YouTube exec says violent, profane videos get views not coins

While attendees at the Island Music Conference (IMC) sought to learn not only how to navigate the modern music industry but also how to make a living from it, Tuma Basa of YouTube was adamant about sharing what he sees as the number one reason many YouTubers go from earning coins to fizzling out without ever understanding where they went wrong.

Basa was a panellist on day two of the IMC seminar, where he participated in the discussion titled ‘Streaming Maths: How to actually make money on DSPs (Digital Service Providers)’. With years of experience at Spotify, MTV and BET, Basa now heads Black Culture and Music at YouTube, where he is responsible for leading activities that connect his industry linkages and expertise to boost YouTube’s engagement with the culture. He is also tasked with helping artistes and labels maximise the full benefits of YouTube’s direct-to-fan tools through product education.

It is with all this knowledge of the inner workings of digital music platforms that he took the microphone to caution the young streamers present to work smarter, not harder. By that he meant not to pursue avenues that would have their content demonetised immediately.

“What applies to YouTube that everybody in this room who does music has control over is not to say things in the video that will get you demonetised. When that line on YouTube turns yellow, you are in trouble, so don’t do and say [anything] stupid!” he shared, adding, “Especially in the first 30 seconds, as it’s not a morals or standards department there watching you, it’s machines and they pick up everything.”

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The platform, he explained, is designed to detect videos featuring guns, violence, or profanity, which are classified as high-risk content, and automatically flag and demonetise them.

“There are no human beings looking at it. It’s all machines detection. So you will still get the views, and some people love that kind of narrative, but you won’t be making any money.”

He added that it is just basic business practice because it ultimately comes down to what advertisers want. “The YouTube community is the viewer, the creator and, yes, the advertisers. You see all these ads on YouTube? People and corporations pay good money to advertise, and they don’t want, for example, Velveeta cheese or their lovely laundry detergent to be shown immediately after viewers just witness someone’s head being blown off! It’s not going to work. The advertisers trust the platform to deliver something that is brand safe.”

Another trap, he said, is age-gated content. This is where viewers have to log in and say that they are over 18 years old. “That hurts the algorithm. A lot. Because your content no longer comes up as a recommended video anymore. And, because you are no longer recommended, now your momentum is gone.”

For those hard-core creators who insist on being true to themselves no matter what, the trick to bypassing the system, he said, is to keep the profanity and violence towards the end of the video. Therefore, in a four-minute video, let all the explicit stuff be in the last minute as by then, the machine will have seen enough and moved on to the next video. “This is the cheat code. It’s the backdoor way of avoiding the headache of being constantly broke.”

nicola.cunnigham@gleanerjm.com