Adpocalypse

In early 2017 major advertisers pulled their spending after press coverage showed their ads running beside extremist and other unsuitable material. YouTube widened what counted as unsuitable, tightened the advertiser-friendly guidelines and put far more videos through review, and channels that had earned normally for years suddenly saw the yellow icon on upload after upload.

Later rounds picked up the same name. What survives is the structure creators still work inside: the advertiser-friendly content guidelines, self-certification at upload, limited ads as an outcome, and higher entry requirements for the Partner Programme. Anyone puzzled by a mainstream video being restricted over one word in the first minute is looking at rules written in that period.