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by shadowmore 2503 days ago
The majority of consumers, yes. Not majority of companies.

Whether tech giants or smaller businesses, they all do advertisers' bidding, and the advertisers themselves have the insipid idea in their heads that having their ads show up alongside non-PC content is going to somehow associate their brand with that exact content, as if it's an endorsement.

2 comments

With the way Youtube, Twitch, and other large platforms share revenue with the content creators, the idea that an ad showing in front of content "associates" their brand with that video doesn't even go far enough. Those brands DO endorse that content directly with their money.

There was an issue on YT where a video from ISIS containing a beheading was monetized. Advertisers were directly funding terrorism in that case (until YT interceded). The same happens all the time with other anti-humanitarian videos all the time.

I agree that there has been some over-reaction, but let's not pretend it's not a problem.

More than that, even if there are tools available for the advertisers to only target specific content they don’t want to be associated with a website that provides content they don’t like. IIRC, this was one of the reasons why Twitch was spun out of Justin.tv— advertisers liked the gaming content but not what was in the other categories.