[angry-hacker]

That always amazes me how pop music passes it.

Search for rap song Coco. It's about being love with cocaine and violence and it shows me Kia car ads with families before the video. And some semi amateur authors who TALKED about true crime events were banned from the YouTube adsense partnership.

[flashman]

I don't see that as inconsistent. The term is 'advertiser friendly'. Plenty of advertisers are happy to be associated with popular artists because their popularity gives the advertiser cover. Equally, they might not want to be associated with a small-time true crime channel.

[angry-hacker]

The term is not really advertiser friendly. Adsense (also YouTube) TOS makes it very clear ALL the content needs to be family friendly to begin with. Of course, I understand big labels are given an exception but it doesn't make it less hypocritical.

[MichaelBurge]

Why is it hypocritical to cut a deal with certain important clients? Even Stallman recommends selling license exceptions to GPL'd code.

Generally speaking, any startup on this site will give preferential treatment to a $50,000/month customer than to a $5/month customer.

Even your bank will treat you differently if you want to open an account with a deposit of $2 million than if you want to deposit $25.

I don't think "hypocritical" is the right word, since Youtube isn't making a moral judgment. They'd take any money they could if their partners would let them.

[angry-hacker]

I understand how world and business work, no problem. I just lined out this is the reason they claim for banning those YT accounts from revenue. I have personally no problem understanding it, but it doesn't make it any less hypocritical.

The same with Google best the practices on showing content first, ads after, same time their search is covered with ads and the content is below fold.

[qwertyuiop924]

...and the same with google heavily advocating web standards, while breaking their website for firefox users for the 16th time.

[eumoria]

This is a direct avenue for advertisers to control what content is actually available on YouTube. If you want to make money on YouTube you need to make content that advertisers like first and foremost or you get to make no money at all. It's exactly the control they had during the television era. Smells like weak reason as a guise to gain control over the content presented on the site entirely.

[qwertyuiop924]

That's always been true, it's just now moreso. This is why creators of content that is offensive (The Jimquisition), niche (Longer videos from people like CGPGrey), or that just want less strings attached are flocking en masse to direct sponsorship (a very old idea, common in the podcasting world, and perhaps most famously enacted by Rhett and Link), or more often to a donation/membership model à la NPR (typically through Vessel or Patreon, this is most successfully done by Crash Course, a show that has a massive budget and is largely payed for by viewers), or to other websites and networks (NormalBoots, HiddenBlock, Channel Awesome (formerly TGWTG) - anywhere that can get other advertisers, or pay the bills somehow).

[angry-hacker]

If I use Google display network to show my ads, there is no category to exclude videos promoting violence and gang life. There is no way I can exclude that specific video.

[qwertyuiop924]

It's because YouTube has a partnership with the record labels.