Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 461 posts

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#61

Post by Feniks »

watwut wrote: post #44
TheCoreh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they could create two separate ad categories by including an option like "Allow ad to be displayed on potentially controversial, offensive or profane content". That way instead if being demonetized videos could simply be moved to this bucket and get ads from less high profile brands, that don't care about this.

Advertisers from France will never agree with advertisers from America on what is controversial. Not even speaking about advertisers from Saudi Arabia.

Excellent point. Saying vagina in the Netherlands isn't a big deal, in the US the FCC would be calling your boss.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#63

Post by simias »

FussyZeus wrote: post #5

Am I the only person who's thoroughly tired of YouTube attempting to be family friendly? I'm not defending the videos with the kids characters doing sick things, that's NSFL stuff, but the constant focus on family friendly content is killing basically all of the channels I really enjoy watching. I thought YouTube was supposed to be for everyone, not just the same lowest-common-denominator mashed potatoes content you…

They don't care about being family friendly, they want to be advertiser friendly. It's harder to sell ads on a controversial platform.

I find it hard to blame youtube for that frankly. They're a completely rational actor here. If you decide to tie all your income from a 3rd party platform who doesn't care about you and what you're doing you have to have a contingency plan for when you'll get screwed over. It's the same story with people developing app store apps, except arguably worse because it's more straightforward to monetize your applications without having to rely on ads or 3rd party services.

I think this complaining by big creators is rather pointless because they have nothing to bargain with. Most of them need youtube a lot more than youtube needs them, with the possible exception of maybe a few very high profile youtubers.

As long as Youtube won't have any serious competition nothing will change on that front I'm afraid. The network effect is too strong, you can't just start self-hosting and expect to get a similar exposition.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#64

Post by ashark »

sbjustin wrote: post #13

We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen. Then these weird videos started showing up. We took youtube away for exactly these videos that are mentioned in this link. These are targeting children and it's sick.

> We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen.

It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her.

My son, on the other hand...

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#65

Post by j-c-hewitt »

Youtube went the wrong direction with ad targeting. It chased after huge brand advertising budgets while essentially trying to portray Youtube as equivalent to TV.

If they had instead aimed to make Youtube more similar to Adwords in terms of trying to show content-relevent ads on the right content, much of this wouldn't have become an issue later on with people basically spamming Google and the wrong ads showing up on irrelevant content.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#66

Post by Feniks »

ghaff wrote: post #43
mtgx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can Google "Adpocalypse" for more info on this. Here are a couple of articles on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters... http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/05/04/how-youtube-adpocalypse... It started when some big advertisers made waves about their ads being placed on "extremist" videos on YouTube. Some quit Google's network at the time, too. To beg them back, Google essentially started re…

Is this even slightly surprising (or unreasonable)? An ad placement agency--which is effectively what google is acting as from an advertising perspective--wants safe, uncontroversial placements for at least most of their clients, especially big mainstream ones. They're mostly not looking for "edgy." The main surprise to me is that advertising support for a fair bit of non-mainstream content has held up as long as it…

No its not. Companies care about their brand and have always wanted some assurance that their ads don't show up in something controversial.

There is actually a really simple solution here that nobody wants to talk about.

DO NOT MONETIZE YOUR VIDEO

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#67

Post by asveikau »

reustle wrote: post #9

It's (un)surprising how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism, while holding steady on their radio silence regarding the large amounts of huge creators who are getting demonetized and community strikes against their accounts. Nearly every big channel I watch has posted a video complaining about it in the past 2 months, with many just this week. Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are…

As a parent I must say if they acted quickly here I would like to know what acting slowly looks like. The creepy, scammy, sometimes illicit toy video thing has been going for years and this is the first I have heard of any crackdown.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#68

Post by fapjacks »

mynewtb wrote: post #32
tmaly wrote: post #8

What I find interesting is when you have parental controls on, and your playing a kids video, the advertisements are not something a kid should be shown.

How on earth can parents willingly expose their children to any kind of advertisement is beyond me. Adblocking is a must. Especially at such young age, you should know and control all manipulative media your kid consumes.

RIGHT. People complaining about these bizarre violent videos but they'll sit their kids in front of mind control all day.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#69

Post by imustbeevil »

ravenstine wrote: post #55
reustle wrote: post #9

It's (un)surprising how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism, while holding steady on their radio silence regarding the large amounts of huge creators who are getting demonetized and community strikes against their accounts. Nearly every big channel I watch has posted a video complaining about it in the past 2 months, with many just this week. Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are…

A couple channels I used to enjoy have clearly limited their swearing, probably because they are afraid of losing their livelihood. I just see this as yet another reason to have adblock installed. Hope you're learning to enjoy cable TV again, folks!

YouTube hosts, monetizes, and promotes their content for free, and you're upset they can't curse as much anymore.

People like Philip Defranco, while still pointing out the damage YouTube is doing to the ecosystem, monetize outside of YouTube to maintain control of their product. If the people you watch don't have a Patreon / Sponsors / merch, they are willingly submitting to the YouTube monetization algorithm. It feels kind of entitled to want to get money from YouTube ads, but not produce content that those advertisers are willing to place ads on.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#70

Post by teddyh »

mynewtb wrote: post #32
tmaly wrote: post #8

What I find interesting is when you have parental controls on, and your playing a kids video, the advertisements are not something a kid should be shown.

How on earth can parents willingly expose their children to any kind of advertisement is beyond me. Adblocking is a must. Especially at such young age, you should know and control all manipulative media your kid consumes.

In my jurisdiction, any and all advertisement aimed at children is illegal, full stop. It continuously amazes me that this is not the norm in the rest of the world.
Post reply on HN