Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

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> Honestly, I don't think Google cares per se. They just don't want the hassle of another adpocalypse. The issue comes from advertisers not wanting to be seen promoting certain things.

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).

The thing is most companies don't want the extra work in finding who they don't want to be associated with. They would much rather the platform didn't allow the possibility of their ads being shown next to content of a specific type.

YouTube isn't banning the content, they're just saying they can't show ads next to it which honestly, seems like common sense.

> The thing is most companies don't want the extra work in finding who they don't want to be associated with

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.

> It's a PR solution; it's not supposed to please engineering,

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.

Grammar.

"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.

Grammar.

I'm fascinated to learn more specifically about this sequence of events. Can you suggest any good sources?

>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'm fascinated to learn more specifically about this sequence of events. Can you suggest any good sources?

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).

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