Admitting 2017 had been a “difficult year”, YouTube owner Google announced new rules on Tuesday to help clean up its content and make it a safer advertising environment.
Starting today, new channels on the video platform will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. Previously, channels had to reach 10,000 total views to be eligible for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP).
“We are passionate about protecting our users, advertisers and creators and making sure YouTube is not a place that can be co-opted by bad actors,” Paul Muret, VP, display, video & analytics, said in a blog post.
“It’s been clear over the last few months that we need the right requirements and better signals to identify the channels that have earned the right to run ads. Instead of basing acceptance purely on views, we want to take channel size, audience engagement, and creator behaviour into consideration to determine eligibility for ads.”
Additionally, both new and existing YPP channels will be automatically evaluated under the stricter criteria and if YouTube finds a channel repeatedly violates its community guidelines, it will remove that channel from YPP.
Google also announced that advertisers will be given “greater transparency and simpler controls” over where ads appear, while changes to Google Preferred – which aggregates YouTube’s top content into easy-to-buy packages for advertisers – will not only offer the most popular content on YouTube, but also “the most vetted”.
It has been almost a year since an investigation by The Times found that major global advertisers had unwittingly been funding extremists by having their ads programmatically placed on what should be blacklisted websites – resulting in hundreds of advertisers pulling their content from YouTube.
2018 then kicked off with the claim that YouTube moderators had approved a video that showed a vlogger making jokes while filming the body of a man who had killed himself in a Japanese forest.
Millionaire vlogger Logan Paul, who has more than 15 million subscribers, many of them children, eventually removed the video and apologised – but only after it was viewed 6.5 million times. Volunteers in YouTube’s ‘trusted flagger’ programme said that the clip was reported but moderators on the payroll decided to leave it up.
“We value the partnership and patience of all our advertisers to date and look forward to strengthening those ties throughout 2018,” Muret said.
Commenting on the news, Tom George, chair of the IPA’s Media Futures Group and UK CEO of Group M, said: “Whilst Google’s communication doesn’t go as far as the proposals the IPA presented to them following our meeting at the end of 2017, we believe it is a step in the right direction and evidence that Google has listened to the advertising community to try to resolve the issues of brand safety that have been the subject of much concern in 2017.”
