While demonetization isn’t technically censorship, it is discouragement and disincentivizing, which can have a similar effect as censorship without its messiness.
If YouTube's advertisers don't want to be funding more arty or niche content, then there needs to be a 2nd platform that caters to arty content and has niche advertisers. This stuff that is getting demonitised all looks pretty interesting, there has to be a market here that YouTube is giving up. Even if maybe it is small.
I think it's important to be very clear on the correct timeline. Tiny activist groups like "Sleeping Giants" put pressure on advertisers, and got a hashtag trending (back when it was easy to get hashtags trending, before Twitter changed it so that they had to manually approve each hashtag before it showed up on the right-hand sidebar). A few advertisers listened, and pulled their ads from YouTube. It was obviously absolutely incredibly insanely obvious that they were bluffing. YouTube is the most-visited site in the world after Google Search. But YouTube folded instead of calling their bluff; now here we are.
This isn't something anybody really wanted. Advertisers did it to look good for a few days on Twitter, in a very low-ad-spend period anyway (didn't cost them anything). They were planning on letting YouTube make a tiny concession, and resuming their ads. YouTube didn't have to fold; they just panicked. They could have given Fortune 500 advertisers the ability to blacklist channels their ads appear on, and it would have gone away. They mismanaged that crisis completely (and it was far from the last).
>They could have given Fortune 500 advertisers the ability to blacklist channels their ads appear on
That's just... I don't have words to describe,but the sheer laziness in failing to write what any non expert outsider would probably write down among the first few obvious requirements for a advertising platform, is stunning.
I witnessed it in real-time and discussed it with marketer/advertiser friends who have good industry knowledge. I don't know if anyone documented the behind-the-scenes. Note that I may have misremembered the name of the main group behind it (might not have been Sleeping Giants back then).
YouTube isn't banning the content, they're just saying they can't show ads next to it which honestly, seems like common sense.
It's a PR solution; it's not supposed to please engineering, systematizing left-brained people, but to calm down a Twitter mob. YouTube had more than enough market power to simply force advertisers to comply, and advertisers were begging to be given a tiny concession in order to end their boycott while saving face.
This solution would have avoided the adpocalypse entirely.
What does the an advertiser having to spend countless hours finding which channels they don't want to be associated with have to do with engineering? Nothing.
"It's not supposed to please engineering-minded people, systematizing people, left-brained people." I'm talking people like you, who indeed don't think like the advertisers who just wanted a braindead controversy to go away; solving it was unnecessary for YouTube or for advertisers.
The recent case of the father sending groin region photographs to doctor via google (?) services and being flagged for "inapropriate child content" is one example of where exceptions should be made.
I'm now aware of this channel - I have no issue with its content and feel it should have as much access to income streams as any other vlogger.
There are audiences for all manner of content, surgeons have an interest in "gore" videos that relates to injury, treatment, and things often pixelated out.
Those in the social sciences want to see stories such as these in this channel to better understand issues and impacts of policy.
This is an area that needs better human judgement and oversight, if youtube wants to deter OnlyFansOG style videos then they should do so in a manner that doesn't also swat channels such as this example.
To avoid making their customers angry, YouTube doesn’t show any ads next to videos that have anything to do with sex.
Next, because these videos don’t provide any revenue for YouTube they don’t have a big incentive to keep them online. In fact they do have an incentive to be quick at pulling them down.
Aye there's the rub. Not everyone thinks the way you do.
Finally, sex-related content is a hot button issue related to children. One "sex positive" state, California, just passed a law to come up with yet another way to "protect the children". If you demonetize all of the content with broad strokes you can go to the states and say you comply with their rules.
It's far, far more complicated than "collective normalization". One could even argue that could have blowback that we can't measure. Sex-related content extends far beyond a simple female breast or a tutorial on using a condom.
Imagine if instead, it was framed as: "YouTube makes money off YouTubers' content; their 45% cut is entirely parasitic, YouTube is price-gouging and rent-seeking due to stronger network effects than any other platform on Earth; and YouTube creators are entitled to keep 100% (or, let's say 90% after hosting and fees) of the revenue they generate, not 55%." (yeah, Google's cut is 45%, not 30%, hah. 30% is practically a gift.)
See how bad that would be for Google? So they go all in on the colorful, bubbly, "we care about you"-teddy-bear, 'Sleeping Giants' train, because they'd rather have progressivism than "Marxism." I just wonder how it's been so effective, and why they garner so much less criticism than the App Store for doing far worse (there's no "video platform duopoly" unlike App Stores, it's just a monopoly).
YouTube's official position is that the monetization status of a video is not a factor in search and discovery, and that is probably true. But according to YouTube, all of the factors that impact advertiser friendliness (read: monetization) are factors in search and discovery.