Experts insist ads on hate videos could have earned £5,000
GOOGLE insists advertisers only hand extremists ‘pennies’ for their videos.
But some hate-filled posts are believed to have raked in thousands of pounds, according to online marketing experts.
The person who posted one virulently anti-semitic video accusing Jews of slaughtering American children could have pocketed over £5,000, with the internet giant also making almost as much itself.
Google typically pays up to about £6.15 for every 1,000 views an advert attracts on its video-sharing website YouTube, although it said the figure is often lower.
The company also takes a cut, although it said the ‘majority’ of the advertising revenue goes to the video maker.
Google executive Matt Brittin said that in most cases the sums involved were ‘pennies not pounds’.
However the video, called Blood sacrifice for McDonald’s, received 915,000 views before it was removed, according to The Times. This would have made it over £5,600 if it was receiving the top rate of advertising revenue. The post features a hoax ‘rabbi’ revelling in a description of how Jews kill American children as a sacrifice and sell their carcases to be made into burgers. Other copies of the video were still on the site yesterday with thousands of hits.
In a grim irony, one version of the video which had 273,724 views, had an embedded advert for www.vizeat.com, which describes itself as the ‘favourite website of gourmet travellers’. Other extremists posting on YouTube have also have massive followings which are likely to bring in far more than ‘pennies’. Videos posted by David Duke, the US white nationalist, anti- semitic conspiracy theorist, and former Imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, have been viewed 100,000 times.
YouTube announced in 2007 that it would start paying a slice of advertising revenue to people who posted on the site. Many respectable video bloggers have cashed in, with beauty blogger Zoella, real name Zoe Sugg, earning a reported £50,000 a month from her 11.6million YouTube followers.
Mr Brittin apologised for the extremist videos but, having spoken to advertisers, did not believe the sums were large.
‘Those that I have spoken to, by the way, we have been talking about a handful of impressions and pennies not pounds of spend — that’s in the case of the ones I’ve spoken to at least,’ he said.
‘However small or big the issue, it’s an important issue that we address.’