What advertisers don’t understand about Google Ads and YouTube
When one of the top YouTubers let fly with a racial slur and was not only unapologetic but continued to make headlines with his racism, advertisers put pressure on YouTube to change its policies regarding ads and what videos people are allowed to monetize. YouTube put its bots on the case and several old videos were removed from the ability to have advertising while new videos were left in limbo and every video may or may not have advertising from one day to the next.
The problem is that YouTube doesn’t have the people to monitor every video uploaded on YouTube, and its bots don’t check the actual content of the video either. They check tags, names and words in the description, which does nothing to solve the original problem – if someone swears or says inappropriate language, that video will only be found when it is reported by YouTube users who have dubbed themselves the police.
None of this policing actually matters, but advertisers don’t realize it. They are still stuck in the old days when a company could sponsor a show and put pressure on that show to feature its products and keep up a set of morals that the advertiser wanted to be associated with (whether true or not to the actual company’s business practices). Google ads don’t work like that.
With Google Ads, the company is getting a certain number of ads targeted at specific groups of people using Google’s powerful amount of data collected through search history and other computer user habits that it can track through its Chrome browser and its own, most popular search engine. So if Google’s algorithms say your company should be advertised to someone who is watching a racist video, that is where your company will have the most opportunity for success. (What that says about your company or its supporters is something better discussed elsewhere.)
But here’s the difference, unless your business has specifically directed Google Ads to promote you on specific YouTube channels, your company will not be associated with the content by more than that one person, if he or she pays attention to the ad at all. Yes, there may be millions of viewers for a video, but each one is seeing a different ad based on his or her preferences as sussed out by Google and its information gathering and processing. Advertisers are no longer sponsoring a show, unless they are giving money to the show’s creators directly they are paying to be marketed effectively. Where they are marketed no longer has much effect because not everyone who sees the video will see the ad.
To take it one step further, anyone who works with YouTube and has his or her own website has a couple of work arounds for the videos in question as long as they don’t mind losing the exposure that a monetized video gets from YouTube. One workaround is to publish the videos with questionable content to a website and put google ads around the video player. A page can earn up to 3 impressions and with a video, it is easy to get 2 – one on top and one on bottom.
However, if the YouTuber doesn’t want to remove the video from YouTube, he or she can take it private so that only those with a link can see the video. By embedding a player on a website page with Google ads around it, the YouTuber can continue to earn revenue from each view without having to re-upload the video.
The icing on the cake is that those advertisers who use Google ads and advertise on YouTube may find themselves back on the video that they didn’t want to support in the first place. In case your keeping track, this means that all of their whining and complaining and all of YouTube’s moves to appease the advertisers are really more for show, full of sound and fury, than to create any type of change that punishes those who would not conform.
Most of these videos are exactly the kind of thing you would want on your channel. They are thought provoking, insightful and informative and they are about race, politics and condom usage. Check out the full list after the Google ad.
The problem is that YouTube doesn’t have the people to monitor every video uploaded on YouTube, and its bots don’t check the actual content of the video either. They check tags, names and words in the description, which does nothing to solve the original problem – if someone swears or says inappropriate language, that video will only be found when it is reported by YouTube users who have dubbed themselves the police.
None of this policing actually matters, but advertisers don’t realize it. They are still stuck in the old days when a company could sponsor a show and put pressure on that show to feature its products and keep up a set of morals that the advertiser wanted to be associated with (whether true or not to the actual company’s business practices). Google ads don’t work like that.
With Google Ads, the company is getting a certain number of ads targeted at specific groups of people using Google’s powerful amount of data collected through search history and other computer user habits that it can track through its Chrome browser and its own, most popular search engine. So if Google’s algorithms say your company should be advertised to someone who is watching a racist video, that is where your company will have the most opportunity for success. (What that says about your company or its supporters is something better discussed elsewhere.)
But here’s the difference, unless your business has specifically directed Google Ads to promote you on specific YouTube channels, your company will not be associated with the content by more than that one person, if he or she pays attention to the ad at all. Yes, there may be millions of viewers for a video, but each one is seeing a different ad based on his or her preferences as sussed out by Google and its information gathering and processing. Advertisers are no longer sponsoring a show, unless they are giving money to the show’s creators directly they are paying to be marketed effectively. Where they are marketed no longer has much effect because not everyone who sees the video will see the ad.
To take it one step further, anyone who works with YouTube and has his or her own website has a couple of work arounds for the videos in question as long as they don’t mind losing the exposure that a monetized video gets from YouTube. One workaround is to publish the videos with questionable content to a website and put google ads around the video player. A page can earn up to 3 impressions and with a video, it is easy to get 2 – one on top and one on bottom.
However, if the YouTuber doesn’t want to remove the video from YouTube, he or she can take it private so that only those with a link can see the video. By embedding a player on a website page with Google ads around it, the YouTuber can continue to earn revenue from each view without having to re-upload the video.
The icing on the cake is that those advertisers who use Google ads and advertise on YouTube may find themselves back on the video that they didn’t want to support in the first place. In case your keeping track, this means that all of their whining and complaining and all of YouTube’s moves to appease the advertisers are really more for show, full of sound and fury, than to create any type of change that punishes those who would not conform.
Most of these videos are exactly the kind of thing you would want on your channel. They are thought provoking, insightful and informative and they are about race, politics and condom usage. Check out the full list after the Google ad.
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Girl tries out a bark collar
Daryl Davis speaks about his relationship with an Imperial Wizard of the KKK
How to put on a condom
Standing in solidarity for undocumented immigrants and against SB1070
No to SB 1070 and its copycats
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