18 BUSINESS @VAPENEWSGO
T
he end of March 2017 marked the demonetization of vape content on YouTube, and with it came hordes of frustrated reviewers.
An international ad boycott is linked as the root cause, when major advertisers started pulling their YouTube ads because they didn’t want those ads running on inappropriate videos. YouTube reacted, or in the opinion of many, overreacted, by changing their terms of service for content creators. The change meant
By ANGELA GARRITY that moving forward, videos had to be “advertiser friendly” to qualify for payment. YouTube began demonetizing videos that they saw as unfriendly to advertisers, thus outraging content creators. YouTube, a platform for creative freedom, has long been a place where a number of the larger channels have found popularity and have grown businesses from their channels’ advertising income. YouTube became a nanny to their creators, showing loyalty to advertisers rather than to their content creators. More recently, YouTube has started
targeting particular channels and has begun auto-demonetizing most vape related video content. Reviewers are now burdened with having to ask YouTube to manually review their work by an actual human before they will run ads on vape Reviewers videos. There is no guarantee that they will approve the content. Some YouTube reviewers have been outspoken about this. One of the largest YouTube vape personalities, Ruby Roo, describes this ad-pocolypse as “absolute malarkey.” Being a YouTube is more than just choosing thumbnails and creative video introductions — it