YouTube Presentation

Hi guys!!

This is a little blog post about our new intro to digital media mission!! This mission is "culture", I decided to pick the topic YouTube. I decided this because I love YouTube and I watch many videos on the platform daily, far too many to actually count hahaha! I love how you can connect with people over a simple video, it is honestly amazing. I also love how people can literally go from nothing to being one of the biggest people on the planet. You can post a simple video on YouTube of you singing and the next thing you know your new album is top of the charts. This has happened to so many people including Justin Bieber. It is such a powerful platform. The quality of videos on it nowadays is incredible some are basically like Hollywood films, people are so talented and it's great they have a platform to show this off in. So because of all this, this is why I chose this mission. 

David Dobrik - Famous Youtuber with 14.7 million subscribers. image from dailydot

As I have said I adore YouTube, but not everything about it is a good thing. The main thing in this mission that I want to look into and do my part of the presentation is about monetization. Monetization is basically making money by posting videos on YouTube. YouTube puts advertisements onto the videos you post and that generates money. But they can also take the advertisements off, this is called demonetization. This happens when YouTube think your video isn't suitable for advertisements. This has been known to cause a lot of controversies as it is a software that decides if your video is suitable or not. Of course, we know you can’t always trust computers to do human work. So what has happened is that the software is demonetizing videos that shouldn’t be demonetized including a lot of LGBTQ+ videos. This has come under a lot of fire. So I wanted to bring more attention on this and research more into it and I thought this was the perfect opportunity. So I researched a lot into this and of course since the topic is on YouTube a lot of them were YouTube videos that I watched. I came across this video of a guy who went and tested all the words that can get you monetized or demonetized. The list of words are very strange, using words like North Carolina and South Carolina in your title or description will get your demonetized whereas North Korea won’t. Which to be fair doesn’t really make sense. Not sure what North or South Carolina ever did to YouTube hahaha. This guy tested so many words and he put them all into an Excel type of document and listed them below the video, so I did go through the whole list which was a lot of words. I just found it very interesting to read and try to understand why this is happening.

It wasn’t too hard to find the research because of the YouTube algorithm suggests videos like ones you’ve watched as to watch next. So without realizing I was in a binge-watching of all these videos but were all very interesting and brought up very valid points. So yes, YouTube can be used as a new way of expressing your creativity but it does have a bad side and of course this is only a minor thing really there is also the whole algorithm, where YouTube hasn’t been showing people new videos from certain topics at all, frankly they’re topics that need to be discussed too, like mental health and LGBTQ+ topics to name a few. I do believe though that this can get better and I really think it will, especially when people are raising their voices about the topic!

source

Thanks for reading, and as always I’ll update you all soon on how this is going!!

Talk soon, 

Megan