Supplementary written evidence submitted by YouTube
Julian Knight MP
Digital, Culture, Media and Spots Committee House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
8 March 2022
Dear Mr. Knight,
I would like to thank the Committee again for the opportunity to engage with you for your inquiry into Influencer Culture and in the subsequent hearing on the Online Safety Bill.
I am very pleased to provide more information on the specific questions raised by the Committee in follow up to my oral evidence session.
YouTube’s unique advertising based revenue model creates jobs, builds small businesses, and enables us to make a robust library of diverse content available to users for free. YouTube shares revenue with Creators and gives them the opportunity to build their own business. Advertising revenue is generated when people watch ads that are running on videos. This revenue from ads is shared between YouTube and the Creator – we empower Creators to directly profit from their work.
Advertising is the primary way that YouTube Creators monetise their content and we share the majority of revenues generated with them. This advertising creates revenue streams that directly reward Creators for the popularity of their content without the need for sponsorship or other brand partnerships. Over the last three years, we’ve paid more than $30 billion globally to creators, artists, and media.
We are committed to further increasing our contribution to the creative economy in the UK. YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, recently published a letter on YouTube’s priorities for 2022, outlining how we have worked to expand the opportunities available for Creators to make money on YouTube.
While advertising remains the primary source of revenue for YouTube Creators, there are now 10 ways in total of making money on YouTube. I hope that this information is useful in outlining the principal role that advertising plays, the scale of revenue that advertising provides to YouTube Creators and the creative economy, and the ways in which we are making new opportunities available to Creators to make money.
Support Systems Available to Influencers/Creators
Creators are the lifeblood of the platform and we strive to protect them and ensure they have a positive experience on the platform. We do this in a number of different ways.
We have Community Guidelines that apply to comments as well as videos, and we robustly enforce those guidelines. Our harassment and cyberbullying policies clearly prohibit comments that feature prolonged name calling or malicious insults based on someone’s intrinsic attributes, content that incites others to harass or threaten individuals, or content making implicit or explicit threats of physical harm or destruction of property.
We recognise that even having to read and repot abusive comments is an upsetting experience for Creators. That is why we combine large teams of people and the latest technology to find and quickly remove content and comments that break these rules. YouTube removed 50.5 million hateful and abusive comments in Q3 2021. More than 99.6% of all the comments we remove are identified through automated flagging. This means that abusive comments can be removed before Creators have a chance to read them.
We are always adding new tools and improving our existing processes to fight harassment on our platform. Creators can hide potentially harassing comments for review and removal, and can even hold all comments for review on their videos or choose to turn off comments. We recently made video dislikes private to discourage "dislike attacks" and better protect our Creators from harassment. This is just one of many steps we are taking to continue to protect creators from harassment. Our work is not done, and we will continue to invest to improve our processes.
We understand that there will still be times where Creators need to access support, and we provide several routes for them to access this:
● Our Creator Academy provides practical support to Creators on how to make a successful channel. The site provides advice and resources on our policies and guidelines for keeping YouTube safe. The website also includes advice on how Creators can stay well and avoid burnout.
● Our YouTube contributors program provides peer-to-peer answers and education in forums and videos.
● Creators in the YouTube Partner Program can receive the support of the YouTube Partner Manager team. This team has held workshops on wellbeing and on tools to tackle abuse.
Diversity Initiatives
As an open platform, YouTube is uniquely positioned to give opportunity to the diverse individuals and communities across the UK, helping them pursue a career and find an audience in the creative fields. We have launched a number of initiatives to help us achieve this.
To support Black creators on YouTube we opened the global Black Voices Fund. The initiative, launched in 2020, is a multi-year commitment dedicated to Black creators and artists where we provide them with access to resources to help them thrive on the platform. The Fund provides grantees with dedicated support from a YouTube Partner Manager, seed funding for investment in the development of Creators' channel, bespoke training and networking opportunities. Last year, we announced our first class of 135 creators and artists from around the world, with 34 Creator grantees coming from the UK. These creators reached subscriber milestones, led meaningful discussions related to Black life and culture, and pursued new business opportunities.
Finally, we launched a YouTube for Creators website in November 2021 as pat of our commitment to encourage more diverse voices from all of the regions of the UK and remove barriers to accessing creative industries. The website provides Creators from different backgrounds with tools to create, connect and grow on YouTube.
Implementation of France’s 2020 “Exploitation Bill” requirements
The safety of children, both creators and viewers, is a top priority on YouTube. The new law in France provides for codes of conduct in regard to the obligations of platforms, which are currently being developed by the regulator. We will continue to engage with the regulator and remain at their disposal to discuss and cooperate on the codes of conduct.
Creator Demographics
We want to ensure that YouTube is inclusive and works for everyone. Today, the evaluation process of our systems is limited because we don’t have identity information about the channels on YouTube. We don’t have a way to evaluate, at scale, how our products and policies are working for channels of creator and artist communities of a particular race & ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
For this reason we opened in June 2021 the Creator Demographics, a completely voluntary survey for US-based creators and artists which allows them to provide us with their gender identity, race and ethnicity and sexual orientation. We have used this US-only survey data to:
● Examine how our algorithms and systems treat content from various communities.
● Understand how various communities are growing on YouTube.
● Identify potential patterns of abuse, including harassment and hate.
● Improve our current programmes, campaigns and offerings to ensure these reflect the diversity of our community.
Should a Creator choose to provide their information in Creator Demographics, Google will keep their information in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy. The information that Creators' provide is stored with their YouTube channel and will not be used by other Google products; it will not be made public without their additional consent, or used for advertising purposes. We are looking to expand this survey outside the US, but need to take into consideration the requirements of local privacy laws.
Thank you again for the opportunity to follow up with this information. I look forward to future conversations with you and your Committee on the important issue of online safety.
Yours sincerely,
Iain Bundred
Head of Public Policy, UK & Ireland, YouTube