YouTube Subjecting All 'Preferred' Content to Human Review -- 2nd Update
January 16 2018 - 7:09PM
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 its latest 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 company said nearly all affected channels
now make less than $100 a year in ad revenue.
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.
As a result, news organizations and advertisers over the past
year have discovered YouTube running their ads before extremist,
racist and hateful videos. Many top brands pulled spending from the
site in response, prompting the company to adopt stricter ad
policies, hire more human reviewers and give brands more control
over where their ads appear.
YouTube has faced other controversies over some of its most
popular stars. YouTube last year expelled from its Google Preferred
program the most popular creator on its platform, Felix Kjellberg,
also known as PewDiePie, after The Wall Street Journal reported on
anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery in some of his videos. Mr.
Kjellberg later apologized for some of the jokes and said the
Journal took some out of context.
This month, YouTube pulled another popular creator, Logan Paul,
from Google Preferred after he posted a video that included footage
of a person who had apparently committed suicide in Japan. Mr. Paul
apologized for the video and deleted it. YouTube said in a tweet,
"Suicide is not a joke, nor should it ever be a driving force for
views."
YouTube on Tuesday said it is improving those controls to give
advertisers more data over how changes in ad placement affect their
reach.
Last month, the company said it plans to have more than 10,000
people reviewing content by the end of this year, though it
declined to say how many people it has in that role today.
Reviewing content manually has become increasingly important at
tech companies that sell advertising alongside user-generated
content, including YouTube, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.
Those companies often outsource that work to contractors, who
typically review thousands of posts a day, many of them disturbing.
YouTube said its reviewers are a mix of employees and
contractors.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 16, 2018 18:54 ET (23:54 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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