Youtube Tries To Think Of The Children

A walled garden for the video site’s advertisers makes things tougher for amateur creators

- Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw

You know things are bad when the engineers show up in suits.

In early January, YouTube’s technical chiefs dressed up to meet privately in Las Vegas with several prominent ad agencies. The Google executives in charge of YouTube’s ad sales had arranged the meetings to assure advertisers the video site was working to get its problems under control. Months of outrage had followed reports that YouTube had let terrorist leaders continue to post recruiting videos and aired the juvenile blunders of young stars PewDiePie (who cracked anti-Semitic jokes) and Logan Paul (who filmed the corpse of an apparent suicide). The bigger problem for advertisers: bewildering, sometimes grotesque videos appearing on YouTube’s dedicated channel for children. Think young kids being force-fed or a knockoffof a popular cartoon pig being tortured in a dentist’s chair.

Google’s solution was to safeguard a tiny slice of YouTube, one sanitized for marketers, with every video vetted by human moderators. The rest of the familiar YouTube free-for-all would have far fewer channels running ads. Advertisers would have less reason to worry that their pitches might run ahead of Nazi humor or child exploitation. “The human review is fantastic,” says Jon Anselmo, chief digital officer with ad giant Omnicom Media Group. “The devil will be in the details.”