media,
because if you go to YouTube today, you're going to
(08:34):
see a lot of authorized uploads of that same sort
of traditional media up on YouTube. So everything comes full
circle eventually, and here's where we run into the first
points of friction. YouTube is primarily a publishing platform. The
company does produce some of its own content, but it's
mostly known as being the place where creators can publish
(08:57):
their works, so YouTube is the video store, not the
studio producing the videos. Generally speaking, the video producers developed
their own voice, their own style, their type of content.
They find what works and they build an audience on that.
Some content creators do music, some tutorials, some do let's
play videos, some do scripted works like sketches, and some
(09:21):
incorporate pretty edgy material in their videos. Or sometimes they
might include intentionally offensive material knowing that controversy will result
in more views and that results in more money. Now,
initially that benefits YouTube because YouTube only makes money as
videos earned views, So as those videos rack up the views,
(09:43):
advertisers fork over more cash and YouTube takes that healthy
slice of all those revenues. Now. One example YouTubers pointed
to as a problem of this kind of philosophy, this
idea of YouTube being totally cool with controversial material as
long as it was bringing money in was a channel
(10:05):
that was run by Mike and Heather Martin. The couple
created a series of videos in which they would pull
what they called pranks on their young kids, but others
saw these pranks as borderline or sometimes beyond borderline abuse.
And it was this that the parents were profiting from.
In other words, they were mistreating their children, at least
(10:26):
in the eyes of these critics, and they were using
that as a form of entertainment through which they were
making money. Um Rose Hill, who was the biological mother
of two of the children in the Martin household says
that she had been flagging videos as being in violation
of YouTube's standards as early as October two thousand sixteen,
(10:46):
and yet little appeared to be done about it. YouTube
did not seem to take any of the videos down
or demonetize them or anything. It was only after the
channel made the news and a massive negative backlash mounted
against the Martins that things seemed to be set in motion.
It reinforced the perception that YouTube was loath to move
against a creator that's getting a lot of views because
(11:07):
those creators are a healthy source of revenue for the company. So,
at least initially, there's very little incentive for YouTube to
do anything about offensive or questionable content if it's driving views,
because that would hurt its revenue. But then we have
the third point of that triangle, and I'm going to
use a lot of different metaphors for things with three components.
(11:29):
Maybe at some point I'll use tricycle. The third part
is the advertisers. Now, advertisers are understandably sensitive about the
types of content they run ads against, the association of
the advertiser with questionable content could be harmful for the brand.
Protecting a brand is an important part of advertising. So
(11:49):
if a soft drink company executive suddenly finds out then
add for their company's flagship product is running against a
video that contains racial slurs or hate speech, calls for
violent or other objectionable material, there's a good chance someone's
about to get fired. So we've got YouTube and creators
pushing the envelope and driving lots of views to videos
of questionable content. This powder keg just needed a spark
(12:12):
to set it off. The spark first arrived in late
two thousand sixteen, and the powder keg blew in February
two thousand seventeen. That's when advertisers began to take note
that their ads were running against videos that had hate
speech and extremist content in them, particularly in the UK.
The advertisers, in an effort to protect their clients and
mitigate the fallout of such associations, began to pull ads
(12:36):
from YouTube. Their main objection was that they had no
control over what types of videos could run their ads,
and so they could end up being associated with ideologies
and messaging that was in conflict with their public image.
And that was just the beginning. I'll explain more in
just a second, but first let's take a quick break.
(13:01):
I mentioned before the break that advertisers were pulling their
spots from YouTube. They represented some really big clients, including
Coca Cola, The Guardian, Johnson and Johnson, and the Government
of the United Kingdom. Their move began to create sort
of a domino effect, and one domino to fall was
a reassessment of Google itself. Analyst Brian Weezer moved Google
(13:26):
stock from a buy recommendation to a hold recommendation based
off the February two, seventeen scandal. He pointed out that
Google had quote a serious issue in the UK with
brand safety issues end quote, and that they could end
up devaluing the company. Now. Suffice to say, this was
(13:46):
a lot of incentive for YouTube to do something about
all this. One high profile case where YouTube did act
involved Felix Kilberg, better known by his screen name as
Beauty Pie, Kilberg published a video that showed two men
holding up a reprehensible message written on a sign and
(14:06):
I'm not going to repeat it here. This prompted Disney
Maker Studios, which had been producing Pautie Pie shows, to
cut all ties with the creator. YouTube canceled a YouTube
red series called Scared Pauti Pie. YouTube Read is a
subscription service that, in return for a monthly fee unless
you watch videos without ads and view special content. Just
(14:28):
for those subscribers, Google removed kale Berg from the preferred
premium ad tier as well, which cut back how much
he could make on his videos. It was a pretty
pretty extreme punishment. UM, I don't know if it was
completely unwarranted. I have some pretty strong feelings about it
in general, but there were other YouTubers who felt like
(14:49):
that was a particularly harsh judgment against another creator, and
other people said no, he got exactly what he deserves.
So it kind of runs the gamut. Now. I've placed
a lot of the responsibility for how things have shaken
out at YouTube on the platform and the creators, but
I want to make it clear that advertisers were also
(15:10):
somewhat responsible, with some pretty bad choices of their own.
In April two thousand seventeen, PepsiCo had an ad featuring
Kindall Jenner handing over a can of Pepsi to a
police officer during a protest. This was at the height
of the initial protests in the Black Lives Matter movement,
and so PepsiCo was widely criticized for trying to exploit
(15:31):
a social movement for the purposes of advertising a soft drink.
Pepsi would pull the ad after just a few days,
including pulling it from YouTube. The move of a major
company pulling more advertising from YouTube fueled even more companies
to follow suit. Even without the public image issues that
Pepsi faced. The sudden departure of numerous big money advertisers
(15:53):
prompted YouTube executives to make some pretty hasty and broad decisions,
leading to what was called the ad PoCA lips. Now essentially,
YouTube effectively demonetized any channels that were not considered to
be family friendly, but the definition of family friendly was
left rather vague, and YouTube began to rely heavily on
(16:14):
algorithms to determine whether or not a channel's content qualified
for the tag family friendly or not. Now, to be
fair to YouTube, the company had little other choice than
the hand things over to an automated protocol. Today, around
four hundred fifty hours of video are uploaded to the
platform every single minute. The site racks up a billion
(16:37):
hours of you time every day. With that much content
being added every minute, it's impossible to put human beings
in charge of vetting all of it and making sure
none of it contains material that violates YouTube's policies or
will upset advertisers. For that reason, the company has developed
programs that try to do that automatically. Part of this
(16:59):
depends upon the metadata that's connected to the videos in question.
A metadata is data about data, so YouTubers build out
metadata like tags and descriptions so that their videos will
show up in search results. That way, when you pop
into YouTube search and you're searching for a specific thing,
like the other day, I search for Gauntlet to play
(17:21):
through because I was feeling nostalgic, then it gives you
the results that are relevant. It helps boost the video's
visibility and makes it more likely that people will find
the video. And since you only make money if a
lot of people are viewing your stuff, it's important to
include the information and your metadata. If you don't your
(17:43):
video is not likely to be seen by very many
people at all, so the algorithms look for the tags
that could indicate whether or not a video contains objectionable material,
and again, the term objectionable isn't terribly well defined here.
YouTube did create a checklist for advertisers in an effort
to win them back, and the checklist would allow companies
(18:05):
to select the types of material they did not want
their ads to support. Categories include stuff like profanity and
rough language or sexually suggestive content, which is stuff similar
to what you would see in a film's m p
A A rating description. But there were other categories as well,
such as tragedy and conflict or sensational and shocking that
(18:27):
raised questions and it could mean that people doing valuable
work in fields that need coverage would find themselves without
a means of earning enough money to pay for production costs.
And you do painted with a pretty broad brush. People
who had never had an issue with demonetization found themselves
hit hard by it. YouTube pointed out that the company
(18:50):
had an appeals process that creators could follow if they
felt that their work had been unfairly targeted, and there
were a lot of people who definitely felt that way.
For example, people advocating for human rights for people in
the LGBTQ community saw some of their videos demonetized, and
the message seemed to be that their goal, that of
(19:11):
extending human rights to a vulnerable population of people, was
somehow not add friendly or it was taboo, which is
a pretty crappy message to get. It reinforces the idea
that the world is against you when your video series
that's all about trying to extend human rights to people
is demonetized because the people in question somehow fall into
(19:36):
a category that isn't advertiser friendly. Uh. It's dehumanizing, really,
And that's just one example of the types of videos
that were targeted. YouTube was seen as being overly cautious
in order to appease the advertisers that were pulling out
of the platform, and the appeals process wasn't exactly a
(19:56):
smooth one. Creators who had a flagged video would get
a notification that their video was in a sort of
limbo in which it was not currently counting towards monetization,
but an appeal could, in theory, overturn that, and the
flagging process was based on machine learning, which also meant
that the appeals process was effectively part of the training
(20:18):
model for the system. You have a computer system that
identifies what it believes to be a video that has
objectionable material, It flags the video. The videos immediately demonetized,
and then by appealing the decision and having a human
go over the result and either uphold it or overturn it,
(20:38):
you train the machine learning model. That's great if you're
doing it in a lab, but when you're doing it
out in the real world, where it's actually affecting people's
ability to earn money, it's less great. So the content
creator was meant to send an appeal request, and in theory,
that would push the video to a human staffer at
(20:59):
YouTube whose of it was to manually review the video
to see if in fact the demonetization was justified. That
was the theory. However, that could not really work in
practice because the number of videos being uploaded each day
and the number getting flagged would have made that almost
as impossible as having humans view all the videos in
(21:20):
the first place, and so YouTube put in some additional rules.
Appealed videos would only go to human reviewers if those
videos had more than one thousand views in the most
recent seven days, or if you had a subscriber base
of at least ten thousand people, then a human would
review a flag video even if it hadn't yet met
(21:40):
the metric of one thousand views in seven days. Besides
the fact that YouTube was having to deal with an
enormous number of appeals, the company also wanted to make
sure it was addressing the concerns of the big earners first,
the most popular channels on YouTube. Many videos performed best
in the short term after uploading to the site, no
(22:01):
big surprise there. Right a new video goes up, people
flocked to it. There are fan bases who eagerly anticipate
the next video or episode, and so you see the
vast majority of activity hit those videos right away. YouTube
wanted to prioritize those videos over ones that might get
a lot of views over a very long span of time,
(22:21):
you know, the sort of stuff that tends to do
well on search. It might be more evergreen, so the
earnings month to month may be low but consistent. So
if I did a video that was sort of a
how to guide on something that would remain relevant for years,
I might not have a ton of traffic to that
video on any given month, but I would have consistent
(22:42):
traffic throughout the whole run of the lifetime of the video. Meanwhile,
someone else who's posting a new episode of a web series,
they're going to see the vast majority of activity on
their video in the in the near immediate fall health
of uploading it. So those first few days are critical
(23:03):
for those kind of series. And worse, there was a
growing concern among creators that this would mean a really
big drop in revenue, since the time they need monetization
would be shortly after the video goes live. So if
you upload a video, algorithm decides its objection it's got
objectionable material in it, flags it, and then you're not
(23:25):
You're demonetized and your video is just now live. It
could be the sweetest spot to earn money, and you
can't earn anything because you've been demonetized. The longer you
your video spins in limbo, the more money the creators
would lose. And as for older videos, there was a
concern that creators wouldn't even see that those had been
(23:45):
demonetized because all the focus would be directed towards the
latest videos that they're posting, So older videos typically don't
earn a ton individually, but collectively they can still act
as a pretty healthy source of revenue. So if you're
a creator who has been active for several years and
you have a big back catalog of videos, you might
have a decent amount of money coming in from views
(24:07):
on those videos, And if an older video suddenly becomes
relevant again for some reason, you could stand to benefit
from that. But if it's been demonetized, you never see
that money, and there's a good chance you wouldn't even
know about the demonetization because your focus is on what's
going up next instead of what you uploaded years ago.
This pushed many creators to consider leaving the platform altogether.
(24:30):
Some looked at alternatives like Twitch, where they can live
stream and use in platform features as a means of
earning money. Others moved to Patreon, in which users could
pledge a recurring amount of money to the creator, either
on a scheduled basis such as a monthly payment, or
on a per upload basis. But these methods meant the
creators had to rely upon fans who were able and
(24:52):
willing to pay for something actively. They were only passively
paying for earlier asked in the fact that they were
watching ads as opposed to actually handing over money to
view videos. Now, if we are to believe some of
the top creators on the platform, the initial fallout was
pretty dramatic. Phil DeFranco said add earnings on his channel
(25:15):
fell by eight percent following the flight of advertisers, though
by mid April those earnings had leveled out to a
thirty percent drop from the average. It's still not great, obviously,
but better than others stated less extreme drops in revenue,
but a lot of people said, yeah, it took a hit.
Making things worse was an overall feeling that YouTube wasn't
(25:37):
very good at communicating out the changes to creators or
explaining how their work was falling into one of these
categories that advertisers were opting out of, or presenting a
sort of best practices approach so that they could make
certain their work wasn't being demonetized. There seemed to be
a lack of communication on YouTube's part, which made the
creators feel truly abandoned. Then things got really crazy. I'll
(26:02):
explain more after the break. In late two thousand and seventeen,
yet another YouTube controversy made headlines. This time it was
all about how several channels creating videos ostensibly for children
(26:22):
had bizarre, disturbing, and sometimes blatantly inappropriate material in those videos.
They inhabited YouTube Kids, which is a standalone app and
it's marketed as a safe space for kids entertainment. The
idea was that you, as a parent or caregiver, could
download the app on a mobile device, hand that mobile
(26:44):
device over to a kid, and feel safe in the
knowledge that the child was only going to see family
friendly content through that app. The general belief was that
YouTube would have a system in place to block any
material that didn't meet the app's family friendly standards, but
that's not what happened. Some people made really disturbing videos
(27:07):
using popular characters to lure kids into watching popular trademarked characters,
a lot of them Disney characters, and tricking kids to
watching them, and these videos were trending. They were popular
enough so that they were showing up on related videos
or recommended videos when kids were watching other stuff, and
kids tend to watch a lot of stuff, and they
(27:29):
will often watched the same thing many times, so these
videos were racking up views, which meant more ad dollars
for YouTube. Now the videos were getting flagged. There wasn't
much activity to show for it, not much response from YouTube,
at least in the early days. But then these stories
broke about these videos and YouTube had another pr disaster
(27:50):
to deal with. This is the same year when the
apocalypse thing had started, so creators throughout their hands and
essentially said they're preventing us for making money while you're
also allowing this kind of stuff to go on on
your kids app. It wasn't a good look. It made
YouTube look like hypocrites. Now. Adding to that scandal was
(28:13):
one in December two thousand and seventeen when Logan Paul,
who was is an extremely popular YouTuber. He had really
made his fame on Vine and then when Vine closed down. Uh,
he had already done some stuff on YouTube, but he
managed to kind of leverage his popularity over to YouTube's
platform anyway. In December two thousand seventeen, he posted a
(28:35):
video that showed a hanging corpse in it. Uh. Logan
Paul was walking through an area in Japan known as
the Suicide Forest and encountered this corpse and caught it
on video and uploaded it. The video received millions of views.
It ended up trending on YouTube. It became the focal
(28:56):
point for a huge blowback from the YouTube community. Here
was a video that clearly violated YouTube's policies. Numerous people
had flagged it for review. YouTube didn't remove the video.
Logan Paul or someone on his staff removed the video,
but YouTube, the platform, seemed to do nothing, and that really,
(29:20):
in many people's minds, cemented the idea that YouTube's rules
didn't apply to people if they were at a certain
level of success and were seen as the future of YouTube. Moreover,
advertisers didn't pull their spots from Logan Paul's videos, which
seemed to suggest that it was the financial aspect of
the platform's rules that matter, not the ethical ones. So
(29:44):
there's a lot of blame to go around here. Advertisers have.
They have some of the blame, a lot of the
blame because while they reacted strongly to Beauty Pie, they
did not react strongly to Logan Paul, and so YouTube
was given a very strong incentive to react to the
Pauti Pie scandal by punishing Pauti Pie. But because the
(30:06):
advertisers didn't freak out, YouTube didn't have a whole lot
of incentive to uh, punish logan Paul because they were
making money. No One, no one on the let me
give you a check side of the equation was complaining.
Video viewers and other content creators were complaining. But since
(30:27):
they're not the ones handing checks over to YouTube at least,
as is the way the argument goes, YouTube just didn't care.
One thing YouTube did do, though, was to restrict its
Partner program, which allows content creators to opt into monetization
in the first place. This is the criteria you have
to meet in order to be considered in a part
(30:49):
of the partner program. So you have to meet these uh,
these requirements first before you can actually join. Before the
new restrictions were put in place, the general rule was
that a channel had to hit ten thousand views to
qualify as a YouTube partner across the channel. So if
you had a thousand videos and they each had ten
(31:12):
views each, you hit ten thousand views, that's It may
be that you only have ten people watching, but you
still have ten thousand views across your entire channel. That
would be enough for you to qualify as YouTube partner
under the previous rules, but the update changed that. They
changed it to four thousand hours of watch time over
(31:33):
the previous twelve months, which clearly favored longer videos over
shorter ones, since you could create very short videos and
rack up ten thousand views relatively quickly. But if you
have short videos, accumulating four thousand hours of view material
would take a lot longer. If your average video is,
you know, two minutes long, just getting an hour makes
(31:57):
mean that you have to get a whole lot of
views on that one video. But if your average video
is an hour and a half long, then it doesn't
take as many full views to hit that four thousand
hour water mark. Now, in addition, a channel would need
to have at least a thousand subscribers before it could
be considered for the Partner program. Existing channels that had
(32:18):
previously qualified for the Partner Program under the ten thousand
views rule but had not yet hit the four thousand
hours one thousand subscriber benchmark would end up being demonetized.
So there were people who had been qualified under the
Partner program previously, they did not get grandfathered in when
(32:39):
these changes were made, they were affected to Now YouTube
claimed that of those affected by these changes them were
making less than a hundred bucks a year on videos
that it was a very small amount of money that
wasn't being paid out and therefore was not having a
meaningful impact on people. Fast forward to February two thousand nineteen.
(33:04):
That's when Matt Watson, a former YouTuber, posted a video
showing that there was a disturbing trend on the platform
in which Skivie people were uploading videos showing kids doing
just stuff like nothing bad, just kids being kids. But
in the comments section, people were posting time stamps of
(33:27):
specific moments of the video that, out of context, would
sexualize the content, and that was where the huge issue was.
Watson demonstrated that YouTube's recommendation algorithm could quickly pull up
one of these videos, and he started with a bikini
hall video in which a woman was showing off bathing
(33:49):
suits she had purchased, and using only the recommended videos
that appear alongside the one you're watching, Watson quickly navigated
to a seemingly unrelated video of a young girl playing
in two clicks, and the comments were full of disturbing,
awful content that was enabling some truly hideous behavior. Watson's
(34:12):
point was that YouTube's algorithm was actually facilitating this sort
of behavior, making it easier for predators to seek out
each other and the content they wanted. The Verge ran
their own test after seeing Watson's video post, and they
used his methods, and they found that it took at
most six clicks to get to one of those videos
(34:35):
from the recommendation page, so they would start with a video,
and it found that if they just followed enough times
that being at most six, they would hit on one
of these. While Watson was adamant that he didn't want
another apocalypse and that he still had many friends who
were dependent upon YouTube for their living, he did want
(34:56):
something done about this problem, and he urged people to
reach out to the advertisers whose ads were being displayed
against this sort of content to have that content or
to have those ads pulled, because he was concerned that
YouTube wasn't going to do anything. So essentially he was saying, hey,
did you know that the ad for your product is
(35:18):
showing up on videos that are sexualizing children and don't
you think that's a bad thing? Then you want to
have your your ads pulled. And since YouTube had developed
a bit of a reputation for not responding to issues
like this in a timely or consistent manner, Watson decided
he'd go public with this discovery to create that pressure. Now,
(35:40):
some YouTubers disagreed with that strategy. Many said that Watson
simply should report incidents rather than try to get views
out of the issue. Some feared that the publicity would
prompt AD companies to pull out of YouTube altogether, creating
another round of the apocalypse. Personally, I find it hard
to figure out where I stand on this particular issue.
(36:02):
I do think reporting the incidents is important. Posting a
video about it could very well be in the best
interests of the people using YouTube, particularly if the YouTuber
chose not to monetize the video. So, in other words,
if Onston comes forward and says there's this terrible practice
that's going on and his video is not being monetized,
(36:23):
then at least you remove the criticism of, hey, you're
just trying to profit from this because you know it's
going to be a big controversy. It's going to drive
a lot of views, and therefore you can make money
off of it, and it removes that criticism. But if
the video pointing out the problem itself is monetized, then
you're like, well, you're now you're just trying to stir
up a hornet's nest for your own personal benefit. Even
(36:46):
if that's not the case, it's enough to create the
seed of doubt. On the other hand, YouTube definitely has
a history of turning a blind eye to problematic behaviors
on the platform, typically taking action only when the pressure
is too gray to ignore, and so I can sympathize
with Watson's point that this was something that needed to
be brought to light to create that pressure necessary to
(37:07):
enact change. At the same time, I also sympathize with
all the creators out there who are depending heavily on
YouTube for their living. They've spent countless hours shooting, editing,
and uploading videos for their audiences. They face challenges like
sweeping changes to monetization policies, which is sort of like
(37:27):
coming into work and learning that your paycheck has been
cut by and they can't tell you why or how
you can fix it. That's how people who depend upon
YouTube feel, and they face burnout as they try to
create more videos to meet demand and to earn money.
You know, knowing that each new video that comes out
earns most of its money on its initial release means
(37:51):
that for you to keep making money, you have to
keep producing videos, and that takes its toll. As someone
who makes his living creating content week to week, I
can tell you it's not always easy. Sometimes it requires
a lot of work to scrape up the motivation and
energy to do the job. You can ask Tari sometimes
pitch a fit before I come into the studio, and
(38:11):
by sometimes I mean pretty much every time. Having a
capricious platform doesn't make it any easier now. It also
reminds me of what Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth would
point out pretty frequently. I've heard him say this in person,
I've heard him say it on podcasts and videos, and
I think it's a really important point. When you rely
(38:34):
on someone else's platform, you are creating a recipe for
things to go wrong sooner or later. So in other words,
it's the old adage don't put all your eggs in
one basket, because when that platform changes, you may find
yourself a disadvantage with no recourse, no solution. It's much
(38:56):
better to spread that risk around. Having your own platform
is helpful too, if you can do it, because you
have ultimate control over your own platform. So, for example,
with the Rooster teeth. They have their own website and
they host all their videos on their website. They also
host them on YouTube because that's where the audience is.
Then that's the flip side. Getting people to come to
(39:17):
you remains a huge challenge. It's hard to get people
to come to your owned and operated site. People go
where the content is, and as YouTube gets hundreds of
hours of content each minute, it's definitely that destination. So
it's easy to say, don't put all your eggs in
one basket, but it's also hard to build your own
(39:38):
platform and then convince people to go to it, so
it's not like there's a one size fits all solution. However,
it does again reinforce the point that depending entirely on
YouTube means that whenever there's a change, you're gonna be
affected by it and there may not be much you
can do about it. The same thing is true as
(39:59):
certain and I've seen this in my actual professional career,
where you might have articles that do really well in
Google Search because of the algorithm, and then Google will
change the algorithm and now those articles don't do so
well in search anymore, and you'll notice as a result,
traffic to your website drops dramatically. That impacts revenue and
(40:21):
impacts how much money you make from advertising. And again
it shows that if you're beholden to a third party
for traffic to your stuff, for people to actually get
their eyeballs on it and to consume it and thus
to generate revenue for you, then you could be up
(40:42):
the creek. And as The Verge points out, YouTube's own
course doesn't seem to have original content creators in mind
at all. YouTube seems to have kind of moved away
from that d I Y you know, home video content
creator model. When YouTube presents pitches to advertisers, they're not
(41:05):
typically showing these individual content creators, even the really popular ones.
More and more of the sizzle reel that the company
shows off includes stuff like music videos and clips of
television shows and movies, clips of celebrities, uh, stuff from
popular late night TV shows. In other words, it's that
stuff I was talking about at the beginning when YouTube
(41:26):
first started and people were uploading pirated content and the
industry was freaking out. Now that's what YouTube is relying
on in their in their sizzle reels, because now they
have these working relationships with these these big production studios
it's no longer adversarial now it's you know, a sort
of a symbiotic relationship, and the content is always more
(41:50):
highly produced than what d I Y video content creators
can do, even though YouTube build its business around those
content creators. And so the feeling among a lot of
creators is that they've been completely left out in the cold,
that they've been abandoned by the platform they helped build.
And so that's where we are right now, with content
(42:10):
creators concerned about their livelihood and looking at possible ways
to offset their dependence upon YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube continues to
court big names and entertainment and groups that can create
highly produced content, and there's still the worry that another
apocalypse could be coming. So it's, uh, it's kind of
a concerning time if you're a content creator. UM. I
(42:31):
know a lot of content creators who, even fairly recently,
have expressed a lot of concern about this, some of
whom have gotten out of the content creation business pretty
much entirely. And it's a shame because they made really
good stuff. But they were also affected by these moves.
Some of them had content that wasn't at all objectionable,
(42:55):
but for one reason or another it would get flagged
that way, they'd have to go through the whole appeals
pro sess and it would happen with all their videos.
And if you've created you know, more than a hundred videos,
going through that process again and again just to just
to have monetization turned back on, I think it's demoralizing.
So it's a pretty rough landscape out there for the independent,
(43:19):
you know, small creators. There's some some of the big
names who are still doing quite well. Um you know,
they're they're big enough where they can operate on a
level at least, you know, similar to the established studios.
But for a lot of others, they feel like they've
been completely abandoned and left out, so they're looking for alternatives.
(43:41):
A lot of folks have moved to Patreon or to
Twitch in the hopes that perhaps they can at least
convince their audience to follow along with them. It's tough,
and it's one of the reasons why I've never spent
a huge amount of time trying to develop my own
YouTube video series, because I know that at the challenges
(44:01):
would be beyond just your average production challenges. You know,
even after something has been produced and published, you still
have challenges making sure that it remains monetized and that
you recapture the costs of production. Anyway, that wraps up
this episode about the apocalypse and YouTube's demonetization practices, and
(44:25):
maybe they will change over the course of twenty nineteen.
We'll have to take a look again in the future.
If any of you have suggestions for future podcast topics,
you can reach out to me by email the addresses
tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
can drop on by our website that's text stuff podcast
dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all
(44:46):
of our shows, links to our social media, as well
as a link to our online store where you can
purchase stuff that's got tech on it. Deck stuff Stuff
and you can be super duper cool and remember that
every purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you again
(45:08):
really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.