Sep 07, 2022 15:00:00

Clearly YouTube was on the verge of abolishing the most profitable ``brand advertisement''

In the book '

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination, ' authored by Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was in charge of operating all of Google's advertising technologies, including YouTube, , It has been revealed that they were considering abolishing all brand ads, that is, video ads played before and after YouTube videos similar to traditional TV commercials. In addition, Mr. Ramaswamy's proposal seems to have agreed with YouTube's top executives, including Susan Wojski CEO and Neil Mohan CPO.

YouTube Nearly Pulled 'Brand Ads' Over Elsagate Vids, Book Says
https://gizmodo.com/youtube-elsagate-kids-videos-like-comment-subscribe-1849501198

At a conference held in November 2017, Mr. Ramaswamy proposed to abolish YouTube's brand advertising. Branded ads on YouTube are ads that bring in far more revenue than other ads. The reason why we considered stopping the distribution of brand advertisements, which is one of the revenue sources that Google cannot ignore, was that YouTube at that time was suffering from ' Elsagate '. 'Elsagate' is a situation in which videos dealing with inappropriate themes for children are spread as content for families, and as a result, YouTube has been temporarily suspended from ad distribution by major customers such as Adidas.

Regarding YouTube at that time, Mr. Bergen pointed out that ``YouTube was building the world's largest children's entertainment service, but it could not be said that it was fully considering the content there.''

However, YouTube is looking for another way to deal with Elsagate, removing ads from as many as 2 million videos. An additional 2 million YouTube channels have been disabled for monetization and ads have been removed from those channels. In addition, it seems that the total number of videos with ads removed was played tens of billions of times.

YouTube removes ads from 2 million movies, why? -GIGAZINE

``YouTube was considering unplugging its largest commercial product,'' Bergen said. In addition, YouTube's sales in 2017 were 8 billion dollars (about 1.1 trillion yen).

One of the shocking stats about Elsagate is that an internal report prepared by Disney noted that 'the total number of Disney promotional video uploads per month is 1 billion, compared to the movie 'Ana and I'. An unauthorized amateur video featuring Elsa from The Snow Queen had 13 billion views per month.'

The impact that Elsagate had on YouTube was so great that it fundamentally changed the way children's content was approached. At the time of writing the article, it is necessary to tag the video uploaded to YouTube with 'whether it is content for children' or not, and in the case of content for children, it will not be possible to deliver targeted advertisements.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission fined YouTube and Google $ 170 million (about 24 billion yen) for violating the child privacy law at Elsagate.