Advertisers on social media platforms are facing flak due to objectionable content.
By Jignasa Sinha
Bangalore, April 12, 2019: Social Networking sites in India have been used for video streaming and advertising for years. People need advertising to earn money through their videos and content online. These ads generate revenue for the content creator and for the social media site. There’s no authority which looks over the content of these advertisements and the videos they are attached to. Artists often take offers from companies who have controversial ideologies and present their ads online for monetary benefits.
Yashica Jain, content creator for online media says, “I have a YouTube channel and I upload song videos every Thursday. They offer brands that one can advertise; I choose reliable brands that I personally use and believe in since my followers might get influenced by something wrongful. I limit my advertisements frequency on my channel and publish only a few ads. It is dangerous to endorse brands I don’t believe in, they give you more money but their content might get you in trouble since several followers can back out of our channel due to objectionable content.”
Recently, several advertisers are facing a lot of criticism because their ads are attached to videos with objectionable content like violence and hate speeches. People watch these videos and think that advertisers promote such ideologies.
Many of the children’s videos have such ads – which are not suitable for kids to watch. It is also very difficult to remove such ads from videos and once the content has been published the creator has to stick with the ads. Creators often select random companies whose products and ideologies and often unknown to the creator.
Mithila Nanda, a school teacher says, “It is difficult to remove ads from YouTube, free videos come with a heavy cost. Children often use sites such as Instagram, Facebook and other sites without their parents’ supervision, although they watch animated stories and poems, the ads that appear before the videos are not suitable for kids. These ads have adult content and are not recommended for children.”
Companies like KredX focus on marketing through technology don’t advertise through video streaming online applications. Vishvendra Rathore, an employee says, “We believe in building our brand through customers’ trust. These applications are filled with miscellaneous content without any credibility and reliability.
We often give advice to our clients to not choose online media to avoid malicious content creators and the environment. YouTube has no set guidelines to censor and filter such content, business ventures don’t want to invest in advertising since the ads are not checked by the officials.”
