We’re going to step back just a tad to 2017 and the event on YouTube known as the “Adpocalypse.”
The Adpocalypse was a major slashing in income earned on YouTube from advertising, due to multiple factors, the greatest of which being ads simply not being run on certain videos deemed unsuitable, due to reasons we will get into later on. This has been a rather critical event in YouTube the past year, as one can imagine, and while it has hurt some up-and-coming YouTube content creators, the people who seem most affected are larger channels that have tended to cover events which could be considered controversial.
I don’t think anything above is up for debate, but it appears the actual cause of Adpocalypse is. This surprises me, seeing as when all this started it gathered quite a bit of attention – these weren’t events that just happened silently one day and no one recalls them. Far from it.
The below summary is what I recall generally happening. Details may be lost, but a search on Adpocalypse shows this as the general story of what happened, and matches what I remember.
You may recall back in early 2017 when YouTube golden boy “PewDiePie” was caught in a stream saying a certain word that’s considered racist – this stirred up quite a bit of attention on just what YouTuber’s were doing in their videos, and in people paying attention to this, other jokes he made that could have been seen in poor taste, and with journalism being the way it is, next thing you know the media was all over it. Mix in screenshots of channels that are clearly nothing but hate speech, or worse, displaying advertisments from well known companies (creating the illusion of these companies somehow supporting these points of view / organizations) and you have a pretty terrible situation on the advertisers end.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/6cyuva/what_is_the_youtube_adpocalypse/
https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/03/20/youtube-apologizes-ads-extremist-videos/
Advertisers started pulling ads all together, which of course cut into what money YouTube itself could earn, so what did they do? They started restricting ads from being shown on content that could even be remotely considered controversial, and that seemed to do the job well enough to appease most advertisers.
Content creators, on the other hand, well, if their content was detected as even remotely controversial, that was the end of that – the video would get demonetized. Sure, an appeal could be made but in many cases the content wouldn’t be up for much debate on its acceptability, so manual review proved pointless. Naturally, the bigger content creators got pissed that they were, and still are losing money, which is understandable, and given the content some of them discuss, there really aren’t many ways around the loss of advertising revenue, which I will fully admit isn’t cool for someone properly discussing sensitive issues properly, much as major news agencies would.
[adinserter block="3"]
Here’s where things get odd: I’ve seen more than a few moderate sized creators say that it was smaller YouTube channels that caused this.
I’m absolutely amazed. I really shouldn’t be though – these are the same people, from what I’ve seen, who think that small time content creators shouldn’t be upset that they are losing monetization, so it seems their ability to care about the “little guy” is non-existent.
Still, to outright lie like that? To act like the issues with PewDiePie, among a myriad of other well known YouTube content creators saying things or making videos that companies decided “no, I don’t want to put my ads on this” didn’t happen? To act like somehow a person who gets 30 views on an average video is somehow to blame?
Bullshit.
The roots of Adpocalypse are incredibly well documented. Don’t go trying to put it off on us just because you’re mad you aren’t making as much as you used to for sitting in front of a camera rambling about video game news or other shit. Maybe, just maybe, you should take the same advice you give to all of us with smaller channels and go get a job to supplement that income you lost.
Seriously, wanting to blame the “little guy” on your lost revenue when it’s the top-tier channel owners doing pretty much whatever they want that caused the problem to begin with? That’s pathetic.
Adpocalypse affected small YouTubers as well – I’ve had a few videos demonetized (a video I did on all 3 U;nee albums was demonetized, for example, because I mention her suicide in the video – an appeal got things fixed, but nonetheless it was an example of the system automatically detecting what I said in the video and flagging it as not suitable) but generally have had no issues beyond a few videos. Indeed, I actually noticed my ad revenue was better during Adpocalypse than it had been in the past! Of course, this doesn’t matter now as in a few days I, like many others, will lose monetization under YouTube’s new policy, but that’s already been discussed here.
Get off your high horse Rich.
Ooops, did I let a name slip? My bad.
Trying to get anywhere with a small channel these days is like trying to single handedly conquer a fortress or something. The metaphorical ‘wall’ was already enough to put some people off and all these people looking down on us doesn’t help.