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So, you raise some interesting points, but this morning I saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw Denys Davydov is a Ukrainian, hometown Sevastopol, whose channel was mostly about his life as a commercial aviation pilot until the war started. He does not show any of the sort of content you discuss, and is definitely not cheerleading anyone's death. He started a Telegram channel recently so that he could post videos which he did not think would be wanted on a YouTube channel. He never posted videos that showed actual killing, nor did he otherwise cross the line you describe. Nonetheless, he's demonetized today, apparently.

Which all suggests, there is something going on other than "no cheerleading deaths".

I doubled my Patreon contribution to Denys this morning.

Patreon offers no way to add a one-time boost, which sucks.

Also added one for Suchomimus, who I assume has also been hit.

Except he is VERY subjective towards Ukrainians and cheering for their gains in war which falls within "condones, exploits or dismisses". His channel is a propaganda for Ukrainians, understandably so. Denys has higher quality content and I watch him from time to time but this is business. When/If this war ends you will have the entire "woke" population turning on YT for monetising this type of content, benefiting from death and drama of war.

Now let's say you're on the other end, an advertiser that pays for placements, and you see your ads showing on videos where people literally die on camera, with funny reactions, videos and sounds. Do you think that it has the potential of ruining your business or not? Sorry to say but I take YT's side in this matter.

I think it's a very rare viewer who actually thinks the advertiser YouTube slapped on a video actually condones or even saw what is in the video.

Nobody thinks an advertiser paid for a video of death and destruction. Everyone knows that sort of content is 100% between the uploader and YouTube.

>Denys Davydov is a Ukrainian, hometown Sevastopol, whose channel was mostly about his life as a commercial aviation pilot until the war started. He does not show any of the sort of content you discuss, and is definitely not cheerleading anyone's death [...] Which all suggests, there is something going on other than "no cheerleading deaths".

Couple of possibilities:

- it may be a temporary false-positive for demonetization : their A.I. algorithm with (with imperfect heuristics) scanned a bunch of channels for controversial Ukraine content and automatically demonetized them skipping any human judgement. In some cases, the youtubers appeal it and they get re-monetized again. As an example, the youtube aviation channel "blancolirio" went through this. He started making videos about Boeing 737-MAX which automatically got de-monetized by the algorithm because it had "737MAX" in the titles but his later crash-analysis videos got monetized after human review. E.g. He wrote[1] "(Note: after initially demonetizing this video, after a human review YT re-monetized it...Why? I have No Idea.)" And his recent video analyzing Las Vegas plane crash is also monetized with Youtube ads.[2]

- Youtube suddenly got stricter about the Ukraine topic so more channels are getting caught up in the dragnet. If that's the case, hopefully the high-quality channels will appeal and a human reviewing it will turn on monetization again. I'm guessing a quality channel like Perun will pass human review and get re-monetized to override the auto-demonetization. However, the channel (Artur Rehi) cited by this particular thread probably will not because his type of content is not "advertiser-friendly".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8_vl3theT8, [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Up_Cw8X-g

The term 'demonetization' can be misleading. It's the creator who is demonetized on a demonetized video or channel. YouTube still often shows ads on such videos, it just keeps all the money instead of 45% of it.

Is this true? I don't think they show any pre-roll ads, mid roll ads or post roll ads on demonetizrd content.

The only ad they show is a regular display and on the right hand side out of the video frame, and as far as I know revenue from that ad is never given to the creator anyway.

See for instance the replies to this guy's clever idea yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubers/comments/xxlkvi/using_dem...

It may depend on what country you're in or if you're on mobile or not. I wouldn't know for certain, I'm a uBO/NewPipe man.

> It's the creator who is demonetized on a demonetized video or channel. YouTube still often shows ads on such videos, it just keeps all the money instead of 45% of it.

I may be wrong but I don't see evidence that Youtube continues showing ads on demonetized content like these explicit Ukraine war videos. The reason is that the advertisers who pay money to Google don't want their brands associated with certain types of lurid content. (See Adpocalypse: https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...)

So, Google is being extra strict with ads on these videos to avoid an angry call from a giant advertiser like Proctor & Gamble complaining, "Why are you showing my dish soap ads on a video of a naked guy getting killed while pooping?!?" (E.g.: https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...)

There also may be some confusion about some videos with ads and creators not getting the money: the creator has not been accepted into the Partner Program for revenue sharing. Yes, in those cases, the creators are not getting ad $$$ -- even for safe advertiser-friendly videos.

But these Ukraine demonetization videos seem more like not repeating the Adpocalypse debacle and Google will not run ads on them.

Of course, Google/Youtube's system isn't perfect so there will be false-positives. Will there be indecent videos that Google improperly display ads on? Yes. Will there also be high-quality channels that got unfairly demonetized even if advertisers would have no objection to their content? Yes.

I just opened the YouTube android app and looked at some videos from this channel. I saw three ads from about 15 videos watched. I then looked at some videos from an apolitical channel I'm subscribed to and saw considerably more ads. They also seemed to be 'higher quality' in some sense. The ads on the Ukraine channel were for things like an earwax removal tool. The ads on the other channel were for luxury sunglasses, a political party†, and so on.

You're quite right that there's some confusion between Partner Program eligibility and demonetization proper. This Ukraine war creator actually talks about being removed from the Partner Program in the video linked in this post.

† It was a deepfake of the current Israeli Prime Minister explaining why I should vote for Shas, a party of which he is most definitely not a member. Not relevant to this issue but too crazy not to mention.

I watch this channel on the regular and... yeeeahhhh this is right on the money. It's definitely not neutral journalistic reporting of the war, and plays pretty fast and loose with "footage that some viewers might find disturbing". Heck, his catchphrase, "Knock em out cold" is pretty obviously a euphemism for killing russian soldiers. If anything I'm surprised he has survived this long without being demonetized or straight up stricken out (Cody's Lab nearly got struck out for far less).

> a war death

You are suggesting that there is some sort of moral equivalence between a Ukrainian fighting a war to defend the existence of their country and a Russian fighting to conquer said country.

That is just sad.

It's OK to cheer when the bad guy has a bad day.

In any case, why would you begrudge someone trying to tell the rest of the world what is going on there? It's not like you're going to find any dispassionate, unopinionated, completely neutral news agency out there. That just doesn't exist.

Post videos cheering the death of US soldiers in the invasion Iraq and you will get demonetized just as fast. It's not about moral equivalency between Russia and Ukraine, it's that advertisers still don't want to be associated with that stuff. So why would Google monetize the channel?

(And by the way there's a massive difference between biaised news, and posting what is basically snuff content... Advertisers have no issue rolling ads on CNN even when it covers wars, but there's a reason why they don't broadcast gore/graphical content.)