Experts believe that extremists and hate preachers have made at least $318,000 from ads for household brands and government departments placed alongside their YouTube videos. In the meantime, Google is estimated to have earned about $150,000 from advertisers for providing a tool that enables to place the ads against the content. Needless to say that the affected brands did not want their names associated with the hate speech. Some Muslim preacher, who has been banned from entering the United Kingdom due to concerns of “provoking others to commit terrorist acts”, has earned about $78,000 from ads placed in anti-western propaganda videos.
These ads include campaigns by the BBC, Boots and Channel 4, and the preacher’s YouTube channel appeared to be the most popular of the online extremists to be making money from Google’s advertising system. YouTube’s algorithm places brand adverts against any videos. He has about 207,000 subscribers to his channel, and his videos have been watched 31m times. Given that YouTube video creators collect about $4.18 for every 1,000 views, his channel has made a total of $78,000+. Exact figures are available only to Google and YouTube video creators only, but Google refused to provide them and disputed such calculations. Google also declined to address its role in funding potential terrorists.
The list of online extremists earning from ads placed against their YouTube videos is long enough: for example, it includes the US pastor, who was banned from the UK for hate speech against gays and whose YouTube channel is estimated to have earned $68,000 from 33.5m views of his videos. His viewers could see adverts for L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Nissan and the Guardian. Another US white nationalist and antisemite is estimated to have earned $34,000.
Although Google had policies to prohibit adverts from appearing on pages or videos with inappropriate content, the company has to admit that sometimes the system fails and ads appear against content that violates its monetization policies. Google assured that it immediately removes such ads once they are discovered, but it still has room for improvement. In the meantime, the UK government and some commercial companies like the Guardian, BBC and TfL, pulled all advertising from Google and YouTube.
