Company / division: YouTube
EU Reports that US Internet Companies Have Improved Removal of Hate Speech (Jun 1, 2017)
Back in December, four big US Internet companies signed a voluntary code of conduct with the EU under which they agreed to improve and accelerate the removal of hate speech from their platforms. Now, the EU is reporting good progress on those goals, with twice as high a percent of offending content removed, and Facebook and Twitter removing substantially more content within the first 24 hours, while YouTube slipped a little in this regard for reasons that aren’t clear. As Facebook has discovered, policing content is an expensive and labor-intensive task at the best of times, but having external standards set like this raises the stakes even further. The big risk in the EU and specific European countries is that this moves from voluntary codes of conduct to actual laws with significant consequences for non-compliance, so the big US companies are wise to do what they can to play nicely to try to ward off such outcomes.
via Reuters
Some UK Advertisers Still Staying Off YouTube (May 12, 2017)
As a reminder, the boycott of YouTube and Google which began a couple of months ago kicked off in the UK, where some high-profile press coverage of major brands’ ads showing up next to undesirable content caused some brands to pull their advertising from YouTube and in some cases Google’s other platforms. Although the hubbub over the boycott both there and here seems to have died down considerably, especially after Alphabet itself played down the impact in its recent earnings call, there are still advertisers which are staying off Google’s platforms in the UK. This article lists several ongoing holdouts including Channel 4, Marks & Spencer, Toyota, Tesco, and Pepsi, while others including McDonalds and RBS have returned. The quotes from marketers in the article makes clear that this is still about more than just dodgy content and extends to other frustrations advertisers have with online ad platforms, and that they’re using the boycott as a way to apply pressure to achieve those other aims.
via Marketing Week
★ YouTube Announces Six New Original Content Series For Its Free Service (May 4, 2017)
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YouTube and Netflix Dominate Teens’ Video Viewing (May 2, 2017)
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★ Alphabet Reports Strong Growth and Profits, Shrugs Off YouTube Boycott (Apr 27, 2017)
Alphabet was the third of the big three tech companies to report earnings today, and one of two (along with Amazon) which saw a very favorable response from the market to better than expected results. Its growth was strong once again off the back of ongoing positive ad revenue trends and a second straight quarter of strong growth in Other revenue in the Google segment, which includes its hardware sales. However, whereas Q4 saw something like $600-700 million in hardware sales, Q1 saw a much smaller bump from hardware – likely around $300 million. Other Bets revenue – mostly from Nest, Fiber, and Verily – continued to grow rapidly (47% year on year) though losses also grew. Google’s traffic acquisition costs continue to rise fairly rapidly due to the increased payments Google has to make for mobile search traffic acquisition (notably on the iPhone) – it rose from 8.5% of revenue from Google’s own sites to 10.4% in one year. Meanwhile, clicks or their equivalents on ads on Google’s own sites continue to rise rapidly, while the cost-per-click continues to fall due to the rise of mobile and video advertising. So far, the former is more than offsetting the latter, and there’s no indication just yet that there’s an end in sight. But Google’s own sites now contribute over 80% of total ad revenue, while third party websites running Google ads are down below 20% and the gap between the two continues to widen as Google continues to be far more successful driving growth on its own sites. That’s a reflection both of a deliberate strategy – Google’s margins on its own sites are much higher – but also of the broader trend away from traditional desktop display ads and towards mobile, search, and native advertising.
via Alphabet
YouTube Kids Now Has 8 Million Weekly Viewers, Will Expand to Smart TVs (Apr 26, 2017)
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YouTube Algorithm Changes Hit Legitimate Creators’ Ad Revenue (Apr 19, 2017)
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Tumblr Launches Social Video App With No Connection to Tumblr (Apr 18, 2017)
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YouTube Cracks Down on Fake Channels by Setting 10,000-View Minimum Before Serving Ads – Variety (Apr 6, 2017)
As I’ve said essentially from the beginning of the advertiser boycotts of YouTube, one easy way for the company to resolve at least some of the issues would be to raise thresholds on the channels and videos that could carry ads, and it looks like YouTube is now taking baby steps in this direction, albeit in the apparent context of impersonation rather than other content issues. Channels will now have to earn 10,000 views of their videos before they can fully join the YouTube Partner Program and begin serving ads, which should help weed out some troublesome channels before they get to the point of monetization. As of right now, that should have only a tiny effect on the ability of creators in general to monetize their YouTube activity – 10,000 views generate such a minimal amount of ad revenue that this isn’t going to hurt anyone’s ability to make money. As long as the threshold stays at this low level, then, this might be a relatively painless way to introduce at least a low bar to monetization on YouTube.
via Variety
YouTube TV Reviews Suggest Nice User Interface, Features, Limited Content (Apr 5, 2017)
It looks like the embargo on reviews of YouTube TV lifted this morning and a slew of those reviews have now emerged. On balance, the reviews seem positive about the user interface and features (notably the DVR), but note limitations across content, including the complete absence of Turner and Viacom channels, geographies (the service is only available in five cities to start, due to local broadcast rights), and devices (only Chromecast and Google Cast-enabled TVs, no Apple TV or Roku). I’ll link back here to my first take on YouTube TV following the launch event, because my overall sense of this service hasn’t changed. But it does seem as though the app does better on some key concepts than the other offerings already out there, notably that DVR feature and the way it taps into favorite shows and sports teams. As you’d expect from a brand that’s always stood for ease of use and discovery in video consumption, it’s good at those things. But those limitations are going to mean it’s not a viable competitor in the vast majority of the country for now. The limitations are, in fact, probably a good thing in that they’ll allow YouTube TV to avoid some of the scaling issues suffered by DirecTV Now when it launched last fall, but it’s going to need to find a way to go national sooner rather than later, which means working out those complicated local affiliate rights which have bedeviled everyone else in this business too.
via Business Insider (more reviews on Techmeme)
Google says its YouTube ad problem is “very very very small” but it’s getting better at fixing it anyway – Recode (Apr 3, 2017)
There are one or two interesting data points in here, with the most interesting probably being that videos big advertisers “had flagged received less than 1/1000th of a percent of the advertisers’ total impressions” – in other words, the problematic videos were around one in 100,000 or less of the videos where ads appeared (it’s worth noting that this number only relates to the videos flagged by brands – there may have been quite a few more they didn’t find). The other interesting thing here is the suggestion Google exec Schindler makes several times that there’s some unnamed person behind the recent attention this issue is getting: there was a report recently that someone who developed detection technology for videos was pushing the story as a way to get attention for that technology, and I wonder if Schindler is hinting at that without being explicit and thereby drawing more attention to the issue. The last thing worth noting is that Google is now allowing outside firms like DoubleVerify and comScore to start auditing ad placement, which is something that third parties have been wanting. The issue is definitely fading from the headlines as the stream of advertisers announcing boycotts dries up, but it certainly hasn’t been dealt with definitively, and as I’ve argued, as an issue it goes well beyond just YouTube and affects programmatic buying more broadly as well.
via Recode
Eric Feinberg, the Man Behind Google’s Brand-Safety Crisis – AdAge (Mar 27, 2017)
This is a fascinating little piece on a guy who claims to have technology that would help Google from showing ads on problematic videos and websites, and who has apparently been responsible for raising the issue with reporters. Unfortunately, there’s fairly little evidence of that connection in this article, and I haven’t been able to establish one independently. But it would be striking if a guy trying to sell his technology was behind this crisis for Google and YouTube. None of that is to say that the issues aren’t real, but as we all know none of this is particularly new, so it would help explain why all this has suddenly come to a head now.
via AdAge
YouTube Details Fixes While Additional Advertisers Join Boycott (Mar 24, 2017)
This story just keeps going, and in some ways it’s more of the same, but these two pieces are worth calling out specifically. The Bloomberg piece mentions a memo sent to advertisers late this week providing more detail than the blog post on Monday, though sadly the article doesn’t provide many of those details. The Journal piece, meanwhile, provides lots of examples of ads from big brands still showing up next to bad videos, with some of those brands adding their names to the list of boycotters. Importantly, the changes in the memo are supposed to be implemented by Sunday, so if advertisers are happy with the changes, we could see something of a return to normal early next week. As per my Techpinions piece yesterday, I still think that’s something of a long shot, although I argued that none of these brands really want to abandon YouTube or Google permanently, and will likely return to the fold once they extract some concessions over data and analytics. But if those fixes don’t go down well, and there continue to be widespread and easily found examples of ads showing against bad videos, then this could drag on for months.
via Bloomberg (memo) and WSJ (bad ads still appearing, and more advertisers bail)
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and YouTube are bidding to stream the NFL’s Thursday night games – Recode (Mar 24, 2017)
When Twitter won these rights last time around in their first year as a separate set from television rights, it turned out to be something very different from what many of us expected. Rather than a massive splurge on a very valuable set of rights, it turned out that the winner merely got the right to show the games along with advertising mostly already sold by broadcasters, meaning there was very little additional revenue opportunity, and as such Twitter got the rights for a paltry $10 million. These NFL games have actually been a good fit with Twitter’s overall live strategy, which has mostly been focused on winning audiences rather than lots of new revenue, but it seems others are interested in taking another crack this year. It would obviously fit well with Facebook’s recent push into professionally produced live video, but also with YouTube’s recent investment in e-sports rights and with Amazon’s foray into TV bundles and Twitch video streaming. It’s less of a good fit with Apple’s current focus in the TV space, so it’s not surprising that its name doesn’t appear here. I’ll be very interested to see if the NFL is pitching the same kind of package as last time or whether the winning bidder will have the right to sell more of its own ads this time around.
via Recode
Netflix still has a huge lead in the streaming wars, but Hulu’s smaller service has loyal users (on TV sets) – Recode (Mar 22, 2017)
I added the parenthetical in the headline because that’s the key caveat here, as the piece itself points out. There’s a great chart in here comparing penetration of TV viewing over WiFi by various services with the average hours spent viewing those services in households that use them, and it highlights Netflix’s dominance as both the most popular and most used service within that narrow viewing category. Hulu does well on time spent too, though with far fewer households, while Amazon Video comes bottom of the four, and YouTube has reasonably high penetration but low time spent (again, on TVs in homes). Obviously, all four services can be viewed outside of homes too, and it’s YouTube in particular would score much higher in a mobile-only comparison. But for the other three services, in-home viewing on a TV is a critical segment of the audience, and it’s worth noting the order on that basis: Netflix first, Hulu second, and Amazon third. Sadly, there’s no traditional content in here for comparison’s sake – much higher percentages take pay TV services in the US than any of these services, and time spent is quite a bit higher too. The full Comscore report (linked below) is well worth reading in its entirety – lots of other interesting data points.
via Recode (source Comscore report here)
AT&T pulls Google, YouTube ads over extremist videos – USA Today (Mar 22, 2017)
In my first piece about the UK backlash against YouTube by advertisers last week, I said that I saw no reason why the trend shouldn’t spread to the US, because the same issues applied here too. Now we’re starting to see signs that – despite YouTube’s somewhat vague reassurances earlier this week that it would do better – US advertisers are indeed beginning to jump on the bandwagon too. And the first big name is AT&T, one of the biggest advertisers in the US, and that’s likely to lead to more. As I’ve said in previous pieces on this topic, this is a thorny issue for YouTube, which can’t simply remove all ads from more obscure videos. Even its existing standards for which videos are suitable for advertisers are sometimes controversial, as this Guardian piece suggests, so going further down that road is likely to alienate at least some smaller creators, and of course have implications for Google’s revenue as well. At least some financial analysts are already downgrading Alphabet on that basis, and if this continues to snowball I’ve no doubt we’ll see more of that. Update: this story is moving fast: Verizon, Enterprise, and GSK have also joined in.
via USA Today
Google Announces First Steps in Better Preventing Ads Appearing on Hate Videos (Mar 21, 2017)
Last week, there was a blowup in the UK over ads showing up next to videos promoting hate and terrorism, and Google issued an initial response in Europe without promising any specific changes. It’s now talking about the problem on a global basis and getting slightly more specific about how it’ll tackle the problem. Given that the initial post highlighted the challenge of human curation, Google’s promise to do better in policing content is too vague to be reassuring – how will it do this? By hiring thousands more people to check individual videos? Better computer video analysis? On the other hand, it’s finer-grained controls for advertisers and tighter default settings are very much in line with the solutions I proposed last week, but come with other risks. If by default advertisers’ ads won’t show against the long tail of YouTube content, that will dramatically reduce the attractiveness of posting video to YouTube for creators, and revenue for YouTube as well. So the devil is in the detail here, and detail is something this post is incredibly short on. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more specifics as Google works its way through this. There are no easy solutions here though. Update: one other thing worth noting, which I had intended to include earlier but forgot: Google is going to be cracking down on some content not just from an advertising perspective but in terms of what can be posted to YouTube in the first place, which feels like a significant shift.
via Google
Google to Revamp Ad Policies After U.K., Big Brands Boycott – Bloomberg (Mar 17, 2017)
This situation in the UK doesn’t seem to be getting much attention here in the US, but it should be, because although the boycott is UK-only for now, the issues at stake aren’t UK-specific at all and could easily spread to other markets. What’s happened is that some UK companies as well as the UK government have become increasingly concerned that their ads on YouTube have been appearing next to some pretty undesirable videos featuring extremism or promoting terrorism, and Google’s tools for avoiding this don’t seem to be doing their jobs. As a result, several companies and the government have now stopped advertising on Google at all as a protest until Google fixes things. A blog post from Google makes clear just how hard it is to police the video on YouTube – 400 hours of video are uploaded every hour, and it stopped ads from showing on 300 million videos last year, which provides some sense of the scale and the impossibility of monitoring all this with human beings alone. Google is never going to be able to police the content itself at sufficient scale and with sufficient accuracy to solve the problem directly. The solution is therefore probably paring back the kinds of videos on which at least certain ads would appear – such as limiting big brand advertising to channels with long histories, large numbers of subscribers, and a good track record. However, it’s likely that many brands would choose to limit themselves to this higher quality material, which in turn would mean the long tail of videos on YouTube might go un-monetized or monetized at a much lower rate, which would have a severe impact on not just creators but YouTube’s financials. Not only could this problem spread to other markets, but Facebook will have to deal with many of the same issues as it ramps up video advertising on its platform.
via Bloomberg
YouTube makes its biggest e-sports bet with FACEIT streaming deal – Reuters (Mar 16, 2017)
E-sports are one of the few where the TV and digital rights aren’t sewn up for years to come, and so they’ve become a battleground for big digital players, with Amazon buying Twitch and YouTube now stealing one of its most high-profile, high-quality content deals. This is a big step for YouTube, which has dabbled with various bits of live sports in the past but has never had a really high-profile deal. It’s obviously not going to deliver NFL-like viewing numbers, but it’s a good test of YouTube’s commitment to live video and sports.
via Reuters
YouTube Bets It Can Convince Youngs to Pay for TV – Bloomberg (Feb 28, 2017)
It looks like Bloomberg got a pre-brief on the YouTube TV announcement this afternoon, and has posted its article just as YouTube’s event gets underway. The service is called YouTube TV, it’s $35 per month, and the headline is that it includes all four major broadcast networks, but not several big cable networks (no Viacom, Discovery, AMC, A&E, or Turner networks including CNN, TBS, and TNT). From what I’m seeing on Twitter as the event unfolds, it looks like the service will only launch in local markets where the broadcasters have affiliates, which means people like me (I live in Utah) are out of luck. As I predicted a couple of years ago in the context of a potential Apple TV service, local and sports are the big challenges, and YouTube hasn’t really cracked this on a national basis yet. The US TV market continues to be incredibly resistant to real disruption – every over the top streaming alternative to traditional pay TV is handicapped in at least one way, and often several. YouTube TV will offer cloud-based DVR as a differentiator, but the missing cable networks are a big downer. This is basically a four-way deal with the big broadcasters and their cable affiliates, but it means if you want any of the other networks you’re still going to have to buy Sling, DirecTV Now, Sony Playstation Vue, or whatever else comes down the pike later this year. There’s a certain irony to the fact that, though these services are nominally disruptive, they actually offer even less choice individually in many cases than the pay TV services they’re aiming to replace. These companies are each so determined to reach a $35 price point that they’re making decisions on behalf of customers about what should be included, and in all cases they’re excluding some channels a lot of consumers are going to want. We’re still a long way from being able to choose a bundle of channels that makes sense to us, rather than having to buy a bundle someone else configured for business reasons.
via Bloomberg