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YouTube Wants Content Creators To Appeal Demonetization, But It's Not Always That Easy

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This article is more than 6 years old.

One of the big, controversial stories over the past few months has been the demonetization of content on YouTube. The 'Adpocalypse' has hit YouTubers who deal with controversial subject matter, video games, gun reviewers and historians, as nervous advertisers pause their ad campaigns while YouTube scrambles for a solution.

For some content creators, the past few months have been such a rough stretch that they've turned to Patreon, a website that allows musicians, YouTubers and other creative types to offer a subscription service for fans. Others skip crowd-funding and find that YouTube Red, a $9.99 subscription service Google offers, can help make up the difference in lost advertising revenue.

Still others remain mysteriously unscathed.

Age Of Adpocalypse

The 'Adpocalypse' began over two separate incidents. The first was when it came to light that terrorist groups like Hezbollah were using YouTube to upload and monetize videos promoting terrorism.

The second occurred when Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg made a video that included men he had paid to hold signs that read 'Death to all Jews.' Kjellberg insisted his video was satirical in nature and has since apologized. But since his channel remains the largest on YouTube, and since he was partnered with Disney's Maker Studios at the time and worked closely with YouTube Red on original content, the backlash was intense, and the reverberations were felt throughout the YouTube community.

The two revelations combined spooked advertisers, and the resulting downturn in revenue for many content creators has been brutal. I've spoken with YouTube, and while they say that advertisers are returning, they also emphasized how important it is that content creators appeal demonetization.

Machine Learning

A new yellow demonetization icon has been added to the video manager that allows creators to see when one of their videos has been flagged. This indicates that the video is in something of a purgatory, and an appeal may result in that video being monetized once more.

Since YouTube uses machines to determine which videos are flagged for demonetization, and the only way for those machines to 'learn' and improve their filtering capabilities is for YouTubers to appeal.

Here's how the company put it in a recent blog post:

We’ve heard questions about why the monetization status is applied so quickly after upload (including with unlisted and private videos). This is because in the first few hours of a video upload we use machine learning to determine if a video meets our advertiser-friendly guidelines. This also applies to scheduled live streams, where our systems look at the title, description, thumbnail and tags even before the stream goes live. We know our system doesn’t always get it right, so if you see a yellow icon in your Video Manager and feel our automated systems made a mistake, please appeal. As noted above, an appeal gets sent to a human reviewer and their decisions help our systems get smarter over time. Deleting the video and re-uploading won't help.

However, it's important to note that not all channels or videos will get an actual human reviewer for every appeal:

Because we’re a platform that has hundreds of millions of videos, we have to set parameters around which appealed videos get reviewed first to make sure we review those videos that are getting substantial traffic. Right now, our team of expert reviewers look at appealed videos with more than 1,000 views in the past 7 days. If you want to check the monetization status before making the video public, you can upload it as unlisted. If you think we got it wrong and your channel has more than 10,000 subscribers, you can appeal, and we will review your unlisted video regardless of view count. We do this because we want to make sure that videos from channels that could have early traffic to earn money are not caught in a long queue behind videos that get little to no traffic and have nominal earnings.

YouTube's hope is that machine learning will eventually sort all of this out, but in the meantime that's left a number of channels with vastly depleted revenue.

No Clear Answers

I spoke with popular YouTuber John "Totalbiscuit" Bain to try to get a better understanding of how content creators view the issue, and while Bain notes that just three of his many thousands of videos have been demonetized, he also has no idea why he's been spared.

"The problem is they have an unholy amount of video uploaded to their service every minute," Bain tells me. "They don't have enough people to monitor all of it, and they have no interest in monitoring all of it. But it's gotten to the point where advertisers are not okay with that anymore, so the solution is, "Let's get a machine to do it." The problem is they can only really use that in the live environment. They can't do it in any kind of test environment. It's got to go live, and that means it's going to affect real people.

"Right now, the problem is that the machine isn't operating in a logical way. It's demonetizing videos that don't seem to have any logical reason behind the demonetization, and their communication with partners is next to zero. We don't know what they want us to do, and if they want us to fix things, they can't expect us to just guess what exactly those things are."

One problem with the current system, Bain says, is that if a video is demonetized and isn't monetized again very quickly, content creators could lose out on the most important time in the video's life-cycle when "by the time the appeal goes through, the lion's share of the views that that video is ever going to get have probably been and gone, so you've lost out on the majority of your income from that video."

But older videos can pose a unique problem as well, Bain notes, since content creators may not even notice that they've been demonetized in order to star the appeals process.

"A video of mine of a game that came out a couple of years ago probably isn't very relevant now," he says, "but if it gets a huge update or if it goes on sale, it suddenly becomes more relevant again. But now, that video might be demonetized, so when that second round of relevance comes in, I'm unable to earn off of that."

Communication Is Key

Bain's solution to all of this is for YouTube to communicate better with content creators. He tells me, "if they're going to insist on doing the whole machine learning thing, which does make sense considering the size of their platform, then they need to be very clear about what exactly it is that they want their creators to do. By not communicating that, that means that we can't alter our content in a way that works for them and for advertisers.

"This is not new," he adds. "They have consistently failed to communicate with us up to this point and now, during a time when creators are suffering very badly and so is the YouTube platform [...] We can't put out the content that they want that is safe and appropriate for these advertisers so that we can get all of this fixed."

The problem, it seems, is finding a way to do that when there are so many content creators out there and such a vast amount of content. Bain attributes some of the lack of communication to the dwindling role of networks on YouTube.

"The way that it used to be is upon as we got signed up to multichannel network, and the network would kind of act as a union and Google would kind of connect with them. They'd communicate with the network, and if they wanted some content made, they could talk to that and say, "Hey, who've you got in your network that may be appropriate for this?" or all that kind of thing. But networks have sort of... a lot of them have collapsed, and a lot of them shrunk. Their influence has sort of waned.

"Frankly," he adds, "I think that they just don't have a way to do it. They have no centralized location to communicate with their partners, and they have made no effort to really establish one either. To do so now would probably take a long time. This is the kind of thing that should've been done a long, long time ago, but it's maybe a bit too late for that. It's hard to say."

This makes sense, and actually lines up pretty well with my other research into this issue. There's little doubt in my mind that YouTube is having a hard time communicating with content creators, and so conspiracy theories and misinformation spreads like weeds. Indeed, YouTube is already prone to conspiracy videos, so it's no surprise that we've seen cries of political censorship and so forth. Of course, it's in YouTube's interest to have as many videos monetized as possible also. The ideal situation would be the right ads in front of the right videos. That way everyone wins. Viewers click on ads which is a win for advertisers, helps monetize content, and puts money in Google's pocket. The trick, right now, is figuring out how to make that work.

A Light At The End Of The Tunnel

The good news is that advertisers do appear to be coming back. Certainly YouTube believes they are. It's just incredibly hard to tell for sure when you're on the other side of the aisle.

"From what I've heard, they are slowly coming back," Bain tells me, "but there is not a lot of proof of it. That's really the problem. We don't have a way to know whether or not monetization is getting worse or better because it's so inconsistent across platforms. My channel is and hasn't been touched, honestly. I'm making just as much as I always was.

"But for other people, it's gone through the floor. We're essentially trying to piece together a complete picture from tiny scraps of information without YouTube telling us anything, so really, the sense of what is going on is complete confusion at the moment. There is no objective data to help us come to that conclusion."

While there's some cause for concern---another controversy involving PewDiePie has just rocked the YouTube community---Bain is ultimately optimistic, though he has little doubt that some content creators won't be able to weather the storm.

"I think it'll leave in itself out of the time, honestly," he tells me. "Google is too big a platform and too big an advertising provider for advertisers not to be on it, at least in some form. This kind of thing can happen. It can scare people away. They generally come back once everything has died down, and that is probably what's going to happen here. If nonsense like Pewdiepie's latest outburst keeps happening, that is going to probably keep people away for longer. They don't want to be associated with that kind of thing. But once everything has calmed down, yeah, they'll probably come back.

"The thing is that, in the meantime, one has to wonder how many content creators are going to be damaged by this, how many people are going to have to stop working on this full-time. Ultimately, if you're an independent content creator, you should never be putting all your eggs in one basket anyway. You should be absolutely creating multiple revenue streams so that if one collapses, you can rely on others. But that's easier said than done, and it's hard to do that when you are struggling to make ends meet in the first place. We may very well fix this, but we may lose a lot of channels in the process, which, in turn, devalues YouTube as a platform because there is less variety on the platform and less good content available."

For now, content creators will need to try to sort things out on their own as best as possible. That means appealing every demonetization and could also mean turning to Patreon, Twitch or other potential revenue streams.

There may be a light at the end of the Adpocalypse, but it's not over yet.

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