There you have it. We expected some serious measures from YouTube following reports that it was placing advertisements next to hate speech and other such unsavory content. The reports caused many prominent advertisers to pull their ads from the company and temporarily suspend their contracts. YouTube is now taking action on the issue and as a corrective measure has limited the videos ads will be available on to display.
Yup. The company has said that it will now block ads on channels that don’t reach a certain number of views. Put more exactly, YouTube will no longer display ads on channels whose vies don’t add up to 10,000 when you take all the videos of the channel into account. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, the company said that it was developing this tool as a way of combating channels that steal content from others and that the tool had been under development from as early as November last year.
It is extremely easy to get a channel to display ads on YouTube. All you need to do is create a channel, add some videos, ask YouTube to run ads on your videos and voilà. This latest condition regarding 10,000 views means that only videos that have actually been watched by a significant audience will be able to play ads. Since users are quite likely to report any offensive content they see, this move means that offensive content that goes mostly unseen — in form of videos with less number of views — will be prevented from hosting any advertisements.
This will also reduce the number of videos that YouTube will have to sift through and review and separate from all other videos on its platform. The company has already list customers such as Pepsico and Coca-Cola. This latest improvement to its policy will allow it to do more reviews on a larger number of videos and remove ones that it deems unfit. This will also prevent videos that are offensive and that have lesser views, from going public.
