What’s this about?
Despite having one of the best (allegedly) AI engines, Google and YouTube just haven’t been able to stop insidious comments on YouTube kids videos.
This has cost them global advertisers and a big chunk of revenue, and has spurred them into action.
It’s amazing how companies will generally only act if it affects their hip pocket.
Read more in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 24th November 2017.
#SEO #SEONews #Google #YouTube #AdStrategy
YouTube & Google Lose Major Advertisers
Key Issues Summary:
- Despite proudly showing off its AI and machine-learning neural network photo recognition skills, Google cannot identify and remove offensive comments on YouTube videos of children.
- According to The Guardian (and the Beeb) This has caused a number of significant global advertisers to pull their YouTube and Google ads until Google resolves the situation.
- This is not the first time this year Google has run into big issues with YouTube and advertisers.
Key Actions To Take:
- If you are advertising on videos with children in them, be proactive in ensuring your brand advertising is not next door to offensive comments.
- If it is, either remove your advertising, or contact Google and pressure them to resolve the situation.
- If more ads are removed, or there are fewer places to advertise, then expect advertising costs to increase.
- Click here to contact me to discuss the state of YouTube advertising.
Insights & Discussion:
This is getting silly. Google heralds its artificial intelligence abilities, and yet it fails in something so simple as screening comments on videos of children.
Given its extreme photo recognition skills, (and the heuristics learnt from spam filtering for Gmail) it’s not beyond the realms of fantasy that Google is able to identify videos with children in them, and either : stop advertising on those videos, moderate comments, or just screen and flag comments and accounts.
Google’s long-held argument against copyright infringement was that YouTube was a common carrier, but it (amazingly) managed to create detection software which identified proactively potentially infringing videos and remove them / block the account. Not employing these kinds of screening safeguards before smacks of Google not taking the issue seriously enough, or perhaps, not being hit in the hip-pocket enough.
Google is now big enough that it decided “Don’t Be Evil” wasn;t right for it anymore. Perhaps it needs to remember that “Evil flurishes when good (people) stand by and do nothing”.
More Information:
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- So, web nasties have been nasty under YouTube videos of children.
- Big advertisers have had their ads appear next to these comments.
- Oddly, they didn’t like that, so they’ve pulled their advertising.
- Maybe the biggest AI, algorithm builder can work out a way to fix the problem.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
- Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
