Following the scandal, YouTube blocked 50 channels with children and removed thousands of inappropriate children's videos, the video service reported two days ago / Evgeny Razumny / Vedomosti

American companies HP (computer equipment) and Mars (sweets), German Deutsche Bank and Lidl (retail), British BT (telecommunications) and Sky (media) have removed advertising from YouTube and Google – because of inappropriate comments about sex under children's videos, writes the Financial Times. The Guardian points out that German Adidas (sports goods and clothing) has done the same.

Representatives of the German supermarket chain Lidl said they were shocked: inappropriate comments under videos with children are not removed by YouTube employees. The owner of the video service, Google, assures advertisers that there is strict monitoring of comments on YouTube, but it turns out that this monitoring is completely ineffective.

Other advertisers who refused to accept the offer complain not about the comments, but about the videos themselves. HP removed all ads from YouTube because the service placed them incorrectly: “We are extremely concerned that our ads appeared within absolutely terrible content.” YouTube incorrectly classifies videos as safe for children and families, BT and Deutsche Bank supported HP.

Advertisers have begun monitoring the content surrounding their YouTube ads since the BBC and The Times published investigations into children's videos on YouTube and the comments surrounding them in mid-November.

The BBC reported the problem to members of the Trusted Flagger program, volunteers who help the service monitor inappropriate videos and comments for free. Several people from the program, on condition of anonymity, said that technical problems could arise when moderating comments: after filing a complaint about comments that clearly violated the service's rules, the link to the comment itself disappeared from the form for some reason. The BBC's interlocutors pointed to several comments with explicit sexual proposals to children - the heroes of the videos; these comments were published several weeks before the conversation and were removed by YouTube only after a request from this British media outlet.

In turn, The Times reported on children's channels that have tens of millions of subscribers and whose videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views – despite clear violations of YouTube's rules. The Toy Freaks channel, for example, published a video of a sobbing seven-year-old girl who had just had a baby tooth pulled – blood is pouring from her mouth. Another video on the same channel shows the same girl and her sister being scared by their father with live snakes. Toy Freaks was blocked by YouTube shortly after the publication.

Following the scandal, YouTube blocked 50 channels featuring children and removed thousands of inappropriate children's videos, the video service reported two days ago. In particular, the popular Russian channel Vlad Crazy Show, which had 9.4 million subscribers, was blocked. The channel was criticized on social networks for popularizing unhealthy food and various brands among children, which were advertised in the videos. YouTube also said that it had tightened its policy on publishing children's videos and comments under them.

This is already the second major scandal involving YouTube in the last year, as a result of which the service is losing huge advertising budgets.

In March, the same The Times published an investigation showing that ads by major advertisers were placed in videos with clearly extremist content – in sermons by radical priests calling for the murder of gays, in speeches by Nazis, etc. After that, many companies, including retailers Marks & Spencer and Tesco, cosmetics L'Oreal, as well as sandwich shop McDonald's and automobile manufacturers Renault, Audi, Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota, removed their ads from YouTube. According to Pathmatics, in the 90 days from March 15 to June 13, 2017, advertiser spending on YouTube fell by 50% compared to the same period in 2016 – to $739 million. Pathmatics did not take into account data from the YouTube mobile app.

YouTube then apologized to advertisers and tightened its ad placement policies. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that many of the advertisers who left had returned to the service.

Comments hurt advertising