There have been cases where advertisers get in trouble for things the video publisher has included. Once an advertiser has given permission to have their ads on certain videos, people started to take advantage and some even using them for incorrect reasons. Epic Games just wanted to make sure they were not involved in anything before it could escalate.
A representative for Epic Games told The Verge: "We have paused all pre-roll advertising, through our advertising agency, we have reached out to Google/YouTube to determine actions they’ll take to eliminate this type of content from their service."
This discovery was thanks to Matt Watson who even made a video regarding how easy it is for sexual predators to exploit children. In his video he shows that even the comments section of multiple videos used by these predators are full of “violative comments”. He said: “YouTube’s recommended algorithm is facilitating pedophiles’ ability to connect with each-other, trade contact info, and link to actual child pornography in the comments,” Watson wrote on Reddit. “I can consistently get access to it from vanilla, never-before-used YouTube accounts via innocuous videos in less than ten minutes, in sometimes less than five clicks.”
“We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments.” Ensuring that advertisers commercials don’t run on videos with disturbing content is something that YouTube has worked on for some time.
“Any content — including comments — that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube,” the spokesperson said. “There’s more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and catch abuse more quickly” a YouTube rep shared with The Verge.
This is not the first time something like this happens, it has been caught before and YouTube stated that changes had been made and will continue to be made in order to better monitor these situations. There were supposedly changes that made it easier for advertisers to choose which videos they wanted their ads to appear in and which should be skipped. Hopefully YouTube can settle this so that advertisers don’t have to worry about getting into trouble. There are no news regarding when Epic will start rolling Fortnite ads again. For updates, stay here.