Google/Youtube's AD Boycott Grows as Companies Suspend Campaigns

[Tay]

Here comes censorship for anyone running Google Adsense. The golden age of the internet is truly coming to an end.

Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and over 250 brands have reportedly suspended their ad campaigns with Google aside from search.

A growing number of brands have suspended their spend with Google, following The Times' investigation (Paywall) into ads appearing alongside extremist content on YouTube and Google's display ad network

More than 250 brands have reportedly frozen all their campaigns with Google aside from search, after the issue -- which first seemed isolated to the UK -- spread globally as major US advertisers began to boycott the online ad giant too. According to The Times the spend pulled amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The tech company has responded with an announcement of tougher ad policies, increased control for marketers, and said it would grow its capacity to review offensive content with a hiring spree.

Here's a list of some of the biggest advertisers who have stopped their spend with Google and YouTube in the UK:

• Argos
• Aviva
• Havas Group UK froze all of its spend. The agency manages major brands including Dominos Pizza, O2, Royal Mail, BBC, and Hyundai Kia.
• Heinz
• HSBC
• ITV
• L'Oreal
• Lloyd's Bank
• Marks & Spencer
• McDonald's
• RBS
• Sainsbury's
• Tesco
• The Guardian
• Toyota
• Transport for London
• UK Government
• Volkswagen

In the United States:

• AT&T
• Beam Suntory Inc.
• Enterprise
• GSK
• Johnson & Johnson
• Verizon

Source: http://www.inc.com/business-insider/google-ad-boycott.html​

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More on this story: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...oogle-alphabet-shares-extremist-ads/99537874/

 

[Island]

I bet this is resulting in lower YouTube ad costs in many niches, especially in-stream ads because that's where car companies just spam en-masse driving up ad costs.

Golden opportunity IMO...

 

[SSG]

I bet this is resulting in lower YouTube ad costs in many niches...

For sure, this most likely why my CPC has gone to complete shit the past few days.

 

[miketpowell]

The amusing thing is the brands end up buying the same inventory much of the time just with more middle men.

Plenty of agencies exist to tell brands they are buying exactly what they want while reselling them whatever cheap inventory they can find. When you run campaigns in the silly ways(useless KPIs that have no meaning online) many of those brands do it's easy to get tricked.

 

[Darth]

My Adsense has been crazy the last few days. Normal one day then 50% down the next, normal the next, then 50% down again. Weird.

 

[Marko]

This is a real issue for Google. Not some folks spamming their serps

 

[Jared]

How do they define extremist content?

 

[ks1905]

In this age of hyper-partisanship and if you were responsible for a billion dollar company why would you not want to protect your brand? Why not just spend your ad budget elsewhere and not risk bad PR and a backlash from your customer base?

Million dollar ad buy vs protecting a billion dollar brand's reputation. An easy choice for me if I was in that situation.

As with any good business, Google needs to lookout for its customers' needs. Otherwise SOME of Google's customers will spend their money elsewhere.

I'm sure Google will fix this problem but with anything that Google does, some innocent sites will be caught up in the mix.

 

[contract]

It's not just advertiers...

It's publishers too.

You CANNOT block seriously shady/spammy ads from appearing, you just can't. There is virtually no one reviewing the ads. Outside of porn, anything goes. They just keep coming back and back, under new domains. Half the time the ads never get blocked when when you manually do it. ps. You can only block ~500...

 

[miketpowell]

In this age of hyper-partisanship and if you were responsible for a billion dollar company why would you not want to protect your brand? Why not just spend your ad budget elsewhere and not risk bad PR and a backlash from your customer base?

Million dollar ad buy vs protecting a billion dollar brand's reputation. An easy choice for me if I was in that situation.

As with any good business, Google needs to lookout for its customers' needs. Otherwise SOME of Google's customers will spend their money elsewhere.

I'm sure Google will fix this problem but with anything that Google does, some innocent sites will be caught up in the mix.

If only it was that easy for them. The problem with being a large company and wanting to spend 10 mil+ a year on online display advertising with no strong direct click to sale attribution is not as easy as it seems.

Sure the best thing most of these companies should be doing is just buying inventory on handful of premium sites and that's it. But if your a media director getting paid a good six-figure salary you are expected to do something "more complicated" for an online strategy then just buying on Facebook and 3 other sites. See it's not just how effective your advertising is, it's how complicated your plan is and difficult you make your job look.

So you create a convoluted plan of spending your budget in all sorts of different ways in all sorts of different places. You are running an amazingly complex high in the funnel brand engagement campaign! Brand marketing can often be more about how well you appear to do your job vs actual results.

Just look at the contests and awards they hold every year in advertising. Marketing and advertising is about the absolute result of increasing sales and numbers but if you look at the awards that get handed out in the marketing industry you'd think it's classical art or something with no objective way to measure anything.

 

[Tay]

YouTube Stars Have Started Losing Money

It's starting, youtube stars are taking a hit cause of the Advertiser exodus.

As YouTube Tinkers With Ad Formula, Its Stars See Their Videos Lose Money

The video site is not messing around with its ad-block button as it scrubs itself clean for marketers after hundreds of brands froze spending there because ads were appearing alongside objectionable, and even terrorist-backed, videos.

It has sent a note to advertisers telling them about new filters they can apply to campaigns that will help them avoid more types of objectionable content. There used to be two filter categories known as "sensitive subject exclusions" for "sensitive social issues" and "tragedy and conflicts," which advertisers could proactively avoid.

Now, there are five exclusions, including "sexually suggestive," "sensational and shocking," and "profanity and rough language," according to an agency executive who received the update from Google.

"Advertisers can be more conservative by implementing sensitive subject exclusions," Google said in its note, which was sent out within the past week.

The new filter categories are some of the first tangible steps coming out of YouTube to address content concerns and give advertisers more control over where their ads appear. They also mean creators will face more scrutiny over their subject matter.

[..]

"Curious if any other YouTubers saw a massive hit on monetization in last week," Dave Rubin wrote on Twitter. Mr. Rubin interviews provocative political thinkers for his "Rubin Report" videos.

Blair White, a twentysomething transgender woman with sometimes unconventional views, responded by saying she had videos "demonetized."

"Not massive but still frustrating," Ms. White wrote.

Conservative talk show host Steven Crowder lamented that his channel was being censored by being categorized into the age-restricted version of YouTube while liberal media was displaying as normal for all ages.

Meanwhile, some channels that don't even dabble in politics saw videos taken out of circulation for advertising, like Ethan Klein's H3H3Productions, which makes comedy videos.

Last week, YouTube warned creators that the site could "demonetize" videos.

"There's a difference between the free expression that lives on YouTube and the content that brands have told us they want to advertise against," the company said in a blog post on March 20.

YouTube declined to comment for this story but pointed to online forums where it told creators to be patient while it works out its new policies and protocols for advertising.

"If you're seeing fluctuations in your revenue over the next few weeks, it may be because we're fine tuning our ads systems," YouTube said in a web forum on Wednesday. The company has also given creators new tools to appeal videos that get flagged.

[..]

"YouTube is being squeezed by its two most important assets," said Brendan Gahan, exec VP at Epic Signal, a social media agency. "Brands fund the platform and the creators create for it."

YouTube is losing millions of dollars daily, according to most estimates. One analyst put potential losses at $750 million this year.

[..]

For years, YouTube has hosted all kinds of videos, plenty of which could have been considered objectionable. Even its biggest star, PewDiePie, was dropped by Disney's Maker Studio because of joking about anti-Semitism -- on videos often ran with pre-roll ads before anybody noticed.

Before the recent advertiser exodus, ads were showing up on any channel, mostly targeted to the viewer and not tied to the actual content.

"If a top-tier creator is considered 'brand safe' and anti-Semitic videos take four months to be noticed, that's a problem," said an ad agency executive, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Most people think that if an ad is aligned with a piece of content that it's done purposefully."

Source: Youtube Creators Feels AD Squeeze
​

 

[Tay]

JP Morgan Chase Reduces It's Reach on Display Networks - From 400,000 to just 5,000 websites

When big advertisers like Chase start exiting Display Networks (Adsense) and others, it means an overall reduction in CPC costs leading to lower and lower revenue for folks running Adsense or the particular display network. This Advertising exodus of everything Youtube or NON-search related Advertising for the next couple of months will definitely hit the pockets of most people running display advertisements on their websites.

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Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results.

As of a few weeks ago, advertisements for JPMorgan Chase were appearing on about 400,000 websites a month. It is the sort of eye-popping number that has become the norm these days for big companies that use automated tools to reach consumers online.

Now, as more and more brands find their ads popping up next to toxic content like fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos, JPMorgan has limited its display ads to about 5,000 websites it has preapproved, said Kristin Lemkau, the bank’s chief marketing officer. Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet, she said. An impression is generally counted each time an ad is shown.

The change illustrates the new skepticism with which major marketers are approaching online ad platforms and the automated technology placing their brands on millions of websites. In recent years, advertisers have increasingly shunned buying ads on individual sites in favor of cheaply targeting groups of people across the web based on their browsing habits, a process known as programmatic advertising — enabling, say, a Gerber ad to show up on a local mother’s blog, or a purse in an online shopping cart to follow a person around the internet for weeks.

But as the risks around the far reaches of the web have been cast into stark relief, some advertisers are questioning the value of showing up on hundreds of thousands of unknown sites, and wondering whether millions of appearances actually translate into more sales.

“It’s only been a few days, but we haven’t seen any deterioration on our performance metrics,” Ms. Lemkau said in an interview on Tuesday. She added that the company had also pulled ads from YouTube in the past week after reports showed other major advertisers like Verizon unintentionally appearing on videos promoting hate speech and terrorism. JPMorgan aims to restrict its ads on the platform to a “human-checked” list of 1,000 YouTube channels, which it expects to be able to do by the week of April 10, she said.

Much of the promise of online advertising hinges on the vast reach of the web, and the ability to reach people on niche sites at low prices. Index Exchange, an ad exchange, has estimated that the titles owned by the top 50 traditional media companies account for 5 percent or fewer of the trillions of ad impressions available for sale each day. Google’s display network alone includes more than two million websites. YouTube has more than three million ad-supported channels, according to the analytics company OpenSlate, which says the average $100,000 campaign on the platform runs on more than 7,000 channels.

If more advertisers follow JPMorgan’s lead and see similar results, it could hurt the operators of smaller sites that make up the so-called long tail of the internet, as well as the advertising technology companies that profit from funneling trillions of ad impressions from brands to consumers through systems that mimic a stock exchange, according to Eric Franchi, co-founder of the ad technology firm Undertone.

“If you charge a percentage of all of the ads that run through your platform, then the prospects can be pretty dim if all of a sudden your volume has been cut by 95 percent,” Mr. Franchi said. “So many of these companies, and some of them are public, tout the number of ads they deliver per second, per day. If you start seeing more marketers move in this direction, it will be pretty interesting. What are the metrics then that those companies start to report?”

JPMorgan started looking into preapproving sites, a strategy known as whitelisting, this month after The New York Times showed it an ad for Chase’s private client services on a site called Hillary 4 Prison. It was under a headline claiming that the actor Elijah Wood had revealed “the horrifying truth about the Satanic liberal perverts who run Hollywood.”

Of the 400,000 web addresses JPMorgan’s ads showed up on in a recent 30-day period, said Ms. Lemkau, only 12,000, or 3 percent, led to activity beyond an impression. An intern then manually clicked on each of those addresses to ensure that the websites were ones the company wanted to advertise on. About 7,000 of them were not, winnowing the group to 5,000. The shift has been easier to execute than expected, Ms. Lemkau said, even as some in the industry warned the company that it risked missing out on audience “reach” and efficiency.

JPMorgan had already decided last year to oversee its own programmatic buying operation, and it works with Google and AppNexus to show its ads, she said. It was not a difficult decision to extend whitelisting to YouTube, given that Chase was already making that shift across its display advertising, she said.

“Before the YouTube thing happened, we were just looking at programmatic,” she said. “Now the question is, what else is out there that we should be looking at whitelisting?”

She added, “At some point, a human is going to take a look.”


Source: Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results.
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[Ryuzaki]

I'm not sure I'm surprised. These terrorist sympathizers and transvestites and overt racists make up like 0.1% of the population in the US yet create massive amounts of high visibility drama. The "vocal minority" if you will.

I think the producers start to believe their own lies and forget how tiny they really are.

Then the conservatives (aka people who contribute to society instead of trying to dismantle it, and therefore earn massive amounts of money) decide to spend their money elsewhere.

It's hilarious to watch this social justice and communism movement miss with every swing and end up punching itself in the face, including 99% of Silicon Valley. They keep cannibalizing each others resources and digging themselves in deeper holes.

It's a case where their giant game of pretend finally collided with reality because it start messing with real boss-level playa's money.

This isn't the first round of this happening though, it's just the first extremely impactful one. Last year a ton of high profile vloggers found a lot of their videos, even tame ones, demonetized and couldn't figure out why. Ethan of H3H3Productions figured it out. It's because they were all using tags like "rape" and "assault" to try to sneak out extra views. But tags were being used by advertisers, so the easiest thing to do was make it impossible to accidentally advertise on a video that relates itself to rape, even if just in the tag.