Value Flow and Collapse: YouTube's "Ad-pocalypse"

• In Event: Algorithms at Work: The Practice of Prediction - II: Case Studies of Prediction in Practice

Abstract

Throughout 2017, YouTube experienced what became known as the “Ad-pocalypse,” a period of plummeting advertising revenue for content creators, caused, in part, by new algorithmic systems from YouTube. This paper is an attempt to understand the intersecting flows of capital, data, content, and advertisement within the platform of YouTube, so to better explain the events surrounding the “Ad-pocalypse” and the actions content creators took in response. The model produced, constructed using a combination of theories from the political economy of social media, should account for the visible and invisible players who are differentially situated within these value flows, including advertisers and audiences, but also content producing partners and IP holders. The image that emerges from this analysis provides a complex model that explicates the economic relationships between the actors and demonstrates how these flows of value were interrupted during the “Ad-pocaplyse.” Using this model, it becomes possible explain the alternative flows of value, such as sponsorship and crowdfunding, that content creators turned to in order to avoid being dependent upon YouTube’s algorithmic advertisement systems for their income, while also exploring the economic vulnerabilities in advertising-based platform economies resulting from their overuse of algorithmic automation.

Author

• Brian Pleasants Harper, Indiana University Bloomington