How this somehow translated, in the era of online youtube videos, to the exact opposite is still a mystery to me. So what if your ad appeared next to something radical on youtube? So what if your ads appeared next to some weird sex segment of youtube? People who see it aren't going to confuse the ads with the video, just the same as people watching television isn't confusing the ads with the programme.
This is simply not true. If you go back long enough shows were often sponsored by specific advertisers making the link even stronger than traditional preroll YouTube ads (this practice goes back to radio, so it is even older than TV). It also ended up with bizarre pairings like "'The Flinstones' brought to you by Winston Cigarettes."[1]
Eventually cable TV came along and it didn't have the type of FCC oversight that broadcast TV does. However you generally only see swearing and nudity on premium cable and not basic cable despite no official rules preventing it. The primary reason for this is that basic cable still relies and advertisers while premium cable does not. Basic cable channels still fear advertisers dropping out if their ads are paired with objectionable content. And that is really all that is happening on YouTube. GM doesn't doesn't want their latest car ad to appear in front of a racist manifesto. I don't think that is a particularly unreasonable desire for an advertiser.
Transformers was only advertising for Hasbro. They licensed the toys then made a show around them to sell them.
And as a big Transformers fan as a kid I along with many others fell right for it!
When theories about child-eating democrats are freely stated as facts and picked up ans spun further in the recommendations so that a conspiracy theorist ends up in Congress (and a significant minority of the population is fine with that), then yes, I as a consumer want to execute on my free speech to hold advertisers responsible for sponsoring that.
Look at it like this:
Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.
I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.
This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.
This isn't true. In the past, some viewers have always followed the money trail of a tv show which inevitably leads to the sponsors/advertisers that help fund it. Example of tv advertisers pulling out of controversial topics:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/30/business/main-character-e...
As I've mentioned many times before, there is no media institution on the planet (whether private corporate or public government funded) -- that is immune from censorship because every piece of the chain (creation, distribution, broadcasting, advertising, etc) all require money and money is the ultimate lever to apply pressure via government decrees, consumer boycotts, advertiser boycotts, employee revolts, journalists shaming, etc.
Nobody has invented an implementation that can withstand any pressure to filter content but also be available to the mainstream masses. Google even with its billions has to tame Youtube to placate advertisers. Apple, even with its billions has to placate China. Niche/obscure "censorship-proof" tech like Freenet/IPFS is not for the masses and the desirable content creators can't monetize their effort there.
> For the second time within a year, the Coalition for Better Television is threatening a boycott of one or more companies that advertise on prime-time television, but this time without the support of its most prominent member, the Moral Majority.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...
I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.
At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.
Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.
Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.
In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.
The ad breaks came later as TV realized that the ad was forever part of the show and so they didn't get more money when the did a rerun.
I am sure that you believe it's true, but advertisers have been used to being able to control what content they were put next to for a long time. I don't know whether it matters, or is valuable, but I do know that they have cared for long enough that it has been one of the largest influences on literally what television programs got made (even if this influence appears oblique, it has been one of the primary motivations of the folks making these decisions).
You can make an argument that the Internet allows things to work differently, but I think it was simply a matter of what was practical - once it became ~ practical to start exercising some control over what you're associating your brand with, of course folks would jump to pull that lever.
Things did actually work differently. YouTube doesn't pay for content before it airs, and large amounts of the income for a show happen as it's left up. When YouTube demonitizes - and it can do this for an entire channel - it's not just a single episode either. Nor can the content be shopped around to other platforms as easily.
Even if the station wanted to take down your content, you at least got a station manager calling your production staff and not just a "We're sorry, but you violated our vague ToS." message with no response mechanism in it. It had some element of human review and wasn't susceptible to brigading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Big_Brother_(British...
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.
But what we did see happens is that shows which were likely to provoke a negative response from audiences or advertisers were never produced, in large part for the exact same reasons.
The specific shape of events may look different, but that's the result of democratization, allowing more people to be part of the game where they spend money, make stuff, and get ads run against it.
In the cases where YouTube does pay for stuff before it airs or offers a guarantee on future ads, I am fairly confident the old TV dynamics are at play - they will ensure that the content they are funding will garner viewers and not offend advertisers.
News papers have long had a policy that the advertising department wasn't in control of what the news said. The advertisers didn't like it, but they went with it because they knew that it is what the eyeballs wanted.
There is a fine line though - some companies didn't advertise in particular outlets (playboy is an obvious example), which might or might not work out for them.
The question is where is the power. YouTube is acting like they don't have power here, but in fact they do: a large portion of video is on YouTube, and so if YouTube says "too bad, either give us your money or not", the advertisers will need to pay up. Of course there is a cost to youtube in doing that which they might not be willing to pay: some advertisers will say no. Others will tell youtube fine, but we are not willing to pay as much as you could get if we got more control who sees us.
The question isn't where the power is, the question is how much money does YouTube need/want?
https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/23/verizon-and-att-latest-to...
As any student of history knows, this is hardly a new phenomenon, but it was never before so globally industrialised or automated.
> everyone was happy
"Everyone" ... except for all the people whose lives are made materially worse by the subsequent ease of disseminating hate material & misinformation. Also unhappy: anyone possessing the humanity to feel for others in distress.
> cowed or [...] ideologically sympathetic
Intentional or not, this came across dripping with derision, but it falls flat: the only "ideological sympathy" here is that of being a decent human being.
> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
>This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
Wonderful. And the "asshole" designation that these Elect ("extremely small set of ..." as was put above) - how do they get to decide who's an asshole and gets shown the door, what are their criteria and what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal or ratify their decision-making?
Can we at least agree that censors can make mistakes, or have their own biases? And shouldn't censors be policed as well, so they are accountable to the public?
Again, a statement dripping with derision, that is actually just sticking up for the rights of assholes.
> how do they get to decide who's an asshole
Peddling a message harmful to others.
> what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal
"appeal" is for crooks, not wankers being thrown out of the pub
Your name-calling should be enough for people to raise their eyebrows at the question: who decides what gets censored.
Tip for idiots thrown out of pubs: yelling at the bouncers isn't going to get your name off the landlord's shit-list, and you don't have a right to make everyone listen to your drivel.
Wrong. There are multiple points that come in play here, none of which are as simple as "the activists are protesting against Nazi and conspiracy crap":
First of all, linear TV, radio and newspapers had human reviews in the loop at every stage: client, producer, ad broker, station/paper. That meant that the chance of valuable ads appearing next to bullshit was somewhat next to zero - and also, that "fringe content" was restricted to unscrupulous (or from the same niche) advertisers. Essentially, there was a feedback loop: content that was not mainstream-worthy had no chance of being financed.
Internet advertising and especially social networks with monetization and targeted advertising however, turned up all of that. Suddenly, a Nestle ad could run as a front-roll of Alex Jones lunacy. The result was that an awful lot of really awful content creators had both the technical capability to reach out to millions of people (thanks to the Internet, which eliminated the traditional gatekeepers) and the advertising income that was previously reserved to mainstream-able content.
The result of that, in turn, was an explosion in numbers of these "content creators" and their content (simply because many of them could now actually afford to quit regular jobs)... and thus, combined with the explosion of followers of such content, meant minorities had to suffer from a constant barrage of both online hate speech and real world violence - including many acts of terrorism that claimed human lives, and culminating in the events of January 6th 2021.
What the "extremely small set of activists and journalists" is doing is attempting to rein in the hate and the violence that results of it. And yes, making brands and their advertising agencies aware of what is going on and where their money ends up is a good thing.
There's probably room in the middle somewhere.
Because these extremely small set of activists include the UK’s government and the newspaper The Guardian who pulled their ads due to YouTube placing them next to “extremist content”. Not to mention the numerous US government watchdogs who have been sniffing out a way to thwart google and Facebook for years now.
As far as actual extreme reactionary content.. I don't know what the solution is. I'd put "the middle" as stop promoting them because they hit your engagement metrics, but be much more cautious about banning them, giving them martyrdom points and an incentive to organize better.
Ultimately the villain here is engagement-optimizing recommendation algos. The current situation is a small reactionary channel will be promoted for engagement, until it's big and people notice, and THEN it's banned, with a maximum of negative impact. Worst of all worlds.
With every such news article, YouTube stepped up its game. It culminated with PewdiePie making an "anti-semetic" joke, and this resulted in the Adpocalypse.
So I'd say it was more commercial interests than activism interests, but at times these align.