Running head: YOUTUBE, PEWDIEPIE, AND THE “ADPOCALYPSE” 1

YouTube, PewDiePie, and the “Adpocalypse”

Danielle Brown

Mississippi State University

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Abstract

Felix Kjellberg, also known as “PewDiePie”, caused controversy on the video-sharing platform

YouTube for posting “anti-Semitic” content on his channel, the most subscribed channel on the

website. Kjellberg apologized, saying his intention was not to offend anyone, but was still

dropped from some deals with other companies he was affiliated with, such as the Walt Disney

Company. Companies that bought advertising space from YouTube began to look into what kind

of content their advertisements were being placed on. After research, many companies pulled

their advertisements from YouTube, causing YouTube to change many of their policies to

appease both users of their website and the companies that invest in them. YouTube changed

their algorithms to automatically flag videos with certain keywords or tags with inappropriate

content. Once flagged, the video would have no advertisements placed on it, thus not able to

make money. These policies were not very effective to their users or investors, causing what a lot

of YouTubers deemed the “Adpocalypse.”

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When the top user on a company’s website causes international controversy, what is the

best way to go about it? The website YouTube came under fire for the way they handled what

many people across the Internet call the “Adpocalypse.”

YouTube is a video-sharing website where users can upload, share, and watch content.

The website was created in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. All three

founders worked for PayPal at the time of the website’s launch. YouTube became popular very

quickly, averaging about 100 million video views a day in July 2006. It was most popular among

teeangers in the 12 - 17 year old demographic. A few months later in November 2006, YouTube

was bought by Google for about $1.5 billion in US stock. In 2006, Time Magazine even

presented YouTube with its “Person of the Year” award. YouTube continued to gain traction

worldwide and expanded their platform to high-definition videos. By 2010, advertisers began to

invest money into YouTube, allowing users on the website to make a living by making videos.

Presently, YouTube is the second-largest website in the world. More than 400 hours of content

are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours of content are watched each day (Ace

X, 2016).

Felix Kjellberg was born in Gothenberg, Sweden on October 24, 1989. While enrolled in

school at Chalmers University of Technology for industrial economics and technology

management, he registered for an account on YouTube under the username “PewDiePie.” After

dropping out of university and failing to land an apprenticeship, he began to invest more time

into his YouTube channel, where he started posting video game playthroughs and commentary.

These games mostly included horror and action games. He built a very large audience, becoming
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the #1 most subscribed user on the website in 2013. Kjellberg has maintained this top spot, even

through his controversies.

The controversy began in January 2017 when Kjellberg posted a video to his

YouTube channel where he paid people on the website “Fiverr” to do various acts as a joke.

“Fiverr” is a website where you can pay someone $5 to $500 for a service, such as graphic

designs, music, and animations, among other services. In this video, Kjellberg is shown paying a

man dressed as Jesus Christ to make a video saying the phrase, “I’m just here to tell y’all, Hitler

did absolutely nothing wrong.” He also paid two boys from a foreign country to make a video

holding a sign that said “Death to all Jews.”

At the time of the controversial video’s posting, Kjellberg was signed to the Walt Disney

Company through one of their smaller brands called Maker Studios. Maker Studios helped

produce his television show that aired on YouTube Red called “Scare PewDiePie.” The premise

of the show was that Kjellberg would walk through replicated sets of horror games he had played

in the past, normally with a guest on the show. Disney immediately terminated Kjellberg after

being informed of the video, consequently cancelling his show in the middle of its second

season.

Kjellberg later released a statement on his Tumblr page, apologizing and acknowledging

this wrongdoing. His statement, in full,

“It came to my attention yesterday that some have been pointing to my videos

and saying that I am giving credibility to the anti-Semitic movement, and my fans

are part of it as well for watching. I don’t want to cite the sources because I don’t

want to give them any more attention. This originated from a video I made a
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couple of weeks ago. I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is,

specifically some of the services available online. I picked something that seemed

absurd to me—That people on Fiverr would say anything for 5 dollars. I think it’s

important to say something and I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way

supporting any kind of hateful attitudes. I make videos for my audience. I think of

the content that I create as entertainment, and not a place for any serious political

commentary. I know my audience understand that and that is why they come to

my channel. Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were

ultimately offensive. As laughable as it is to believe that I might actually endorse

these people, to anyone unsure on my standpoint regarding hate-based groups:

No, I don’t support these people in any way. Thanks for reading.”

reached over 11,000 notes and was met to mixed reactions (Kjellberg, 2017).

With a prominent content creator causing such a controversy, companies began to look

into what types of videos their advertisements on YouTube were being placed on. Kjellberg’s

sole income came from YouTube, meaning he was making money off of his controversial

videos. According to the Guardian, after just fifteen minutes of browsing YouTube, they found

T-Mobile ads on videos about abortion, Minecraft banners on videos about using cocaine, and

pre-roll ads for Novartis heart medication on videos denouncing feminism (Solon, 2017). Many

other journalists did their own research and found similar results. These companies were

unhappy with the way there did not seem to be a successful system in place to keep

advertisements off of inappropriate content. Soon, hundreds of companies including Johnson &

Johnson and Verizon began pulling all of their ads from YouTube.
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YouTube wanted to make the situation right, so they created a few objectives. The first

was that they wanted to regain the trust of their advertisers. This was an attitudinal objective

because they wanted to change the opinions of the investors from negative to positive. The

second objective was to encourage their users to post more “advertiser-friendly” content. This

objective was behavioral because they were asking people to change the way they had been

posting in the past to appease the advertisers. The last objective was to earn back lost revenue

from advertisers that had pulled from their website. This was also a behavioral objective because

they were looking to earn money in different ways than before, changing the way they normally

operated.

YouTube quickly started to work toward these objectives. Firstly, they adjusted their

algorithms in order to more easily flag videos with inappropriate content. The video uploaded

would pass through a filter in order to detect certain keywords or tags that were deemed

inappropriate and could instantly be flagged for demonetization. YouTube created

“Advertiser-friendly content guidelines” stating,

“YouTube uses technology and policy enforcement processes to determine if a

video is suitable for advertising. We continually work hard to make our

algorithms as accurate as possible and to understand nuances, including for

categories like music, gaming, and news. Our intention is to treat each video

based on context, including content that is clearly comedic, educational, or

satirical in nature.”

which was followed by a list of categories the website deemed inappropriate. The list

included categories like controversial issues and sensitive events, drugs and dangerous
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products or substances, harmful or dangerous acts, hateful content, inappropriate

language, sexually suggestive content, and violence (YouTube Help, 2017).

If a video happened to get wrongfully demonetized, YouTube created an appeals

process to have the video reviewed a second time. During this time, the video would still

not make any money, and if the ruling was overturned, the user would not earn back lost

revenue from the time it was demonetized.

Posting the policies on their website was a form of controlled media, but the

reaction that came from these policies was uncontrolled media. YouTube tried to totally

accommodate their advertisers with these policies as much as possible.

In evaluation, YouTube was not very effective in their attempt to appease

advertisers. They instead created intense strife among their users. Many people

complained about the appeals process taking far too long, meaning by the time the video

was reinstated, they would make almost no money on it. Furthermore, many channels

were making much less money than before, regardless of their video being flagged or not.

Huge users such as H3H3productions began tweeting about their lack of revenue and

how ineffective YouTube was about reinstating their videos for monetization (Sawyer,

2017). Felix Kjellberg referred to this entire situation as the “Adpocalypse.” Also,

YouTube users were also complaining about how vague the guidelines for the

“Advertiser-friendly content” were, saying many of the guidelines were overarching and

could mean many things.

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The strengths in this case were that YouTube responded to the controversy

immediately, that they were part of a huge company that had scandals in the past, and that

they have a loyal following that will visit the website no matter what. Firstly, YouTube

reacted within a week to the controversy, implementing new algorithms and flags. The

time of reaction was critical, as they needed to react quickly, but not so quickly that the

response was not substantial. Secondly, YouTube is a part of Google, which is a

company that has been in business for decades. They have had their share of issues, so

being a part of such a large and financially stable company was definitely a plus. Thirdly,

YouTube has billions of users log on to their website every day, so their loyal following

helped to keep traffic on their page. These strengths were crucial to YouTube’s case.

The weaknesses in this case were that their new algorithms did not effectively sort

through videos and that they tried to totally accommodate their advertisers but not their

users. Firstly, their algorithms consistently flagged videos incorrectly, causing content

creators to lose an enormous amount of money. Secondly, YouTube made strict

guidelines in order to appease their advertisers and isolate their users. The attempt to

bring back advertisers was unsuccessful because many are still reluctant to put their ads

back onto YouTube.

YouTube had a few opportunities in this situation that could have been seized.

One opportunity they missed was creating two-way communication between themselves

and their users. They should have opened the door for ideas to flow both ways before

creating the strict guidelines, in order to make it seem like a conversation. Another

opportunity they missed was creating a campaign for the “Advertiser-friendly content”
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they were looking for. They could have expressed more deeply what they were looking

for, instead of just updating their policies and algorithms.

YouTube had a couple of threats throughout this situation. One threat was from

competing websites. Lots of users decided to start streaming and putting their videos on

websites such as Vimeo and Twitch. These websites do not have as big of an audience,

but their policies are much more loose. Another threat was the amount of money they

were losing from advertisers. With so many companies leaving the website, it left

YouTube scrambling to quickly find a solution to get the advertisers back.

In conclusion, this case was not very successful. YouTube could have been more

accommodating to their own users instead of trying too much to get their advertisers

back, but on the other hand, they reacted quickly and tried to do what they thought was

right. The “Adpocalypse” is still going on presently, with most users still not making

much money from their videos. While some advertisers have come back, most do not

affiliate themselves with YouTube anymore.

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References

Advertiser-friendly content guidelines - YouTube Help. (n.d.). Retrieved December 05,

2017, from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en

Kjellberg, F. (2017, February 12). Just to clear some things up... Retrieved December 05,

2017, from http://pewdie.tumblr.com/post/157160889655/just-to-clear-some-things-up

Sawyer, M. (2017, May 10). Why YouTubers are losing so much ad money (and how

they can survive the crunch). Retrieved December 05, 2017, from

https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/10/15609660/youtube-youtuber-ad-money-google

Solon, O. (2017, March 25). Google's bad week: YouTube loses millions as advertising

row reaches US. Retrieved December 05, 2017, from

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google-youtube-advertising-extremist-co

ntent-att-verizon

X, A. (2016, November 10). Public Access - The History of Youtube. Retrieved

December 05, 2017, from https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/10/the-history-of-youtube/