YouTube is the premier destination for video consumption, with over 5B uniques on the platform each day! But, it’s a sobering fact that both informative and dangerously amateur content vie for your viewers’ attention every second.

1. A BRAND SAFETY THESIS
Introduction
YouTube was just another domain name on February 14, 2005. But in 12 years, this tiny
video sharing service with the apocryphal backstory that it was programmed into
existence to share a video of a dinner party, has exploded from a single 19 second video,
to a vast universe of content, propagating in its wake over 17.2 million hours of content
each month (nearly 7 hours of content each second). A digital version of the Big Bang.
On Alexa, YouTube is the second most visited site in the world, a notch below Google (its
parent company), but above its nearest social video competitor, Facebook. Attracting
more than 15 billion unique users each month, YouTube prides itself as the world’s
premier destination for video content.
When Sridhar Ramaswamy, the Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce at Google,
announced Trueview for action at dmexco in September 2016, he shared a recent study,
which found that 47% of U.S. adults aged 18 to 54 said that YouTube had helped them at
least once a month when they were making a decision about buying something. Doing the
math, that’s an estimated 70 million people going to YouTube each month to research a
purchase. If brands stop advertising on YouTube, then they shouldn’t be surprised if
competitors step into the breach, connecting with consumers during these intent-rich
moments.
YouTube Creators Ecosystem and Content Quality
On YouTube, using AdSense to monetize channels is simple. Content creators, called
“influencers” in YouTube parlance, activate AdSense on their videos. As audiences watch
an influencer’s video, their views directly translate into video ad inventory on AdSense.
This video ad inventory, called Trueview by Google, is sold on AdSense as an auction
through two ad-buying platforms: AdWords Trueview and DBM Trueview. On both ad-
buying platforms, Trueview, because it’s an auction, is bought through a bidding process,
where views can be won for mere pennies. For each view that is won against an
influencer’s video, AdSense will give 55% to the influencer, while 45% is given to YouTube.

2. Investment banking analyst Ken Sena at Evercore ISI, estimated that in 2015, YouTube
grossed $9B in gross revenue. Comparing YouTube’s financials to another modern
content behemoth, Netflix, Mr. Sena’s analysis shows that YouTube spent as much, or
more, than Netflix on acquiring content, yet generated $3.2B more on gross revenue. With
55% shared with the content creators, more than $5 Billion is distributed to the content
ecosystem. As more advertisers spend on YouTube, YouTube content creators will
produce higher quality content.
The Issue: Why Is This Happening?
Dominating the tech news cycle over the last ten days has been the mass exodus of many
of the world’s biggest brands from YouTube. The stampede was sparked by The Times (a
British newspaper) article on February 8th, which stated that ads placed by the English
government were being displayed on YouTube alongside hateful content from
pornographers, nationalists, and terrorists like ISIS.
Initially, a flurry of UK-based companies such as Lloyds, HSBC, The Guardian, and The
BBC announced they were suspending ads on YouTube. Then over the next few days,
L’Oreal, Audi, and McDonalds UK followed suit. Despite Google’s public response that they
would rapidly work to fix the problem, by the end of March, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Wal-Mart,
AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, and ride-service firm Lyft had pulled out as well. The resulting
hit to parent company Alphabet’s stock erased $26 billion in market value overnight.
This is a big deal, and it is bringing mainstream awareness to one of the largest problems
intrinsic to digital advertising: brand safety.
1. Programmatic advertising enables advertisers to target users based on individual
profile data and serve ads to them regardless of where they are on the internet.

3. This automated process serves billions of ad impressions every day with no
human input, allowing advertisers to cheaply and efficiently reach audiences at
scale. Such massive scale comes with a cost: the algorithms cannot always
distinguish which content is toxic and should be avoided.
2. Advertisers are demanding low CPMs while requiring high performance and brand
safety metrics. At Channel Factory, insights gleamed from our database and
technology platform IQ, show a decrease in CPM/CPV on YouTube while overall
demand from advertisers is increasing. This means that monetizable inventory on
YouTube is increasing, allowing advertisers to buy cheap inventory but potentially
exposing them to the worst excesses of the internet.
How to Implement Brand Safety
In response to the brand safety crisis, major agencies have demanded third-party brand
safety measures, but there is a major obstacle to this technological solution: Google does
not allow third-party JavaScripts on YouTube. In 2015, Google banned the use of
JavaScripts, as the same programming language that is deployed by third-parties to
ensure brand safety (blocking technologies from MOAT, IAS, etc.), can also dip its digital
fingers into the goldmine of our information age: user data. With the infamous “walled
gardens” built around YouTube and other publishers, Google has—so far—resisted the call
to reinstate third-party tags (powered by JavaScript) from the agencies.
So, without a third-party solution, what are the primary methods of maintaining brand
safety in digital advertising, and how are they best deployed for campaigns on YouTube?
Channel Factory employs three brand safety tactics on YouTube: Content Filtering,
Blacklisting and Whitelisting.
1. YouTube Content Filters are a built-in YouTube function that can be used to filter
out general content categories, such as “Mature Audience Only.” Content Filters
are the broadest possible way to restrict content on YouTube. Other brand safety
filters include:
a. Digital content labels exclusions—advertisers can exclude “Mature
audiences” or “Teen audiences” or exclude all the content that hasn’t been
labeled yet by YouTube (new content that has been just published).

4. b. Sensitive subject exclusions—advertisers can exclude video content that
falls into one of the two categories: “Tragedy and conflict” and “Sensitive
social issues.”
c. Content type exclusions—advertisers can exclude two specific types of
videos: “Live streaming” and “Embedded videos.”
On top of the existing safety filters, Google has recently announced that they will
be introducing further improvements to this functionality. More specifically, Google
will be changing the default settings for ads so that they show on content that
meets a higher-level of brand safety and excludes potentially objectionable
content that advertisers may prefer not to advertise against. Media buyers will
have an option to opt in to advertise on broader types of content if they choose.
2. The next level of restriction is Blacklisting. Blacklisting is maintaining a database
of sites or channels that are blocked. Blacklists are organized by taxonomies like
racism/sexism, pornography, guns and violence, and terrorism. Google allows
advertisers to utilize their exclusion database to provide an important brand safety
protection. Advertiser can upload lists of keywords, videos and channels that
should be excluded from the ad campaign or “negatively targeted.”
Since this type of a campaign would usually have a broad targeting (e.g., would be
based on keywords, topics or interest groups), success of the exclusion
methodology to a large extent depends on how exhaustive the exclusion lists are.
While the list of the negative keywords can be created and managed by a human
operator, it is more difficult to generate the list of videos and channels that should
be excluded from the ad campaign. This is especially true because these exclusion
lists become insufficient as time passes by since newly offensive and brand
unsafe YouTube channels and videos are being uploaded to the platform each
day.
Channel Factory has built a technology to assist marketers in blacklisting content
on YouTube in real-time. The technology utilizes machine learning to continuously
look for extreme and hateful content, both existing and newly uploaded to
YouTube.
This system works effortlessly 24/7, pulling new videos and channels for defined
group of negative keywords from YouTube. To scale, we deploy innovative use
cases of both audio analysis and image recognition. The newly discovered videos
and channels are then scrutinized by a human team. Those that show clear red
flags are added to the database of blacklisted YouTube channels. We not only do
this for English, but for a variety of languages (Spanish, Russian, Arabic, etc.).
With approximately 400 hours of video content uploaded every minute on
YouTube, ongoing vigilance is necessary.

5. 3. The final brand safety tactic is Whitelisting. This tactic provides the highest level of
brand safety, as inventory is only bought on previously vetted channels, known to
be 100% brand safe. In order to effectively execute, advertisers have to have
insights into channel’s daily activity in order to ensure that the content published
on those channels meet the brand safety criteria.
To ensure delivery scale on the AdWords campaigns with the whitelisting
approach, advertisers have to identify thousands of the verified content creators.
That’s where Channel Factory comes in. Our technology tracks the small and the
large creators real-time. We analyze the content they create daily, and we create a
search engine for advertisers to easily identify content creators they are looking
for by KPI. We not only analyze by keywords, our machine learning algorithm
analyzes engagement, where the views are coming from, and combine several key
factors to understand if something will be appropriate for an advertiser. If a
creator is flagged, it goes to our human team to curate what is dangerous, border-
line, and safe. To further analyze content, we partner directly with content creators
to have deeper insights to their audience and content. This helps us develop an
internal scoring of each Channel, and we can customize the scoring base on an
advertiser’s comfort zone.
Experience, technology, unflagging vigilance and human intelligence; these are the
foundations which has forged Channel Factory’s brand safety philosophy.