How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media
How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media
By AMANDA HESS APRIL 17, 2017
At the age of 21, David Pakman started a little
Massachusetts community radio talk program. While the young broadcaster got his
show syndicated on a few public radio stations, it was a YouTube channel he
began in 2009, “The David Pakman Show,” that opened up his progressive
political commentary to a whole new digital audience. The show has since
amassed 353,000 subscribers, and roughly half of its revenue now comes from the
ads that play before his videos. He earns enough to produce the show full time
and pay a lean staff.
Or, at least, he used to. Last month YouTube announced
abrupt, vague changes to its automated processes for placing ads across the
platform. Ads on Mr. Pakman’s YouTube channel evaporated, dropping to as little
as 6 cents a day, and forcing him to set up a crowdfunding page to help cover
$20,000 a month in operating costs.
“This is an existential threat to the show,” Mr. Pakman
said. “We need that money.”
Since its 2005 debut with the slogan “Broadcast
Yourself,” YouTube has positioned itself as a place where any people with
camera phones can make a career of their creativity and thrive free of the grip
of corporate media gatekeepers. But in order to share in the advertising wealth
a user base of more than a billion can provide, independent producers like Mr.
Pakman must satisfy the demands of YouTube’s unfeeling, opaque and shifting
algorithms.
The architecture of the internet has tremendous influence
over what is made, and what is seen; algorithms influence what content spreads
further on Facebook and turns up on top of Google searches. YouTube’s process
for mechanically pulling ads from videos is particularly concerning, because it
takes aim at whole topics of conversation that could be perceived as potentially
offensive to advertisers, and because it so often misfires. It risks
suppressing political commentary and jokes. It puts the wild, independent
internet in danger of becoming more boring than TV.
YouTube’s most serious ad change yet came in the wake of
reports from The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal that ads were
appearing on YouTube videos that espoused extremism and hate speech. When major
advertisers like AT&T and Johnson & Johnson withdrew their spots,
YouTube announced that it would try to make the site more palatable to
advertisers by “taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory
content.”
But according to YouTube creators, that shift has also
punished video makers who bear no resemblance to terrorist sympathizers and
racists. YouTube’s comedians, political commentators and experts on subjects
from military arms to video games have reported being squeezed by the ad
shake-up — often in videos they’ve posted to YouTube. On the site, it’s known
as “the adpocalypse.”
The topics of Mr. Pakman’s videos are no more
controversial than the programming typically found on CNN or the local news. In
fact, because his show is also broadcast over the radio, it adheres strictly to
FCC content rules. But the show takes pride in its independence from corporate
ownership. “I have no boss above me,” Mr. Pakman said, and because of YouTube’s
automated ad systems, “I’ve never had any contact with advertisers, so it’s
impossible for me to ‘sell out’ to satisfy them.”
Instead, he’s subject to the whims of the algorithm. To
rein in its sprawling video empire — 400 hours of video are uploaded to the
platform every minute — YouTube uses machine learning systems that can’t always
discern context, or distinguish commentary or humor from hate speech. That
limitation means that YouTube routinely pulls ads from content deemed “not
advertiser-friendly.” That includes depictions of violence or drug use, “sexual
humor” and “controversial or sensitive subjects,” including war and natural
disasters. YouTube has previously blocked ads on Mr. Pakman’s news videos
referring to ISIS church bombings and the assassination of a Russian diplomat.
YouTube creators can appeal the decision to a human who will watch the video,
but the recent changes have upended the usual processes, often leaving creators
without an official channel for appeal.
Recent ad changes have hit some of YouTube’s most popular
channels: The comedy channel h3h3Productions has seen YouTube’s system grow
stricter in recent weeks, while the Military Arms Channel, which tests and
reviews firearms, has registered a complete drop in ad revenue before
rebounding to 25 percent of its usual income. Felix Kjellberg, a wildly
successful comedy and video game vlogger known as PewDiePie, lost development
deals with YouTube and the Disney-owned Maker Studios after The Wall Street
Journal reported on a proliferation of Hitler references in his videos. (Mr.
Kjellberg apologized for what he called jokes that went too far.) But he’s also
seen programmatic ads yanked from a portion of his videos, and he’s become a
symbol for the resistance to the “adpocalypse.” He’s taken to churning out satirical
videos presenting himself as the brand-safe character “Family-Friendly Felix.”
Last month’s changes signaled that YouTube’s ad rules had
become even stricter and less clear. YouTube announced that it was leading
advertisers toward “content that meets a higher level of brand safety.” YouTube
gave creators no further hints on what that means, just issuing a blanket
message telling them they may experience “fluctuations” in revenue as the new systems
are “fine-tuned.”
“It’s getting so bad that you can’t even speak your mind
or be honest without fear of losing money and being not ‘brand-friendly,’” said
Ethan Klein, the creator of h3h3. “YouTube is on the fast track to becoming
Disney vloggers: beautiful young people that wouldn’t say anything
controversial and are always happy.”
This is not all the algorithm’s fault. People create
these systems, and they are sensitive to bad press and skittish advertisers.
The YouTube ad crisis — and the company’s response — also speaks to a
persistent public misunderstanding of the worth of digital creators. The
mainstream media barely engages with YouTube videos as an artistic product in
the way it does traditional television and film. Coverage is focused on how
much money YouTube stars make, how improbably famous they are among teenagers
and, now, on the small number of racist and extremist videos that have slipped
through the cracks of the ad system.
Jamie Byrne, director of creators and enterprise at
YouTube, said that concerned companies had requested tougher controls to keep
their ad dollars flowing. “For creators to flourish on our platform, we need an
incredibly strong advertising community engaged on YouTube as well,” he said.
He hopes that as the ad systems learn to decipher context, and advertisers
relax, creators will see greater returns.
Media power has consolidated in the past several decades,
with a smaller crew of billionaires controlling journalism and entertainment.
The internet was supposed to offer an opportunity for a diverse group of
upstarts to challenge the corporate structure. But the same consolidation of
power has happened online. Independent blogs have been shut down or snapped up
by bigger companies. YouTube has long been owned by Google, which has gobbled
up a greater share of online ad revenue in recent years. Google and Facebook
are now so dominant that they form a practical duopoly over digital
advertising. Meanwhile, YouTube is making a run at Netflix with its
original-content subscription service, YouTube Red, and going after television
with YouTube TV, which allows subscribers to stream TV channels online for $35
a month.
All of that means that new media creators hoping to make
a living online need to play by YouTube’s rules, and steer clear of anything
“potentially objectionable” — not to real people, who might actually be
offended, but to robots. If YouTube wants to fulfill its promise of an online
environment where independent creators can make interesting work, it will find
a way to scrub ads from truly vile content without penalizing the merely
controversial.
A version of this article appears in print on April 18,
2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: YouTube’s Shifting
Rules Are Hurting Small Players.
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