[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

[mhudson125]

Unfortunately, neither of the links show a concrete indication of where YouTube profitability is right now.

It was approximated to be break even two years ago but doesn't have a growth factor as part of the number that is reported in the article, which is a key metric for determining revenue in the future. Revenue aside, profitability is extremely difficult to calculate as we don't know what the costs are as YouTube grows.

You would have made a better case here, but it's still far too old for any relevance in this discussion: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...

[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.