[Update 6/30/2019:] According to a tweet from Clownfish TV, YouTube has restored their monetization to the videos after they appealed the process.
Oh damn! Made the news again I see. Ha ha.
Update: All of the videos have finally been released… each about 24 hours after disputing them.
So… yeah… very little money to be made off our terrible, heinous hate-filled videos talking about, you know, dolls and stuff. https://t.co/UP3IVvJuKP
— Clownfish TV (@RealClownfishTV) July 1, 2019
[Original article:] Clownfish TV boasts over 40,000 subscribers and covers a lot of content related to toy culture, animation, and some video games. It’s basically a pop-culture channel on YouTube. Recently, the video hosting giant has been demonetizing ClownFish TV’s content, even though the channel is Left-leaning and largely tries to stay out of the polemics surrounding the Culture War… but apparently the Culture War isn’t staying out of their ad revenue.
They posted up an image of their most recent video covering Mattel’s poor market performance and their attempts to “diversify” their content by trying to offer kids toys based on Left-wing propaganda properties like the rebooted She-Ra And The Princesses of Power. You can check out the video below.
The video covers Mattel’s financial woes, the companies collaboration with She-Ra, and a last ditch effort to market the toys by leveraging Pride month and showing the kids toys in collaboration with LGBTQIA+ promotion.
The video, however, was promptly demonetized.
Over on their Twitter account, Clownfish TV posted an image of the video about She-Ra and Mattel being hit with the demonetization icon, indicating that they wouldn’t be making much from the ad revenue. But it wasn’t just the recent Mattel video, it’s noted that their last three of four videos that were uploaded were affected as well.
Wait wait wait … @TeamYouTube @YTCreators why are you demonetizing videos talking about an article about a toy business??
Literally what is going on here? I’ve had to fight to keep monetization on the last 3 or 4 videos we’ve uploaded – most not even REMOTELY controversial. pic.twitter.com/HBU9WwasMi
— Clownfish TV (@RealClownfishTV) June 28, 2019
If you head over to the Clownfish TV YouTube channel you’ll see that the last four videos they uploaded includes the Mattel and She-Ra toys, a video about the ongoing discussion from media outlets’ blaming “toxic fandoms” for properties failing along with some discussions about Vic Mignogna’s ongoing case, a video about Tifa’s boobs bouncing in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, and another video about Netflix not allowing She-Ra to fail.
Now while these topics might seem benign to most people, some of them are what YouTube might label as “borderline content”, despite the fact that Clownfish TV is not a political channel.
We riff on dumb pop culture articles and talk about movies, TV shows, anime and comics.
If they’re looking to get rid of “political” channels they definitely have the wrong people.
We barely talk about politics and we lean LEFT.
— Clownfish TV (@RealClownfishTV) June 28, 2019
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had explained earlier in June to Re/Code that they use “Raters” to rate content that they deem as “borderline content”. This means that it’s not even content that violates any rules, it’s simply content that YouTube has determined to be “borderline” unacceptable based on their own ideological standards.
Clownfish TV’s latest videos – or potentially the channel itself – may have been determined by “Raters” to contain “borderline content”, since some of the effects of such a label includes the potential to have your channel affected by reduced visibility from recommendations, reduced search visibility for certain keyword phrases and topics, or demonetization.
While it isn’t confirmed that Clownfish TV has been labeled by YouTube as a channel containing “Borderline content”, we have seen other channels report similar outcomes for their content covering similar topics as Clownfish TV, specifically content pertaining to Vic Mignogna. YouTuber Hero Hei just recently reported that multiple videos of his have been hit with demonetization, and he believes it may be associated with his Vic Mignogna coverage.
Again, we still don’t have any definitive proof that YouTube is targeting Vic Mignogna content, but in as little as a few days two channels that did cover the topic have been hit with repeated demonetization of their content. This also comes just after YouTube said they would be cracking down on what they determined to be “Borderline content”.
Now remember, “borderline content” doesn’t need to contain profanity, lewd imagery, or even violent content, it simply needs to cover subject matter that YouTube feels is “borderline”, whatever that may mean.
Right now we still don’t know if it’s YouTube targeting topics (i.e., Vic Mignogna, She-Ra, Netflix, or other Culture War related subjects) or if it’s YouTube targeting specific content creators because of the topics they’ve covered in the past. We do know that demonetization is hitting these channels with higher frequency, so we’ll have to keep an eye on how this unfolds and if more channels covering similar topics are also being affected.
(Thanks for the news tip Bandercoot Thundersnatch)