Jessica Ballinger’s Hit By YouTube Monetisation Ban

YouTube has been under scrutiny by content creators for their quickly-changing policies over the last 18 months.

Yesterday, Jessica Ballinger discovered that her recent videos were being demonetised by YouTube. In a series of tweets between Jessica and @TeamYouTube, it revealed their policies have once again changed.

Jessica said, “My 5-year-old son does gymnastics and is a happy, sweet, confident boy,” followed by a screenshot of her analytics. One of her videos titled Miranda Sings Gymnastics Lesson! w/ Parker received over 3 million views and combining the views revealed by Jessica, the channel received over 4 million views with just six videos equating to an estimated $4,500 in revenue.

Each of the videos now has a message saying “Not suitable for most advertisers” with the dollar symbol turned yellow (indicating monetisation has been disabled). Jessica continued, “This happened yesterday–I find the timing on this very, very disheartening for the YouTube community”.

YouTube responded by saying, “For reference, over the past few days, we’ve taken a number of actions to better protect the YouTube community from content that endangers minors,” — in a statement, YouTube also say they are “working incredibly hard to root out the horrible behaviour on our platform… we’ve disabled comments on tens of millions of videos. We’ve also terminated over 400 channels for the comments they left on videos and reported illegal comments to law enforcement,”.

This purge of comments and channel terminations follows after a U.S. man, called Matt Watson, uploaded a video titled YouTube Is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it’s Being Monetised (2019) which caused a huge backlash from YouTuber Keem Star who shared his thoughts on his channel DramaAlert. Walt Disney pulled their advertisements in light of the situation leading content creators to believe YouTube’s response is “reactive” rather than “proactive”.

In a continued reply to Jessica, YouTube said, “With regard to the actions that we’ve taken, even if your video is suitable for advertisers, inappropriate comments could results in your video receiving limited or no ads (yellow icon),”

Jessica went on to explain the comments are “highly monitored” but YouTube has stated they have taken this “aggressive approach” due to “an abundance of caution related to content that may endanger minors”.

In a since-deleted Twitter account, a comment was passed to Jessica saying, “I’m a content moderator and although these images are completely innocent to us, they’re not so innocent to paedophiles.

You’d be surprised how many nasty freaks out there use innocent images parents post for their own sick pleasure” with Jessica responding, “This tweet was deleted. But I’m pretty sure a YouTube representative just admitted that our content is completely innocent. And then continued to victim blame my kid”.

Many on social media have given their view, one user wrote, “Basically, YouTube seems to be hatching a plan to enforce a new policy that will say ‘no children allowed in videos’”, and another said, “YouTube shooting themselves in the foot by taking nice things away from nice people because of horrible ones”.

YouTube hasn’t released an official statement as of publishing this article.

Side note: YouTube, instead of penalising innocent content creators, such as Jessica and her amazing family, perhaps focus on introducing a new system that filters out, or better yet, blocks hateful, “illegal comments”.