YouTube Subjecting All 'Preferred' Content to Human Review -- Update
January 16 2018 - 6:44PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
YouTube is ordering workers to review thousands of hours of its
most popular content and setting new limits on which videos can run
ads, in moves to ease advertisers' worries that their brands are
showing up alongside offensive or controversial videos.
YouTube said Tuesday that human reviewers would watch every
second of video in its curated lineup of top content, dubbed Google
Preferred, which brands pay a premium to advertise on. Human
reviewers also will have to approve new videos uploaded by Google
Preferred channels before the videos can begin running the premium
ads.
YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, says Google Preferred
includes among the most popular 5% of channels, as determined by
their likes, comments and shares, among other factors. The company
didn't say how many hours of content that entails.
But YouTube has said since 2015 that users upload 400 hours of
video to the site a minute, or 65 years of footage a day, meaning
reviewing even a small slice of that total would likely require at
least tens of thousands of hours.
The company expects to have the full review completed by the end
of March, then continue to review new videos as they are
posted.
YouTube is also raising the bar for channels that want to carry
ads. Channels must now have accumulated at least 4,000 hours of
watch time and 1,000 subscribers, compared with the threshold of
10,000 cumulative views that YouTube set last year. YouTube said a
"significant" number of channels would be affected but declined to
provide more details.
The moves come after a series of scandals involving ads from
prominent brands displayed alongside racist or other objectionable
content.
The steps show YouTube is yielding to advertisers' demands for
more oversight on videos it sells as ad space, despite the fact
that such policies are likely to upset its network of video
creators, who are crucial to the site's reach and popularity.
Google has long touted YouTube to advertisers as a better
alternative to television, with unprecedented scale and diversity
of content. But those traits have also made the site difficult to
police. Human reviewers could never watch all of YouTube's content,
while software often doesn't understand what could be
offensive.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 16, 2018 18:29 ET (23:29 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024