美国国家公共电台 NPR Online Video Producers Caught In Struggle Between Advertisers And YouTube

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People who produce content on YouTube are bringing in less money. They say their ad rates have gone down by as much as 75 percent the last couple weeks. As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, the producers are caught in a struggle between YouTube and its advertisers.

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE 2: YouTube has plenty of lighthearted entertainers who depend on the ads the company places on their video channels.

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Want to forget that horrible illness and move on?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Take this pill, and forget you were ill.

SYDELL: David Firth is a British animator whose dark comedic videos were bringing in a good living.

DAVID FIRTH: However, recently, it's taken a huge nosedive.

SYDELL: Part of what's happened is that big companies, such as General Motors, McDonald's and Audi, pulled out of YouTube after reports of ads running next to extremist and anti-Semitic material. So there's less money to go around. To bring back advertisers, YouTube began to stop running ads against some videos.

FIRTH: They've decided 3 that there are a whole new set of rules for what you can and you cannot put an advert 1 on and make money off. And they didn't tell anyone. They just suddenly start removing people's advert revenue 4.

SYDELL: Firth says ads have been taken off videos that have the word die in the title, even though it's someone dying of laughter. It's not just entertainers who are having problems. It's advocates, like Real Women, Real Stories, which has non-graphic videos of women who've struggled with problems like physical abuse.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Then he started touching 5 me and hitting me and kicking me.

SYDELL: The founder 6 of the channel is Matan Uziel.

MATAN UZIEL: Real Women, Real Stories is a platform for women to say actually whatever they want to say, to speak their own mind.

SYDELL: Uziel was using the money from ads on the videos to pay for more of them. And then, the ads just stopped. YouTube is making changes to the way its algorithms plays ads. Jamie Byrne, a director of enterprise 7 at YouTube, says the machines will get better at knowing the difference between a site fighting violence against women and one that promotes it.

JAMIE BYRNE: They need to take some time to learn where they should show ads and where they should not. And so by nature, they start out kind of with a smaller set of inventory 8 that they serve ads on.

SYDELL: Byrne says one of the ways that the software will learn is if YouTube producers challenge a bad choice. YouTube is also making changes that give advertisers more control over where their ads are shown. They can pick categories, say, news or sports or even particular sites.

BYRNE: And if an advertiser has a specific content creator or organization that they don't feel they're comfortable with, they can always tell us that. And we can implement 9 those types of controls for them.

SYDELL: So if an advertiser has conservative 10 politics, maybe they don't want ads to run on MSNBC. The stakes are high for YouTube. According to some analysts 11, it stands to lose as much as $750 million this year if it doesn't bring back advertisers. Producer Matan Uziel says he's starting to see some ads come back on his videos, and he understands that YouTube is in a difficult position.

UZIEL: I don't hate YouTube. I like YouTube. And I think that because we're all very much dependent on YouTube, we have to know how it actually works.

SYDELL: For now, it seems like YouTube is also trying to figure out how its new system actually works. Laura Sydell, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF BERRY WEIGHT'S "THE WAY OF THE DODO")