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This guy is as wholesome as wholesome can possibly be and he was still demonetized. Wears suits, is cordial with his viewers, doesn't curse... what more could YT want?

HOW? This guy is basically a 1950's white-picket fence gentleman. I think we are seeing a concerted effort to attack major YT channels into leaving YT.

My pet conspiracy theory regarding Youtube is that Google wants to pivot it to compete with Netflix and Amazon, and replace user-submitted content with exclusive, licensed content that might actually make money.

But Google doesn't want to risk the PR nightmare of admitting that they no longer want 99% of their userbase poisoning the well for the 1%, so they use pretexts like demonetizing content to encourage them to go elsewhere.

It's probably not true, but Google either seems to be fantastically inept or malicious at this point, when it comes to their interactions with content creators and their UX.

You can Google "Adpocalypse" for more info on this. Here are a couple of articles on it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters...

http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/05/04/how-youtube-adpocalypse...

It started when some big advertisers made waves about their ads being placed on "extremist" videos on YouTube. Some quit Google's network at the time, too. To beg them back, Google essentially started removing anything that might upset those big advertisers. Like anything at all.

The "demonetization" actually came a bit later when there was backlash against those removals from users, so it was Google's way to "compromise". It wouldn't remove the more "sensitive" (but not extremist) videos, but it would demonetize them without much thought.

Is this even slightly surprising (or unreasonable)? An ad placement agency--which is effectively what google is acting as from an advertising perspective--wants safe, uncontroversial placements for at least most of their clients, especially big mainstream ones. They're mostly not looking for "edgy." The main surprise to me is that advertising support for a fair bit of non-mainstream content has held up as long as it has.

No its not. Companies care about their brand and have always wanted some assurance that their ads don't show up in something controversial.

There is actually a really simple solution here that nobody wants to talk about.

DO NOT MONETIZE YOUR VIDEO

The boundary for what gets demonitized are arbitrary and ridiculous. It's not just people dropping racial slurs or showing graphic violence. It's comedy channels, science channels, etc...

It's probably the only thing they can do, but it really is an awful way to treat people who should be your partners.