Youtube. Tens of millions of people frequent this video-sharing site every minute of every day, with videos beyond counting being viewed and commented upon and shared around the clock. But despite the site's tenure, having been a staple of internet users since its release in 2005, and popularity; there is talk among many YouTubers that they may be on something of a sinking ship now in 2018. For some time, YouTubers have spoken of the ‘adpocoplypse’, referring to many of their videos being demonetized for content that they deem inappropriate for their advertisers.
This was intended to be remedied at the start of this year with Google hiring roughly ten thousand employees to sift through flagged videos on the site to determine if they could be monetized as a direct response to their predecessor, a bot, that seemed almost universally hated. But this past week Google announced that the some of the content was, in fact, graphic enough that the time an individual could spend actually doing this had to be limited. So there is no guarantee that things will improve for YouTubers and, by extension, we the viewers in the near future. But many may still wonder, how did it come to this?
The term ‘adpocolypse’ arose in March of 2017 referring to advertisers boycotting putting their adds on any videos they did not consider family friendly. This caused thousands of videos to be demonetized and put a dent in the income of many YouTubers who relied on the site as their primary source of income. It was, as is often the case, not until the effects of the ‘adpocolypse’ were felt by people like PewDePie and Youtubers of roughly proportionate size that Google was made aware that their way of monitoring their system may be somewhat flawed. But, youtube in many fewer mainstream communities likely will scoff at this 2017 date.
The bot added by Youtube to appease the advertisers worked by searching for tags that may be seen as controversial or potentially violent. In theory, searching tags like war, combat, swords, guns, and so on may sound like a personally reasonable way to accomplish this. The problem is, as was immediately seen by the history and historical combat communities of Youtube, that searching these words out of context can lead to unfortunate results. Whereas the term and focus have only been around since 2017, communities such as these that suffered under the bot started having problems back in 2015.
For many Youtubers in this latter category, the only options they really had were to use Patreon to supplement their ad revenue or to find another site, and it stands to reason that many that have more recently been affected by the ‘adpocolypse’ will be forced to do the same. If ever there were a time for Youtube to address the problem that they have created, it was some time ago. Even now, their efforts to replace the bot with human workers to sift through the flagged videos has backfired to some extent. Only time will tell if this is truly the end of Youtube, but as things are without a drastic change in the very near future it does seem likely that Youtube will go the way of MySpace before too long.
