YouTube Market Control Through Disincentives

Hello Minds! This will be my first post here, despite having been on the platform for over 24 hours. I wasn't sure how to introduce myself, so I thought I'd start off with a blog post talking about what, for many of us, was that catalyst for our migration: the YouTube "advertiser friendly" policies.

Personally, it has no affect on me. Although I have a YouTube channel, I have no monetized videos, but I've been looking forward to this move since Dave Cullen first teased us with the idea of a new social media site.

I want to start off by getting some of my (possibly) more contentious views on the subject out of the way. Was it some plot to push anti-SJW folks off of their platform? Maybe, but probably not, as a bunch of TYT videos, gaming videos, videos by Rob Dyke, and beauty channels were also hit with demonetization. Some even say that these policies had already been in place for a year, and that whatever videos are demonetized now had already been demonetized, you just didn't know about it. It seems the biggest changes made were that it's now easier to tell if a video has been demonetized, and to file an appeal to get it manually reviewed, rather than marked not "advertiser friendly" by some automated system, which thinks that videos about acne aren't advertiser friendly.

It seems that nothing has actually changed, except now you know that YouTube is blocking your ad revenue, and you can do something about it. It actually seems that YouTubers are in a better position than they were before all this happened. Of course, that doesn't make it better that they were blocking your revenue for a year without you knowing. As Ryan Haywood of Rooster Teeth said in a video on the subject, "Oh, no, we've been punchin' ya... You just didn't notice."

So, is this censorship? In my opinion, no... kind of. It's YouTube exerting influence over the market by disincentivizing controversial content. This is a practice that governments also implement to manipulate markets. There's a saying in economics, regarding government economic policy, that if you want more of something, subsidize it, if you want less of something, tax it. The US government increased taxes on cigarette sales and gas to reduce consumption of both. They've also given grants for solar panel and electric car manufacturing, which is how Elon Musk got into those industtries.

What YouTube is doing is like a tax on controversial videos... except they're denying ad revenue altogether. This makes it so that people whose YouTube channels are their livelihood can no longer sustain themselves on such content, and must make "advertiser friendly" content, at least if they're solely dependent on ad revenue, rather than Patreon, sponsorship programs, or merchandise.

It's like if a farmers' market were to suddenly decide you can't sell apples anymore. You can still bring them to the market and give them away if you want, but you can't make money off them. How this would affect the market for apples is that people who grow apples as their livelihood, who have an orchard full of apple trees, will have to replace those trees with something they can sell if they want to sustain themselves. If they really love apples, and think that it's a joy they want to provide the world, even if they can't profit from it, maybe they'll keep a few trees, and give away those apples for free, but largely they will have to start growing different fruits. For people who grow apples just because they like doing it, or because they just happen to have an apple tree in their back yard, they'll probably continue supplying apples, but overall the supply of apples at the farmers' market will see a steep decline.

That's what YouTube is doing by demonetizing controversial content, they're disincentivizing it so that there will be less of it.

I disapprove of this for a few reasons, the obvious being that it is an attempt to reduce speech they don't like, but also because it attempts to subvert market forces. I don't like it when the government does it either. If people want to smoke, let them. Put the health information out there, sure, but don't manipulate the market because you don't like how it's working. The way the market is supposed to work is that products people want sell a lot, thus encouraging suppliers to make more, if a product isn't selling, suppliers stop making it. If there is a large market for this controversial content, YouTube should let the market do its work, rather than try to manipulate it to artificially reduce the amount of controversial content. If someone is making content that there is no market for, that will be reflected in their ad revenue, but if there is demand for their product, why not capitalize on that rather than manipulate it?

Manipulating the market in this way could also have negative effects that YouTube might not anticipate. How many views do you think that some ridiculous SJW gets due to being criticized by someone else? Some content is high in demand because it's ridiculous, and without people there to ridicule it, it's value greatly declines. Inflatable sheep fuck dolls at Spencer's Gifts might actually have been made for weirdos who always wanted to fuck fleece, but more people buy them for their novelty.

Then there's the issue of the advertisements themselves. Like I said, I have no monetized videos, so I'm not exactly sure how it works, but shouldn't the advertisers have some say in who they advertise with and who they don't, rather than it being determined by some fucked algorithm that thinks, "NO! ACNE BAD!"? 

To be honest, I was almost really critical of this point, because in my mind I drew a parallel to the GamerGate e-mail campaigns to get advertisers to stop supporting Gawker. It seemed kind of hypocritical at first, for many GamerGate supporters to complain about blocked ad revenue now, after doing basically the same thing to Gawker. I'm not defending Gawker, and I am a GamerGate supporter, though I wouldn't say I was ever really involved in GamerGate. I just kind of followed it and cheered them on. Also, I have no idea whether any of the people complaining about ad revenue now actually participated in the e-mail campaigns. After giving it a think, I realized there is a difference. Whether the Sam Biddle "bring back bullying" tweet was a joke or not, the "demonetization" of Gawker was the result of both consumer and advertiser disapproval of their actions.

YouTube seems to be demonetizing videos based solely on what they disapprove of, and not on the disapproval of consumers or the advertisers. Hell, it's not even the disapproval of some person who is sat at a computer, reviewing content, and going "Woah, I don't know if advertisers would like that." They're demonetizing videos based on what some algorithm deems to be too controversial.  I don't think that computers are very good judges of morality yet, but that much should have been obvious from Tay Tweets.