November brought us a lot of uproar in the YouTube world. The platform owned by Google is facing a lot of backlash from advertisers and users alike. Facing not one put two troublesome algorithm errors, the company once again needs to take action to make the world happy again.
Brands freeze their advertising
Once again, major brands have decided to pull their advertising from YouTube. And once again have been shown on inappropriate content. After advertising being featured alongside extremist content earlier this year, the BBC and the Times reported last week that their researchers had found obscene comments on videos of children that had been uploaded to YouTube.
After flagging the comments and reporting them to YouTube, not all of them had been removed. The related accounts and the majority of the offensive comments were removed after the BBC contacted YouTube via press channels.
The Times had noticed the advertising alongside videos showing children in various states of undress (think holiday videos or kids uploading videos themselves) alongside obscene remarks. As a reaction, brands decided to freeze their advertising until the issues are resolved and a permanent solution is found. The companies include Adidas, Lid and Cadburys. A YouTube spokesperson said that they are working on an urgent fix and that the videos should not have been running alongside the type of content in the first place.
Peppa Pig is drinking bleach
Unfortunately, the problems regarding child safety continue. Users have discovered disturbing videos that are deemed kid-friendly and appear in their children’s section on YouTube. The videos at first appear to be friendly, seeming to be nursery rhymes or cartoons with favourite show characters. But in reality they might be quite unfit for the little ones to watch, showing Peppa Pig drinking bleach or a Paw Patrol character committing suicide.
These type of videos should under no circumstanced be deemed child-friendly and slip through the algorithm filters. YouTube has faced heavy criticism and will once again have to examine their filters and make sure that users, no matter what age, can enjoy videos. As a response, the video streaming platform has issues a blog post last week ‘ 5 ways we’re toughening our approach to protect families on YouTube and YouTube Kids’.
We hope all the actions will improve child safety considerably.
Google has fixed the YouTube apps problem of draining the battery of iOS devices excessively. The app was causing battery life to dwindle even if it was just in the background. Some users even reported their phones heating up when using it.
Some users said that watching 15 minutes of video could reduce usage by over 10%, others reported a drop of 20% when watching just over 30 minutes (mainly iPhone X users). The problem could be related to the version of the YouTube app that was being used, version 12.42 and 12.43 seem to have been impacting battery life. It is good to know that this is not a problem based on the newest iOS 11 or Apple products.
Last year, YouTube launched a Community tab, providing social features that let creators engage with their followers through videos, text and photos. As always, a few creators tried it out first and now it is being rolled out to creators worldwide. The response has generally been very positive so YouTube will add more channels following the launch.
Just yesterday, it was announced that the new feature is now available for creators with more than 10k subscribers. So if you are one of the lucky ones, give it a go and connect with your subscribers!