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Advertiser Revolt Throws a Wrench Into YouTube’s Plans to Wrest Ad Dollars From TV

Mar 24, 2017  •  Post A Comment

YouTube’s efforts to siphon ad money from television hit a speed bump in the past week when advertisers including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Johnson & Johnson canceled their ad deals with the video site.

“The decision by a handful of high-profile consumer brands to pull advertising from Google’s YouTube over offensive content could threaten the site’s long-term strategy of stealing ad dollars from television, analysts and ad industry professionals said Thursday,” Reuters reports.

The report notes that the immediate financial impact may be minimal, with much of YouTube’s revenue coming from smaller advertisers who don’t have the option of moving easily to another medium. “Some analysts also believe that departing advertisers, eager to reach YouTube’s millennial audience, will quickly return,” Reuters adds.

“But with ‘brand safety’ emerging as a major concern for marketers amid a surge in hate speech and other types of offensive content across the Internet, the widespread assumption that major advertisers are ready to shift large chunks of their budgets from TV to digital now looks much more dubious,” the story reports.

The report quotes Joel Espelien, a senior analyst at the Diffusion Group, saying: “Video is actually a lot more fragile of an ecosystem than the Silicon Valley, software-eats-everything crowd may want to think. The point is all content isn’t actually the same, all advertising isn’t actually all the same. There is an element of taste. And when you ruin that, the whole thing does kind of start to fall apart.”

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