Technology

YouTube Tries to Think of the Children

A walled garden for the site’s advertisers makes things tougher for amateur creators.

Illustration: Kurt Woerpel for Bloomberg Businessweek

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By Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw

January 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the January 29, 2018 issue of businessweek.

You know things are bad when the engineers show up in suits.

In early January, YouTube’s technical chiefs dressed up to meet privately in Las Vegas with several prominent ad agencies. The Google executives in charge of YouTube’s ad sales had arranged the meetings to assure advertisers the video site was working to get its problems under control. Months of outrage had followed reports that YouTube had let terrorist leaders continue to post recruiting videos and aired the juvenile blunders of young stars PewDiePie (who cracked anti-Semitic jokes) and Logan Paul (who filmed the corpse of an apparent suicide). The bigger problem for advertisers: bewildering, sometimes grotesque videos appearing on YouTube’s dedicated channel for children. Think young kids being force-fed or a knockoff of a popular cartoon pig being tortured in a dentist’s chair.