Google‘s ad issues in the UK will result in more staff hires as they have openly discussed how they will be investing more of their time to regulate YouTube videos that carry a hateful undertone and message. Google has had recent issues with big brands and companies like major banks whose ads have been spotted showing up on YouTube videos that included negative homophobic and anti-Semitic messages. Not wanting their brands to be associated with these sorts of messages, companies have been pulling their adverts from the YouTube videos.
The reason for hiring more staff will be so that they have additional people who are able to devote time to looking over videos and remove the ads where needed, as Google has stated before that they simply didn’t have enough staff on hand to keep up with the amount of videos that are uploaded per minute, which is about 400 hours of video. YouTube already has a policy in place for videos that recommend or support extremism and will attempt to remove ads from these videos in as little as a few hours after being alerted to the video, so it’s possible that they’ll be looking to do the same with other negative videos where advertisements for big brands are present. In addition to hiring more people to regulate the ads for these videos, Google is also going to be updating their policies revolving around advertisements and part of the changes to the policies will include more control for companies over their ads, though at the moment Google hasn’t elaborated on how companies will have more control.
Beyond the improved ad control, Google wants to make ad locations easier to spot for the companies that the ads belong to so they have improved visibility of who their ads are reaching. YouTube will also be looking into altering their guidelines for what types of content can be uploaded which should help to prevent ads from showing up on hate-filled videos, as there would likely be less of these types of videos on the platform. YouTube ads are a big source of income for Google and the UK is the second largest source of that ad income, second to the U.S., so Google is working to resolve the issues as fast as they can.