As part of its updated and expanded guidelines, YouTube is eliminating ads from demeaning, hateful, and ‘incendiary’ videos to stop it from making money through ads. Earlier this year, a global backlash among marketers happened after they found out that their ads appeared on videos that contain inappropriate content. Creators feared about losing revenue after Google cracked down on the ads that were displayed on the controversial videos. Some of these videos were from the Australian identical twins, Racka Racka, who used famous kid characters like Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse in violence and sexual content. Meanwhile, YouTube’s Vice President of Product Management Ariel Bardin expressed his sentiments in a blog post, saying that its California-based video-sharing website should expand its guidelines among additional kinds of content.
YouTube will particularly remove ads from videos containing “hateful” content. Content that discriminates, defames, and humiliates an individual or group of people in terms of their ethnic origin, sexual orientation, race, age, disability, or other characteristics. It will also stop running ads from known family or children characters that display inappropriate behavior including sexual acts and violence. In addition, it will work on stopping videos that have “incendiary and demeaning context” or videos that use foul languages to insult an individual or a group of people. However, the video giant would like to make it clear that these videos will not be removed from YouTube as long as they abide by its terms and conditions. These videos will still appear on the video sharing platform but will not be able to monetize from its ads.
Meanwhile, Bardin stated that its systems aren’t flawless but they are working towards improvement. He also admitted that although they won’t be able to cover all videos, they hope that the information they have provided will give additional awareness about the type of contents that most advertisers don’t want to work with. Last March, brands such as Channel 4, L’Oréal, the FCA, Transport for London, and The Guardian have ceased advertising because of the incident. Meanwhile, over 2 billion ads were removed from YouTube last year while Google has protected more than 300 million advertisements from its videos.