Video kills the advertising star?

The past week has seen sustained pressure on Google after an investigation by The Times claimed that it was profiting from, and rewarding extremist and illegal content on YouTube. Essentially ads from blue chip brands had appeared alongside content from extremist groups. This then earnt the person responsible for posting the content £6 for every 1,000 clicks that the advert generated. Reputable organisations, including the UK government, were therefore unwittingly contributing money to extremists.

This has led to an advertiser backlash with brands stopping spending on YouTube, apologies from Google, and a newly stated commitment to sort the problem out. Following on from concerns around fake news being used to drive advertising revenues and worries that many online adverts are clicked on solely by bots, rather than people, it demonstrates the potential issues for online advertisers.

What can be done to reassure advertisers? Google has been quick to jump on the problem, with it escalated to its Chief Business Officer, who set out new safeguards for brands in this blog post. The reason for the alacrity is the impact this could have on Google’s revenues – advertising drives the business, and YouTube’s share of this is growing as more and more people watch and share video content through the site.

Can Google get YouTube back under control? There are two problems it has to grapple with:

1         The scale of YouTube

There’s the sheer amount of content on the platform. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and 3.25 billion hours of content are watched every month. Keeping track of all this content, and removing anything illegal or extremist has traditionally relied on other users notifying YouTube about individual videos, but that is clearly not enough in the digital age.

Google’s defence (like that of Facebook and other social networks) is that it legally it is not a publisher, merely a platform where others can share content, meaning it is not automatically liable for extremist videos. It believes it is the equivalent of the phone network – just transmitting information, rather than creating it.

2         The black box approach

Given the size of YouTube and many other online properties it is impossible to hand match adverts to particular content. So there’s a black box approach at work, where advertisers (and even Google personnel) don’t really know why a particular advert appears alongside a particular video. Therefore promising more smart technology to solve the problem (as Google has) is unlikely to placate people. At the same time Google is not going to release details of its advertising algorithm, as that is the source of its competitive advantage.

These are big issues to deal with, and the threat of an advertiser boycott has focused the search giant on solving the problem. But I think it will take a lot of time, and a lot more in terms of concrete action to bring back advertiser trust, even if it doesn’t dent the numbers of people actually using YouTube. And I don’t think it will end with YouTube – any advertising-supported online business needs to focus on how it polices itself, and where it places ads, if it wants to avoid being the next in line for media stories and potential boycotts.