Or “How I Got Swept Up in the Adpocalypse”
With income streams for songwriters and recording artists drying up everywhere, we’ll try any trick the brave, new, long-tailed virtual world offers to make a penny, including allowing YouTube to play ads on our videos for that gratifying thousandth of a cent.
Over the years, I’ve had YouTube reject a couple of videos submitted for ads because I’d used unlicensed video stock, and one because of a licensing mixup with a co-writer, but last fall I started getting notices from YouTube that they were removing videos from monetized status.
Your video isn't being monetized because it contains content that might not be appropriate for advertising.
To monetize a video, your video content, metadata, and thumbnail must be advertiser-friendly.
Think your video meets this criteria? You can have it reviewed for monetization again.
A link to google’s AdSense Partner policies page gives an indication of what they deem advertiser-unfriendly.
- Controversial issues and sensitive events
- Drugs and dangerous products or substances
- Harmful or dangerous acts
- Hateful content
- Inappropriate language.
- Inappropriate use of family entertainment characters
- Incendiary and demeaning
- Sexually suggestive content
- Violence
Under each heading, the type of prohibited content is defined and examples given. Most are sensible, or at least understandable from a perspective of liability.
The list has expanded greatly since last fall, when some advertisers squawked at having their products paired with objectionable videos like hate speech. This sort-of explained my first notice, that my video “Ain’t Ridin’ with the KKK” would be de-monitized, though how an anti-Klan song qualified as “hate speech” was a bit of a mystery.
Next to get booted from ad land was a Tom Lehrer homage, “Send a Ham.” I can understand why religious references in that one might have been deemed offensive, but advertiser-unfriendly? What about Frey? Honey-Baked? Oscar Mayer?
Most surprisingly, this week, “the YouTube team” sent me another notice, saying the video for the lead cut on my last record will no longer be paired with ads. This anti-war, anti-greed, anti-sin song is too potentially offensive.
Funniest bit: Since they just yanked it from monetization, it’s showing up in the analytics page for the last 30 days as one of my top-moneymaking videos this month.
Now, for a guy on my level, that’s a bit less than a nickel. Hardly a fortune, but yet another nickel I as a writer and musician won’t make.
For a sense of what this code-driven content nannying means to a YouTuber with more at stake, here’s Hank Green of vlogbrothers to give you his take. You’ve seen their stuff a gazillion times, if only the SciShow. I’ve cued up this vid to start at the explanation of #Adpocalypse, but the whole thing’s worth watching.
For people like the Greens (and YouTube itself, for that matter) who have premised their production model on clickad revenue, Adpocalypse is insult and injury. And it’s only going to get worse, because of what Google, and YouTube, and conventional TV producers are building.
Tristan Snell, writing for Tubefilter, broke it down neatly this spring:
Yet this trend is bigger than just YouTube: none of the large public-company digital video platforms are interested in focusing on individuals digital creators anymore. All of them are moving “upmarket” to focus on TV — or on TV-like content, with longer formats and more advertiser-friendly subject matter. This is happening right at the same time that the larger media companies are unbundling their content and looking to broadcast on mobile and the web. These moves show no signs of ending or reversing, and in fact they follow well-known patterns in the business world.
Moving to a TV-like model also carries with it a second important shift: at any ad-supported media network, when advertisers get pitted against entertainers and producers, the advertisers always win. The #Adpocalypse is the clearest manifestation of this reality to date, and it will be far from the last. If you rely only on advertisers, then the advertisers choose what airs.
Creators and their managers are thus approaching a crossroads. The platforms that built the digital video ecosystem are now leaving it behind, and it is now time for the ecosystem to evolve. New platforms must fill the void, and creators need multiple revenue streams open to them — rather than being overly dependent on advertisers.
Like Hank Green’s video above, Snell’s article has been excepted to move the diary along, but is well worth eating whole. His larger point is that the digital video field is like many businesses: due to its popularity as an innovator and equalizer, it is moving up to play in a bigger field and, ironically, must sacrifice the very innovation and democratization that enabled its success to appeal to advertisers.
It will be interesting to see if smaller creators like the Greens (and midgets like myself) can find another platform in which to produce and (we do hope) profit.