14 DAY TRIAL // It's been weeks since the Google boycott began due to badly placed ads of serious businesses which led to some 250 brands halting their connections to the Mountain View giant. Now, the company finally has a solution to its woes.
What does Google plan to do to keep ads off videos with extremist or hateful content? Use machine learning to identify objectionable content.
The company says that the new tools they came up with will help enforce the revised policies and identify content that may be objectionable to advertisers.
Google also announced it would be offering brand safety reporting by working with third-party partners, such as Integral Ad Science and comScore.
"We are working with companies that are MRC-accredited for ad verification on this initiative and will begin integrating these technologies shortly," Google said in a statement.
What's more, Google will also work on shortening the time it takes to review flagged videos, exclude specific content from where their ads could appear, and change the default level of brand safety for where ads can appear. All put together, these measures should help advertisers better manage where their ads land and what content they associate with, or, better said, with what content they shouldn't associate with.
Little impact
Despite the fact that over 250 businesses put a hold on their ads being displayed on YouTube, Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler said the company wasn't suffering too much. Plus, he added that it was only "very very very small numbers" of ads running alongside the extremist or hateful content.
Regardless of how this boycott impacted the company, they did realize that something had to be done, which is why they scrambled to come up with a solution to the problem. Using the new machine learning tool will help Google find five times more videos that aren't brand-safe.