You are missing the point that for years advertisers were accidentally putting commercials in front of garbage (multi-hour long videos that were only used as pacifiers for toddlers, with dozens of ad breaks) or scum (algorithm scammers getting billions of views from children on unlicensed, sexual content like Spider-man groping Elsa or worse).
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.