While we intend to provide ways for our customers to insert advertising or partner with third party advertisers, I don't think we'll be providing an ad network ourselves anytime soon. As a result, end users will have much more control over exactly how their content is monetized.

Using your example, a firearms video stream could stream videos through Cloudflare Stream and sell ads themselves or partner with an ad network that was willing to sell them to an audience that cared about firearms. I totally agree that the one-size-fits-all solution of Facebook or YouTube reverts to the lowest common denominator and, in doing so, will inherently not be right for every publisher.

Presumably, the algorithm change was to make advertisers more happy. Advertisers don't want to advertise on some content, as much as the creators might like them to. The advertiser response to some people that get demonetized complaining is "we wouldn't have advertised in the first place if we knew, so count yourself lucky you got the money you did".

The reality is of course somewhere in the middle, and there's some content which some advertisers would not want to be associated with, while others might actually want to target, and the current algorithm may not be serving these needs well. Hopefully it's just a matter of a better system being needed that might come later.

Interestingly, which topic was covered recently in Mozilla's IRL podcast[1].

1: https://irlpodcast.org/episode7/

YT has also been demonetizing videos on one of my favorite veterinary channels for being too graphic. It's a shame because they use the funds to provide care to abandoned animals. They always warn when videos contain surgery footage, even though it's relatively tame imho.

You're talking about VetRanch I assume? Yeah they are demonetizing Matt's DemolitionRanch and a number of other similar channels.

Whatever algorithm YT changed a few months ago is really putting a hurt on content creators for little gain. If certain advertisers don't want to be on channels with certain keywords they should be able to configure that, but wholesale demonetization is really stupid.

> You're talking about VetRanch I assume?

Yes, that's it!