[bufferoverflow]

I don't get Youtube policies. Why not let the advertisers decide which channels to advertise on? Why demonetize anything? This babysitting attitude makes so many creators unhappy.

If a video is allowed on YT, why not make more money off of it?

[skybrian]

Advertisers don't actually want to spend time picking YouTube channels individually. But they will complain if YouTube runs their ads against the wrong content. They have threatened to leave before. [1]

Picking channels that are good for advertising is a service that YouTube does for advertisers.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-advertisers-are-pulling-s...

[thevardanian]

Just out of curiosity how much leverage do advertising companies actually have?

[mediaman]

All of it. It's where nearly all their revenue comes from. There's no remaining business without the ad sales.

[supreme_sublime]

First of all, YouTube doesn't make money.

Secondly, there are two sides to this equation. The advertisers aren't paying for ads as charity to Google. They want the billions of views that YouTube gets every day. While I don't know the exact statistics, YouTube definitely seems to be growing in influence where people who are popular on the platform are legitimate celebrities. Advertisers would be foolish to not try to get in on some of the publicity. Now I'm a bit conspiracy theory-ish on this whole thing. I really think that between the advertisers and traditional media there wasn't necessarily a concerted effort where both of them planned to do something together, they were just both acting in their self interest. So when traditional media outlets started publishing the nature of the videos that some ads would play next to, the advertisers thought "Well, this is a great opportunity to strong arm them for some cheaper ads." Meanwhile the traditional media was simply attacking a competitor. It seems to me like there were also some useful idiots at YouTube who saw the so-called terrible things that ads were next to and over corrected. Instead of saying "Okay, well, good luck reaching how many people we do." to advertisers, they rolled over and capitulated. When in my opinion, they really didn't need to. Then again, they know more about the business than I do.

But really pulling ads from too many videos hurts the business too, if ads aren't playing on a video, they are hosting that video for free. It makes absolutely no sense. There is also no evidence of any kind of long term association between advertisements and content. You don't see a coke ad before an ISIS beheading video and think "Huh, Coke endorses ISIS".

[mhudson125]

I'd love to see where you got the idea that YouTube doesn't make any money. As far as I know they don't break out YouTube revenue in any of their filings.

In fact, in each of the filings for 2016 & 2017 the revenue they report is an amalgamation of products that consist of search, ads, commerce, maps, youtube, google cloud, android, chrome, and google play[1][2].

[1] => https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20170331_alphabet_10Q.pdf pg 30

[2] => https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20160331_alphabet_10Q.pdf pg 28

[supreme_sublime]

These are fairly old, but I've gathered they don't make a profit based on articles like the following.

http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojc...

https://outline.com/7PG22L

[VikingCoder]

First of all, even if that's true, YouTube would leak money A LOT FASTER without advertisers.

Okay, there was no second-of-all...

[supreme_sublime]

Yes, but even if big names like Verizon and Coke don't buy ads, it isn't like others won't buy ads. That ad space is still valuable, and most people realize that ads and the content they are in front of are separate.

[watwut]

Apparently a lot? I remember reading that it truly hurt google when there was last major big deal about ads under isis videos. The ad pricesta went down a lot as nobody wanted to pay.

Ad quality I am getting (long cheap ads on companies unlikely to be rich) confirm that.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't get Youtube policies. Why not let the advertisers decide which channels to advertise on?

Because then advertisers have to do more work, and spend less money; doing the picking for the advertisers in a way which keeps them happy with the results is a key part of what advertisers are paying YouTube for.

> This babysitting attitude makes so many creators unhappy

The creators it makes happy are predominantly the ones that aren't supplying YouTube with content that is valuable in its main revenue-generating function.

> If a video is allowed on YT, why not make more money off of it?

So, YT should ban videos rather than demonetizing them?

[zaidf]

Advertisers do get to decide but advertisers don't want to have to decide between 10 million channels. They wanted a curated list with some minimum quality control to decide from.

[bufferoverflow]

So make it optional. Call it family-friendly, make it default, whatever.

[dogma1138]

Advertisers will stick to the safest option to avoid controversy at all costs. And for the most part non family friendly advertising is already disallowed.

[CamperBob2]

And for the most part non family friendly advertising is already disallowed.

And now we're seeing an unintended consequence of that.

[dogma1138]

Of what not allowing pornhub to advertise on Youtube?

I get the free speech argument and I am 110% behind that argume at least when it comes to not banning people for saying whatever they want on what is indisputably by now a public platform.

However the monetization is another issue, if we side with free speech then the ads that run are the free speech of the advertisers they have the final say in where and how those ads run.

The problem is that for the most part there aren't that many advertiser anymore especially on the big platforms. The only times I ever get ads is when I use YouTube on my iPhone and i try to avoid using the app because of them (I didn't log into YT with my account just because I can't adblock the YT ads).

And what ads you get? the same 10-20 big brands all over, big soda, big car, big sports channel, big bank, big store chain that's it.

Regardless where you lean left or right large companies that run on essentially the most inoffensive vanilla consensus possible will rather avoid you and YT demonitizes plenty of far left (and simply weird) channels also.

But as some one who is pro-free speech as it gets as in I stoutly believe that there should be no legal limitation on speech at all including what people call "hate speech" (there will be hate regardless and no laws will ever save us from that) I can't find a single argument that to limit agency of YouTube and advertisers in any way that would improve the freedom of speech rather than diminish it.

Now banning people because they like to shoot guns, pro trump, believe in aliens, anti-vaxxers, socialists, communists, maoists or w/e is something that I strongly believe that platforms like YouTube should not practice.

YouTube was essentially built by weird and disturbing crap that people uploaded over the years (heck for the longest time YouTube and at the time Stage6 if anyone remembers DIVX's competitor was essentially Netflix for the masses, and you can still find plenty of pirated content on YT today to watch) until it became the monster it is, after squashing all competition they simply can't just say sorry folks you have to play by our rules now despite the fact that we got where we are by essentially violating all of them.

[jonny_eh]

Same result. People will get pissed off when they get categorized in a way they don't like, resulting in less money.

[mozumder]

What YouTube needs are editors. Editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.

The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're important.

[zaidf]

Sounds like what fb was doing in determining what news stories to feature. We saw how that turned out (they ended up largely abandoning the editorial team.)

[mozumder]

They honestly didn't have to abandon that. They should have told the complainers to just suck it up, and this is how editing works.

Editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expressions. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.

Facebook tried to have it all, but advertisers only want something specific.

[dragonwriter]

> What YouTube needs are editors.

Editors don't scale.

[_rpd]

Why not start an edited competitor?