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YouTube Loses Major Advertisers Over Offensive Videos (rollingstone.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rolling Stone: Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies have pulled advertisements from YouTube after learning they were paired with videos promoting extremism, terrorism and other offensive topics, The New York Times reports. Among the other companies involved are pharmaceutical giant GSK, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and L'Oreal, amounting to a potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Google-owned company. The boycott began last week after a Times of London investigation spurred many major European companies to pull their ads from YouTube. American companies swiftly followed, even after Google promised Tuesday to work harder to block ads on "hateful, offensive and derogatory" videos. Like AT&T, most companies are only pulling their ads from YouTube and will continue to place ads on Google's search platforms, which remain the biggest source of revenue for Google's parent company, Alphabet. Still, the tech giant offered up a slew of promises to assuage marketers and ensure them that they were fixing the problems on YouTube. Due to the massive number of videos on YouTube -- about 400 hours of video is posted each minute -- the site primarily uses an automated system to place ads. While there are some failsafes in place to keep advertisements from appearing alongside offensive content, Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler wrote in a blog post that the company would hire "significant numbers" of employees to review YouTube videos and mark them as inappropriate for ads. He also said Google's latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning will help the company review and flag large swaths of videos.
So let me get this straight -- racists, misogynists, and terrorists are going to benefit from an ad-free experience, and yet my 6 year old daughter has to put up with ads for mortgages and makeup and other adult stuff when she wants to watch kids videos? WTF did we ever do to you Google that dirtbags get an out from Youtube ads, but the rest of us have to suffer?
Yaz
There was a time when I really enjoyed browsing youtube videos. And I didn't really mind a little advertisement break here and there.
But what killed youtube for me - was the now forced (unskippable) ads that often last well into 30 seconds or more, just for checking out a video. I like seeing if I want to watch this or not, now there's a forced ad on every second video I decide to check.
Now, before my dear Slashdotters say "well, you can use adblocker" etc, please keep in mind that a lot of us watch youtube on our "smart-tv" devices, Nintendos, Xbox's Youtube app etc.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
These companies have been putting so much effort into detecting "hate speech," but the number of times that my wife has had to hit the home button on the Roku to stop a horror movie trailer or something equally inappropriate on content appropriate for preschoolers is truly appalling. But we're not triggered, we just deal with it so we don't count.
Well, you know what they say about all good things.
Given Europe's attitude towards hate speech and how they enforce "right to be forgotten", I'm surprised that they haven't already erected a GFW at this point and outright blocked youtube, facebook, and twitter, and/or just outright blocked any and all content that might offend somebody in some way unless the police in Germany and France can be given special moderator permissions to delete content as they please.
You were going to say that no matter whether it was relevant of not (which it isn't)
It's absolutely relevant if it's true. Youtube is being very cagey about exactly what videos it means here. The meaning of words like "derogatory" vary SIGNIFICANTLY depending on who you're asking.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.