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Comment by dottrap | Hacker News Reader

YouTube has been demonetizing everything across the board, from gaming videos to non-political sketch comedies, and without much explanation.

This is all part of the "Adpocalypse" that YouTube content creators have been complaining about this past year.

Content creators are left guessing why many of their videos are being demonetized. Even fairly bland material gets demonetized by "the algorithm". Some speculate just having a somewhat risqué hashtag or image in the poster image is enough to get demonetized.

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Realistically, this is the natural consequence of our current political climate. When you offend [group X] and they go after your advertisers, it's effective.

Advertisers naturally say "I don't want to be associated with anything/anyone controversial, so let's exclude those!"

The problem is that most things are "controversial" to some group.. therefore, large swaths of content are no longer "advertiser appropriate" and all creators suffer.

That has nothing to do with the current political climate. Advertisers were reluctant to advertise against anything not perfectly anodyne 20 years ago. This was a perennial problem for us at early community site bianca.com.

The specific things that people complain about has changed, sure. At the time the US right was much better at the game, insisting that everything be "family friendly". And at the time, anything GLBTQ related was seen as "not family friendly".

That has changed, though. For example, support for gay marriage has flipped, going from a minority position to a majority one:

http://news.gallup.com/poll/210566/support-gay-marriage-edge...

That's what makes YouTube's behavior here particularly notable. If, say, relationship advice is monetizable but GLBTQ relationship advice isn't, then that feels like going back to the dark ages.

This is a positive development if it forces content creators to look for platforms that are not ad-funded, and thus precipitates the death of the publisher business model that is beholden to advertisers.

Hopefully in 20 years we can look back and say that Facebook was the last major corporation to be built on ad revenue.

Why, why hasn't Pornhub or anyone else capitalized on this yet?

I mention Pornhub specifically because people seem to use them as a goto for posting uncensored not-necessarily pornographic content, but clearly Google's policies are creating an opportunity for a competitor to take in all of the content they no longer want.

I know there are a ton of streaming sites out there but no one seems to be positioning themselves (as far as I can tell) as, specifically, an adult (but not necessarily adult) alternative to Youtube?

The number one YouTube channel in size by subscribers, PewDiePie, said the N word live on stream and his fan base essentially attacked people who came out as offended.

I love the part of YouTube that gives you an incredibly personal insight on intelligent people, but I think there is a huge problem with how much leeway the content creators have and are still able to make money. And the fact that this harms the smaller channels like videogamedunkey that doesn't say racist things is extremely disheartening.

I don't have an opinion here other than it sucks that you can't just give people money based on how many people watch their videos.

I think it should be made clear that he didn't just say "nigger"; he actually called someone that.

Well, listen to a few rap tracks and you'll hear many, many people being called that, loudly, clearly, repeatedly.

You're being downvoted because you're completely deaf to context.

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