Sad to hear about the problems The Great War channel is having with Youtube, which is once again another indictment against Youtube for doing damage to quality, education content creators with its scattershot approach to "ad-friendly" videos. What was interesting... well probably only interesting to me and boring to the rest of you, was the sensationalism surrounding it. A frontpage Reddit thread claimed that the Adpocalypse had caused them to lose "90% of their revenue!". Nowhere in the video about it was that mentioned in fact the video maker themselves had to come in and correct the poster saying that they actually hadn't at all.

The truth is unfortunately a lot more boring than sensationalism and outrage, but it is important to understand how Youtube operates. In this case, whats happening to The Great War is actually NOT demonetization in the way you've been hearing about lately, but a much older policy called "manual monetization review". A while ago Youtube put this policy in place that ended up affecting a lot of gaming affiliates, at least short-term, then rapidly faded off the radar mostly because it was a problem that quickly solved itself, a situation where the machine-learning actually worked properly. The idea was that your video wouldnt get ads put on it automatically unless you were a trusted partner (usually managed partner status, or a channel with a lot of history of doing things well) and you had to submit your video for monetization review. This usually took a few hours and rarely caused many problems. The concern at the time was that affiliate game reviewers would have problems competing with managed partners and larger channels because they'd have to make a hard choice, put out their video as early as they could with everyone else so as not to get lost in the crowd, but not get ads on the first few hours of views (thats a lot of potential views), or wait until the video was approved for monetization before releasing it and end up with less people watching it because other people got there first.

The fact that this is still an issue, especially for a channel the size of The Great War is pretty mindboggling. They should be far past the point of getting their stuff put through manual monetization review but according to their video, its happening constantly. The good news is, since their content is "evergreen" and doesnt really have to adhere to a strict schedule, if they get a lead on it, they can get their videos monetized before they go live with them and not lose any money. As they mentioned in their video though thats tough to do and they want to provide their videos at the times their audience expects them, so it can be tricky to manage that. This is further complicated by their reports that the monetization process has vastly slowed down lately, most likely due to the huge load that having to process a lot of appeals that their crazy ad-deathbot has caused. Now these appeals are taking several days, instead of several hours and that screws up a lot of things for a lot of people.

This has very little to do with the ongoing "adpocalypse" outside of that factor, its a much older policy and I'm surprised to hear that its still affecting people. It shows once again why Youtubes inaction when it comes to working directly with their trusted partners and content creators is harming their platform and Youtubes own revenue. Instead they just let a machine loose on the platform to do tons of damage and shrugged their shoulders when asked "what the hell are we supposed to do to make sure our videos are ok for advertisers?".

That is what Youtube should be constantly criticized for. They can't control what content advertisers do and don't want to put ads on and its an advertisers right not to put their ads on any video they want. But what they can do is actually show content creators that they give at least one iota of fucks about the people that make their platform worth a damn by producing constantly good content for it and keeping the audience coming back daily for more.