Because youtube attracts a lot of brand advertisers: think Cheerios, Volvo, Swiffer, etc. These ads are designed to create awareness of the products and to create warm feelings for the brand. Hence cute kids eat Cheerios or Volvo brags about safety or Swiffer shows how easy it is to have an immaculate mansion.

All of the above dread showing up next to eg some jackass going to a suicide forest and showing a dead person for kicks. Showing ads primarily against bigger videos means youtube has a chance to check the content. ie so-called brand safety.

See how the ad industry views the changes:

http://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-is-finally-addressing-...

> Showing ads primarily against bigger videos

Which does fall down somewhat when the jackass going to a suicide forest is one of the biggest creators (estimated 4th highest paid in 2017) -and- was a Preferred Partner.

> means youtube has a chance to check the content

Sure but they apparently approved his suicide forest video.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/9/16869430/youtube-logan-paul...

"[...] YouTube moderation team had reviewed Paul’s video and deemed it acceptable."

It helps a lot against all the ISIS videos that show ads where Google is getting a lot of heat in Europe.

Yes, because figuring out if you are actually sponsoring terrorism is hard. /s

No, the thing is advertisers do not want their brands associated with thing x. YouTube already has automated classifiers for demonetization. This is recognition that these classifiers do not work - from the side of advertisers.

Google could tell them "deal with it" and they'd probably oblige. The manual side was Google Preferred program.

Google had been telling them “deal with it” for years, until the advertisers banded together and threatened to stop spending on YouTube.

That watershed moment is what caused YouTube to develop the whole demonetization algorithim in the first place

Source? I would like to read more about this.

Those brand advertisers really destroyed advertising on the web, with the help of bot clickers ... Pay per click !? Great we don't want clicks ... I got 1000 clicks! Nope, all bots! Advertising went from fully automated to fully manual. There's billions of dollars wasted on manual marketing, and I know many have tried, but if you can make advertising fully automatic again, there's your unicorn startup!

I'm sure there are ways to detect real clickthrough vs fake? (via monitoring the behaviour of the visitor upon clicking through) Why isn't this the magic bullet (or unicorn) you speak of.

It is hard with video because of the bandwidth needed to fake video views. Plus Google has logged in accounts often for YT which helps with detecting if a bot.

Yeah, but wasn't jackass in suicide forest a high-performing video?

And as per the article, Google is now going to have a human being watch all those videos.

You're using logic again. His point is they're not logical unless you count "forest through the trees" fallacies as logic.

They want whatever is IN. Whatever is BIG. Whatever is the most POPULAR.

It's all about "big names" swirling around the community. "Have you heard of X?" Because "discovering X" and getting a big deal makes you famous.

"Driving profits up 3% over last quarter" is not what a hot shot maverick does. It's not cool.

So finding tens/hundreds/thousands of smaller (but successful!) channels isn't popular. Humans can't process that easily. And when it comes to impressing your boss in that industry, you want bite-size chunks. You want the next Macklemore, not 30 amazing electrical-engineering channels.

Isn’t that the Yahoo “search” approach?

Didn’t Google crush their directory of vetted content model because they were able to give users what they actually wanted?