The adpocalypse.
If this word doesn’t sound familiar to you, then you’ve been living under a rock.
It was a very dark and depressing time for YouTubers as YouTube has become into something
else.
Imagine being held accountable for the massive change on YouTube.
Imagine being not able to pay your rent this month.
This is the history of Youtube advertisers’ boycott.
2017 started very nicely, well kind of.
Mariah Carey’s New Year’s Eve performance was a total failure, Cash Me Ousside meme
was everywhere, and Fidget Spinners started to die, thankfully.
But there’s one event that sparked a major backlash.
In the video, he showed a website called Fiverr.
There’s a section where people can pay actors on Fiverr for $5 to do anything they were
told to do.
He was testing whether the actors would literally do anything for $5.
He ordered some requests (all of them are absurd) but most of them turned down the order.
He was surprised that one of the orders got accepted.
When he found out that they actually did what they were told to do (and you know what I
mean), we can see clearly that he was extremely shocked and felt very guilty about it.
The Wall Street Journal quickly made an article to accuse Pewdiepie as an anti-semite.
A lot of people knew that this article, written by Ben Fritz was obviously taken out of context.
To make matters worse, WSJ did not discuss the matter with Pewdiepie first but contacted
Disney beforehand (at that time, they were working together on a project).
As a result, Disney cut ties with him and the second season of his YouTube Red Series
called Scare Pewdiepie was unfortunately cancelled.
It was all because of one article that started the whole fire.
Wall Street Journal accused Pewdiepie of being an anti-semite when in reality the joke he
made in the video was supposed to show if Fiverr actors are willing to do offensive
things for just $5.00.
Internet users quickly exposed the author of the article, Ben Fritz, and they found
out that he also made anti-Semitic and other racist jokes on Twitter.
This started the whole conversation whether news outlets are reputable and trusted these
days.
It is very shameful of him to accuse others of being racist when he himself is ultimately
and disgustingly racist.
This situation is often discredited as the sole reason the adpocalypse started.
It did not happen until after a couple of months when the UK government and other advertisers
found out that their ads appeared on extremist contents.
These advertisers were displeased with Google for not providing a safe environment for an
advertising platform.
After that, the Wall Street Journal, once again, exposed YouTube for not solving the
issue effectively.
Ads still appeared on controversial videos which caused multiple advertisers to start
pulling out their ads.
H3H3 Production claimed that the Wall Street Journal faked the screenshot on their news
article about ads still appearing on racist videos but Redditors quickly pointed out that
Ethan Klein’s claim was misleading as videos that featured copyrighted music may be shown
with ads, but all revenues are taken by the copyright holder.
As the news broke, more and more advertisers opted out their ads on YouTube.
This massive advertiser boycott is the first wave of the adpocalypse.
Google made the algorithm even stricter to the point that non-controversial videos were
mistakenly demonetized.
This change had affected content creators universally as their source of income plummeted
down to 70% of their usual earnings per day.
To combat this, YouTubers started to use other alternatives to gain revenue, such as Patreon
and merch selling.
Pewdiepie had a rough year in 2017.
He was accused of being a Nazi by various news outlets.
A few months later, he faced another controversy in September when he was live-streaming Player
Unknown’s BattleGround (or PUBG) on YouTube Gaming.
During the gameplay, he accidentally slipped the n-word when an opponent shot his partner,
Brad, to death.
He immediately knew it was wrong for him to say the word, but that one particular moment
sparked a major outcry from the public.
This resulted in the developer of Firewatch to react negatively and challenged to file
a DMCA takedown for playing their game on his channel.
Some people think it was just a small matter and people just made it into a big deal.
Videos aimed for children are common on YouTube, and they are undoubtedly popular among kids.
However, some took this opportunity to exploit children by uploading suggestive and weird
videos featuring cartoon characters which are highly popular among the very young demographics.
This exploitation had already existed in late 2016 but did not get much attention until
the half of 2017.
Elsagate is the name given for this controversy as there was an abundance of video featuring
Elsa, one of the main characters in Disney’s Frozen, acting suggestively with other characters,
such as Spiderman.
Parents were becoming more concern as they are worried that their children are exposed
to such contents.
Most of the channels are allegedly run and own by pedophiles, and they can be seen in
the comment section under these kinds of videos too.
As a result, some advertisers temporarily opted out from YouTube because these contents
reflect weak child protection on YouTube.
Logan Paul is a very famous YouTube vlogger who came from Vine.
He started his vlogging career in 2016.
His channel became one of the most watched channels on YouTube, most of the audience
are young kids.
In December 2017, Logan Paul traveled to Japan and recorded his experiences there.
But one of the vlogs made it to the trending page on New Year 2018.
You know which one it is.
This video which requires no explanation immediately received major outcry from the community.
How could YouTube got the controversial video with a controversial thumbnail trending and
still got monetized?
How can other non-controversial videos got demonetized but this one with a visible hanging
body did not pass YouTube’s strict filtering?
Many content creators called out YouTube for nit-picking channels and videos to get the
most profit off of them.
Since Logan Paul was the golden boy of YouTube, it remained on the Trending page for days.
The video clearly violated YouTube’s content policy, which states that graphic imagery
could get blocked by YouTube.
It took YouTube a few days after the incident to state a public apology, but the damage
had been done.
As a result, YouTube changed its monetization policy to avoid this controversy to be ever
happening again.
To get monetized, a channel must have 1,000 subscribers and obtained 4,000 watch hours
from their videos in the past 12 months, a major far cry from the previous 10, 000 views
requirement.
Small YouTubers voiced out their concern online as they were the ones who were affected negatively
by this threshold.
This new threshold went effective on February 20th, with many called it the “Demonetization
Day”.
YouTube was created to share videos easily with anyone.
Content creators defined what YouTube is all about: innovation and creativity.
YouTube is a free platform where anyone can watch their favorite contents on demand, unlike
television.
But after years of advancement, YouTube is becoming bigger and bigger that it is hard
for it to control itself.
It has now become a giant corporate where everything is restricted to appeal to advertisers,
not the community.
The rise of the Internet caused news outlets to be overshadowed by various new online platforms
as everyone has quick access to information these days.
Some may argue that the old media and mainstream news outlets to become irrelevant these days.
It is speculated that these news outlets faked their news with clickbait articles to pull
in more readers, hence them attacking YouTube.
The old media is afraid of losing relevancy and would do anything to stay relevant again.