[vorpalhex]

Your response isn't true. I'm sure you believe it's true, but prior to YouTube we didn't see demonitization happen - TV series were paid for ahead of time. While organizations like OneMillionMoms would harass advertisers to get content pulled, that's not a very effective strategy - they just usually got the spot price reduced.

Things did actually work differently. YouTube doesn't pay for content before it airs, and large amounts of the income for a show happen as it's left up. When YouTube demonitizes - and it can do this for an entire channel - it's not just a single episode either. Nor can the content be shopped around to other platforms as easily.

Even if the station wanted to take down your content, you at least got a station manager calling your production staff and not just a "We're sorry, but you violated our vague ToS." message with no response mechanism in it. It had some element of human review and wasn't susceptible to brigading.

[tehwebguy]

You are missing the point that for years advertisers were accidentally putting commercials in front of garbage (multi-hour long videos that were only used as pacifiers for toddlers, with dozens of ad breaks) or scum (algorithm scammers getting billions of views from children on unlicensed, sexual content like Spider-man groping Elsa or worse).

These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.

Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.

But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.

Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.

Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.

[chrisrhoden]

Well, I didn't use the word demonetization, because it means something specific - which is what I think you're arguing here.

But what we did see happens is that shows which were likely to provoke a negative response from audiences or advertisers were never produced, in large part for the exact same reasons.

The specific shape of events may look different, but that's the result of democratization, allowing more people to be part of the game where they spend money, make stuff, and get ads run against it.

In the cases where YouTube does pay for stuff before it airs or offers a guarantee on future ads, I am fairly confident the old TV dynamics are at play - they will ensure that the content they are funding will garner viewers and not offend advertisers.

[r_c_a_d]

One example springs to mind. The racism controversy on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 led to the sponsor and several advertisers withdrawing. The show was "rested" the following year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Big_Brother_(British...