What does "commercially viable" mean and will YouTube ban my account?
Under its new terms and conditions, going into effect 10th December, YouTube can delete your ENTIRE Google account, if they believe you're not "commercially viable".
What does this mean?
YouTube, owned by Google, will reserve the right to delete your Google account, if you are not bringing it money.
Some people believe that you could get banned just for having an ad blocker on, others believe users won’t see any changes.
But the uproar and media publicity is due to the fact that “commercially viable” is very vague language and may give YouTube full rights to kick you out whenever they please.
Why is a change to terms and conditions such big news?
A bit of context.
If there are only two stories about big tech you should know, they are these two:
- People are (finally) starting to care about their privacy and data
- Big tech companies have received a lot of criticism in relation to their power and influence
Firstly, it’s important to understand that data is the most valuable commodity in the world. And companies like Google collect more data than you could imagine.
For example, check out all the places you’ve travelled to, by the minute: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
The main reason data is so important is because more data ?=> better advertising => more money. Around 86% of Google’s entire revenue comes from ads, while the number for Facebook is around 89%. Essentially, both companies are in the advertising business where data is everything.
Secondly, there have been quite a few data breaches in recent history. Perhaps the most significant being how Cambridge Analytica managed to get personally identifiable information of around 87 million Facebook users, and used that data to make creepily targeted political ads on Facebook. Which just happened to help Trump become President.
Which brings us to the next point.
Big technology companies have a lot of power.
Your online presence is basically Google. If suddenly your Google account disappeared, you’d feel it in every part of your online activities:
- Your Google Drive and Google Photos (meaning your photos, school projects, work documents)
- Gmail. The primary method of communication for many of your networks. Plus your email history.
- Google’s physical products (Android phones practically run on Google). Google Home products you’ve paid money for.
- YouTube (your uploaded and liked videos)
- Business tools you may be using to make your income, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads
- Third-party sites you’ve logged into with your Gmail account may be affected as well
That’s a lot of power that Google has over you (and billions of other people).
In fact, some people believe Google is so powerful that it should be broken up. When a single, private company has such an influence on almost every person’s life, one cannot help but wonder what the company could potentially be capable of.
One may argue that the slope from “commercially viable” to “we can delete you for any reason” is a slippery one. For example, if you were to advocate against YouTube, would YouTube consider you bad for business and shut down your account?
We come down to pretty fundamental questions about democracy and freedom of speech. After all, shutting down a Google account means denied access to your own information, photos, files and the like.
To further stir up the mess, Google and other tech giants have been criticized for their influence in democracy and elections.
In just 5 months, over $120 million has been poured into political advertising on Google in the United States alone. Recent discussions have focused on the fact that political advertising on Google and Facebook may breach democracy; advertisers may easily spread false information or even just different messages to different people (as was the case with the US elections 2016).
Mark Zuckerberg was recently grilled at a US Congress hearing, where he was asked whether Facebook allows advertisers to publish ads that are not fact-checked. Mark did manage to circle the question quite well, but the conclusion is that political Facebook ads are here to stay (at least for now), and they don’t need to go through a fact-check to be approved.
On the other hand, Twitter (owned by Facebook), has banned political advertisements altogether and has received street creds for the decision. Although this move did raise awareness of the issue and put pressure on Facebook and Google, Twitter remains the only big platform to ban political ads for now.
In the end, Google is a private company and basically has no obligation to give any of its products for free. But it is so hugely massive that it cannot just be left to do whatever it wants.
It remains to be seen whether further legislative action will be taken to allow users better control over their own data and how it is used, and how much power big tech companies like Google have.
However, Google has made it easier to review your data, change preferences or even take out all of the data Google holds of you.
The EU adopted the general data protection regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, which was a big step towards increased transparency on how big corporations like Google handle your data. It remains to be seen whether the US adopt similar legislature, but no one is holding their breath at this point.
Why did YouTube make this change to their terms and conditions?
I appreciate I just painted a pretty bad picture of Google and the future of the internet. For the record, there are no cases (that I know of) where Google has grossly abused its power and shut down accounts or channels just for the heck of it.
But it indeed shuts down YouTube channels every day. About 45 000 each day.
And around 6 million comments, every day.
The vast majority due to spam.
Comment removals are done by an algorithm which flags up excessive commenting, shady links, bad language… (And sometimes it does make mistakes)
Point being that the web’s third-biggest platform, unsurprisingly, fights certain spam and bot issues. But does spam affect YouTube’s bottom line?
Fun fact: although Alphabet (Google’s parent company) doesn’t reveal exact numbers, some estimates say that YouTube is barely making a profit.
Even with around 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube finds it difficult to make profit, due to the fact that video storage and bandwidth is so darn expensive.
If you’re technical, you probably know this. And if you’re not (like me), just consider that something like 400 HOURS of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. And YouTube’s software will power this processing, will store the videos forever, and feed them to you in a millisecond.
That does sound expensive, both because of the hardware and servers and such, but also because of the massive know-how you need to make it work properly.
And now consider this.
You’re YouTube. You have this amazing platform. But you’re not making bank with it.
It’s not because you don’t have the users.
And it seems like increasing advertisements is not helping the issue (you’ve probably noticed that you may sometimes see 2 ads before your video, instead of the usual 1).
So what do you do?
Sure, YouTube is exploring YouTube Premium, channel memberships and products like YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.
But what it’s also doing is trying to cut down on costs.
Namely, on video storage, hosting and bandwidth, which are probably the biggest costs they have.
What would be better than to reduce the number of videos they need to process and store?
Of course, not the high-production quality videos you’re probably viewing. But the poor, often bot-created videos that rack up 3 views. You may never see them, but YouTube is filled with AI-generated content, and some spam channels may publish a video almost every minute.
These videos cost YouTube absurd amounts of money but don’t bring any in return, because they don’t pass the standard to be monetized. So ads won’t be played on those videos, YouTube takes no money, shareholders aren’t happy.
With the change to their terms and conditions, YouTube may well just be giving itself more rights to fight bots, spammers and hate-spreaders.
In fact, a similar version of the terms and conditions has existed since early 2018, but this recent change will give YouTube practically unlimited control as to who they can actually ban.
Although YouTube already deletes around 3 million videos each month, there are probably way more that they could remove, without it affecting much on the real humans’ experience.
Now, this was my personal opinion.
YouTube doesn’t reveal too many numbers or insights into what’s actually going behind the scenes, but they do have a full team for anti-abuse who’s constantly looking for ways to make the platform better for the users.
It may be possible that YouTube could ban you for using adblocker. It may be possible that they ban you if you don’t click on any ads. Or if your videos don’t bring in any money.
We don’t know. Because the term “commercially viable” is such a vague one.
If YouTube is barely making profit, is any of its 2 billion monthly users “commercially viable”?
Personally, I don’t believe the change to the terms and conditions will influence the user experience.
From a moral perspective, it would go against Google’s purpose to start randomly banning users. After all, Google is on a mission to make the world’s information universally accessible, which just doesn’t happen if they are trigger happy with the ban button.
And even from a business perspective, I don’t see how Google, already riddled with bad press and privacy concerns, would benefit from banning its own community.
But then again, you could argue that YouTube has made some decisions lately that have caused content creators to leave the platform. Maybe they want to keep it going.
What’s next
Although there has been guesswork about what “commercially viable” really means, YouTube is yet to make an official statement.
So people do what they do best.
They hypothesize – and often assume the worst.
This has led to discussion about “de-Googling” – reducing how much you use Google products and finding alternatives whenever possible. It’s worth noting that there does not exist a strong alternative for YouTube, perhaps because of the massive costs to even think about setting it up and a tricky thing called the network effect.
If YouTube does not issue any further clarification about the terms and conditions change before December 10th (when the changes take effect), we’ll just probably wait and see what happens.
Whatever happens, I'm dying to know the answer to this question:
Will the terms and conditions change tackle YouTube’s problem of bot-generated videos, or will YouTube be on the news again soon for removing legit Google accounts that do not bring it money?
Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.