What YouTube Demonetization Says About The Influence Of Advertisers

Advertisers say no, the video has got to go. Since 2016, YouTubers have faced threats of demonetization of their videos. What does this mean exactly? YouTube created a set of guidelines content creators must follow in order to meant advertiser-friendly content. These guidelines include not having inappropriate language, violence, sexually suggestive content, hateful content, and the list continues. If the videos do not meet these requirements, they are at risk of being demonetized, which means advertisers will pull from the YouTubers video, causing them to lose money. These guidelines and the demonetization of videos calls to question as to what exactly can these content creators publish on their channels? They only have a limited amount of advertisers once they start to fail at hitting these guidelines.

In the most recent news about this, YouTubers began losing advertisers supporting their videos when they began promotions and reviews for the new iPhone X. According to The Verge, one YouTuber made a video comparing cameras on the iPhone X, the Samsung S8 and LG V30. It passed the advertiser-friendly guidelines, but because of a "bot" issue, the video was still demonetized.

YouTube is meant to be a platform for all content creators and it is supposed to give them the freedom to produce the content they want others to see. YouTube serves as a place for citizen journalists to talk about important issues, for creators to be creative and most importantly, to exercise their right of freedom of speech. Of course, the guidelines are important in order to prevent hate speech and inappropriate material, however the issue at hand is that there are videos being demonetized that follow the guidelines, and YouTube doesn't seem to be doing anything about it.

The advertisers definitely have a grip on YouTube as a whole because if they didn't, YouTube would've worked to fix the problem by now. This raises a question of what platforms don't have control over their content creators? The answer is: none. Personally, I believe those YouTube should remain a platform for content creators to express themselves freely, but it's becoming more of a business because of advertiser control.