back to article Cisco cancels all YouTube ads, then conceals cancellation

Cisco has edited a blog post in which it said YouTube is an unsuitable place for its ads to appear. The post, dated May 9th, said “ Cisco has adopted the most rigorous industry standards to help ensure our online advertising does not accidentally end up in the wrong place, such as on a streaming video with sensitive content or …

  1. Ole Juul

    priorities

    Personally I think it's a bit odd to associate an advertisement with its context considering they're everywhere. It seems to me that reaching people who actually might be interested in the product would be a bigger priority.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: priorities

      Exactly, which is why I no longer glance at "certain sites", because of the trashy and annoying advertisements. The association was too strong. So if advertisers want to reach me, they better choose the better sites. I do.

    2. John Lilburne

      Re: priorities

      Ah but some biz don't want to have their ads on a page with videos showing how to mainline heroine, or cut someone's head off, or which are the best anti-black/jew/homosexual chants de jour.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: priorities

      Its just more of the "Politicial Correctness" mob going wild.

      Next blog, some poor "white man" has been sacked for having an opinion.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: priorities

        Next blog, some poor "white man" has been sacked for having an opinion.

        Sorry snowflake

        It’s more like:

        Next blog, some "non white person or a woman" has been sacked for having an opinion.

        Yes Biased crap like this still happens, and won’t stop happening while people pretend it’s not happening.

      2. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Re: priorities

        Its just more of the "Politicial Correctness" mob going wild.

        No. Just serving ads to already indoctrinated is of little benefits. You are better off serving them to people who are actively researching new stuff in an attempt to indoctrinate.

        Or in Google internal ad selection engine terms: "Smart Ass" is an idiocy, the old "Dumb Ass" relevance based engine provides significantly higher ROI to most ad placers and websites.

    4. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: priorities

      Personally I think it's a bit odd to associate an advertisement with its context considering they're everywhere.

      That is how AdSense started until DoubleClick acquired Google. That is the correct way to describe the change of mentality at that point - the original ideas were gone and Google went back to standard adscum tactics.

      There is the key issue with "creepware advertising" - the user gets the stuff presented to them regardless of the context. Regardless of are they watching beheadings, kittens or Boris Johnson the ad stays the same.

      Being in this situation shows that every single marketing manager in a major brand has been asleep on their watch. They have absolutely none of the original AdSense relevance and context now and their brands (and as a proxy the advertisers) are starting to pay for it. They hated AdSense exactly because it was relevant, but if you ask them what they prefer now 95% of them will vote for an AdSense like system with both hands.

      It is only a matter of time until Google goes back to the original AdSense "context only" for some ads and sells it as a product. If it does not, someone else will and will take the market from it the same way it took the market away from the advertisers in 15 years ago.

  2. as2003

    So, Cisco thought they'd try to capitalise on the recent YouTube hate bandwagon, and then either realised that's targeting the wrong demographic or, more likely, Google had stern word with them and coerced them into referring to Google by name?

    1. Danny 14

      surely anyone who has an interest in cisco would be blocking adverts anyway.

  3. mark l 2 Silver badge

    I don't ever recall deliberately clicking on ad advert on a Youtube, the only time i have done it when i was trying to click 'skip ad' and hit the wrong part. But even though after doing that I immediately clicked back/close Google will still count that and charge the advertiser for the click.

    1. ratfox
      Angel

      Google does claim that they try to remove unintentional clicks. Who knows how hard they try?

  4. Denarius

    nice touch there

    Well put suggestion for effective advertising there Simon. Just dont over do it or ElReg will have the ad-blockers go on again. Dont want to put the Vultures out of work.

  5. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    American puritanism?

    Pretending to be the über-virtuous policeman who can afford to burn witchesdeclare others as lacking sufficient morals and thus untouchable or worse - while being a true player for whom the ends justify the means, especially if the ends are a fistful of dollars .... I wonder where that attitude comes from.

    1. deive

      Re: American puritanism?

      Yeah, all this talk of morals from American (and other countries) Corporations is complete hypocrisy.

      1. steve 124

        Re: American puritanism?

        "Yeah, all this talk of morals from American"

        Our country is actually called America, we The People of America, are American (or Americans, if you're referring to a group of us).

        I would call you out on your comment suggesting we are not moral (or have morals) but then we do have a bunch of Democrat Libs running around, so I guess I'll just consider you are referring to them, not me (because I have very centered morals)... our corps, yeah, not so much.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: American puritanism?

          Our country is actually called America

          No it isn't, you tit. Your country is (probably) called The United States of America.

          America (without caveats) is two whole continents, of which the USA is, what, about a sixth?

          Important note: I have a lot of admiration for the things the USA does well, and many USAian friends. I'm not poking at the country in this post, merely at one of its more disadvantaged (presumably) citizens.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: American puritanism?

          @steve 124 - I realize you're a Trump supporter based on your bashing of "Democrat Libs", but tell me... do you truly and honestly believe the country you're living in is called America?

          I'm just going to leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMcb1iyYl0

        3. theDeathOfRats

          Re: American puritanism?

          "Our country is actually called America, we The People of America, are American (or Americans, if you're referring to a group of us)." - Steve 124.

          I don't think so.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas

          1. veti Silver badge

            Re: American puritanism?

            To be fair, the USA is "actually called" all sorts of things, ranging from "America the beautiful" and "home of the brave" to "the great Satan". Indisputably, it does get called just "America" several million times a day.

        4. BlueTemplar

          Re: American puritanism?

          This whole discussion is so funny to look at now that I've read this :

          http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/

          "The Borderers are [...] a bunch of people who lived on (both sides of) the Scottish-English border in the late 1600s.

          [...]

          the Scottish-English border was terrible

          [...]

          Life consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence.

          [...]

          The English kings finally [...] decided to make the region economically productive, which meant “squeeze every cent out of the poor Borderers, in the hopes of either getting lots of money from them or else forcing them to go elsewhere and become somebody else’s problem”.

          [...]

          Many of the Borderers fled to Ulster in Ireland

          [...]

          the Ulsterites started worrying that the Borderer cure was worse than the Irish Catholic disease. So the Borderers started getting kicked out of Ulster too, one thing led to another, and eventually 250,000 of these people ended up in America.

          [...]

          So these people showed up on the door of the American colonies, and the American colonies collectively took one look at them and said “nope”.

          Except, of course, the Quakers. The Quakers talked among themselves and decided that these people were also Children Of God, and so they should demonstrate Brotherly Love by taking them in. They tried that for a couple of years, and then they questioned their life choices and also said “nope”, and they told the Borderers that Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley were actually kind of full right now but there was lots of unoccupied land in Western Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian Mountains were very pretty at this time of year, so why didn’t they head out that way as fast as it was physically possible to go?

          At the time, the Appalachians were kind of the booby prize of American colonization: hard to farm, hard to travel through, and exposed to hostile Indians. The Borderers fell in love with them. They came from a pretty marginal and unproductive territory themselves, and the Appalachians were far away from everybody and full of fun Indians to fight. Soon the Appalachian strategy became the accepted response to Borderer immigration and was taken up from Pennsylvania in the north to the Carolinas in the South

          [...]

          The Borderers really liked America – unsurprising given where they came from – and started identifying as American earlier and more fiercely than any of the other settlers who had come before.

          [...]

          They also also played a disproportionate role in westward expansion. After the Revolution, America made an almost literal 180 degree turn and the “backcountry” became the “frontier”. It was the Borderers who were happiest going off into the wilderness and fighting Indians

          [...]

          This was a big part of the reason the Wild West was so wild compared to, say, Minnesota (also a frontier inhabited by lots of Indians, but settled by Northerners and Germans) and why it inherited seemingly Gaelic traditions like cattle rustling.

          Their conception of liberty has also survived and shaped modern American politics: it seems essentially to be the modern libertarian/Republican version of freedom from government interference, especially if phrased as “get the hell off my land”, and especially especially if phrased that way through clenched teeth while pointing a shotgun at the offending party.

          [...]

          But Albion’s Seed points out that the Borderers were uniquely likely to identify as just “American” and deliberately forgot their past ancestry as fast as they could. Meanwhile, when the census asks an ethnicity question about where your ancestors came from, every year some people will stubbornly ignore the point of the question and put down “America” (no, this does not track the distribution of Native American population)

          And from another website :

          https://www.ecosophia.net/a-tune-for-mountain-dulcimer/

          [...]

          Behind this dynamic is the most enduring of the cultural divides in American society, the divide between the urban enclaves of the nation’s periphery—prosperous, irreligious, and culturally dependent on European models—and the relatively impoverished hinterlands, with their loyalty to Protestant religiosity and American folk culture. That divide came into being long before the Revolutionary War and it’s been a massive influence on our culture and politics ever since.

          I think the same author mentioned at some point (but I cannot find a reference to it now), that in the USA,

          in opposition to Borderers-Cavaliers/"Republicans"/"Conservatives"/"Red States",

          the Puritans-Quakers/"Democrats"/"Liberals"/"BlueStates" were often uncomfortable with calling themselves "Americans"!

          (So, this discussion, while superficially about definitions, is more likely to be actually about group signalling!)

  6. The obvious

    Dear Cisco

    That's a lot of traffic we send your way... it would be quite a shame if anything happened to it.

    Google.

  7. Giovani Tapini
    Joke

    I just came

    to find out where the place is that all the tech types hang out...

    Seems the journo lost consciousness at that point and fell gently onto the submit button after imbibing a few Friday lunchtime bevvies.

    I'll just have to stay here then...

  8. JohnFen

    For the best

    The effect of advertisers on YouTube has been pretty horrific, putting the best and most useful channels in danger of extinction. Rather than slowly bleeding to death, it might be better if all advertisers just stopped advertising on YouTube entirely rather than this slow decay they're causing.

    Rip the bandage off quickly, then we can move forward with a platform that is not so punitive to great content.

    1. YourNameHere

      Re: For the best

      The advertisers are a secondary influence here. The first influence is the methods that youtube uses to point you to sites that have the highest chance of you looking at. This has the effect of pushing you to sites like NxA people showing you how to kill people with their guns since that's their constitutional right... Then youtube and google say what, you mean people don't like showing this? But its really neat...

      1. JohnFen

        Re: For the best

        "This has the effect of pushing you to sites like NxA people showing you how to kill people with their guns since that's their constitutional right."

        YouTube has never once "pushed" me towards sites like that, or honestly, toward any sites that were even remotely questionable.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: For the best

      Rip the bandage off quickly

      Bandages that need ripping off quickly have been on too long. Plasters, on the other hand.....well, that's why I shave my upper forearms before giving blood.

      AC 'cos this isn't "virtue signalling".

      1. JohnFen

        Re: For the best

        Well, I'm a USian, so in my vernacular, "bandage" means "plaster".

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: For the best

        "Rip the bandage off quickly

        Bandages that need ripping off quickly have been on too long. "

        Please remember that the US of A uses a variant of english and therefore words can have 'other' meanings.

        TL;DR

        Bandages are Plasters in the US of A.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: For the best

          What are bandages called?

          1. JohnFen

            Re: For the best

            Bandages.

    3. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: For the best

      Well one problem is that they expected to make a living off YouTube ad bucks and all they had to do was post content. That gravy train is finally ending.

      The smartest folks realize they actually have to run a business, and join Patreon, sell merchandise, and do other things. It's not very far from making webcomics in that respect.

      It's the typical internet cycle of people putting up stuff (software/videos/comics) because they enjoy it and don't expect to make money. Then people realize they can make a few bucks, so they churn out the content. Then it all comes to a head when the new content is crap/hate speech/child porn and people realize that no, you can't really make money that way other than getting your name out there and getting a good reputation.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: For the best

        "Then it all comes to a head when the new content is crap/hate speech/child porn and people realize that no, you can't really make money that way"

        Except that the YouTubers that are getting hurt aren't producing stuff like that at all. They're producing inoffensive and uncontroversial stuff.

        Aside from that, you're right that underlying all of this is that people began to shift to producing videos expecting to make a living off of ad revenues, thus giving advertisers essentially total control over their content. This is part of why advertising is such a corrosive thing.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: the YouTubers that are getting hurt

          "Except that the YouTubers that are getting hurt aren't producing stuff like that at all. They're producing inoffensive and uncontroversial stuff."

          Maybe some of those Youtubers should try doing what BigClive does: don't rely on Youtube ads to cover costs, explain why it works better for him and his viewers if the money needed to buy coffee and cookies doesn't pass through Youtube, and hope it works out OK. Everybody here is aware of BigClive, right?

          Or maybe more prospective YouTube starlets could repeat what some lowlife have achieved with the help of the Daily Mail this week: use the Daily Mail's 'news' coveragel to provide free advertising of dubious videos set in dodgy London shopping malls (and worse), thereby enabling this stuff to reach an audience that wouldn't normally even know such videos existed ("Barbara Streisand effect" gone mad).

          1. JohnFen

            Re: the YouTubers that are getting hurt

            "Maybe some of those Youtubers should try doing what BigClive does: don't rely on Youtube ads to cover costs"

            I agree 100%, which is why I'd love to see advertisers flee from YouTube entirely. The sooner that advertisers lose their power to control content, the better.

            1. sabroni Silver badge

              Re: The sooner that advertisers lose their power to control content

              Google control YouTube. Google are the biggest ad broker in the world. Ads control YouTube.

          2. BlueTemplar

            Re: the YouTubers that are getting hurt

            "Maybe some of those Youtubers should try doing what BigClive does: don't rely on Youtube ads to cover costs, explain why it works better for him and his viewers if the money needed to buy coffee and cookies doesn't pass through Youtube, and hope it works out OK. Everybody here is aware of BigClive, right?

            Or maybe more prospective YouTube starlets could repeat what some lowlife have achieved with the help of the Daily Mail this week: use the Daily Mail's 'news' coveragel to provide free advertising of dubious videos set in dodgy London shopping malls (and worse), thereby enabling this stuff to reach an audience that wouldn't normally even know such videos existed ("Barbara Streisand effect" gone mad)."

            Exactly. I've never heard of BigClive. I *have* heard of a YouTuber disrespecting a corpse.

            https://locusmag.com/2016/03/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/

            "Whuffie [a fictional reputation-based currency] has all the problems of money, and then a bunch more that are unique to it. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, we see how Whuffie – despite its claims to being ‘‘meritocratic’’ – ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top. Once you have a lot of Whuffie – once a lot of people hold you to be reputable – other people bend over backwards to give you opportunities to do things that make you even more reputable, putting you in a position where you can speechify, lead, drive the golden spike, and generally take credit for everything that goes well, while blaming all the screw-ups on lesser mortals."

            I feel that there's many parallels to hoarding YouTube subscribers, "likes", and view-based income trough advertising...

  9. baspax

    Stupid

    What's the point of this article? Is this some sort of fncked up gotcha journalism? What exactly is being concealed? It was done relatively quietly without big press release or false virtue signaling, then someone thought the wording could be better and changed it.

    What exactly are you implying?

    Cisco took the high road and did the right thing. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, and I think we can all freely admit this is exactly what should be done to force Google to finally police the cesspit that is YouTube, you guys are egging on the first major company to dare do this. Are you out of your mind?

    I am appalled by your behavior. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mr Sharwood. Have you no decency?

    1. JohnFen

      Re: Stupid

      "I think we can all freely admit this is exactly what should be done"

      Since I'm not sure what you're actually talking about, I'm also not sure that we can "all freely admit" that this is what should be done. Why should it? What's the moral imperative here?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Stupid

        Boycotting or putting pressure on Google to start policing its platform. It takes wilful ignorance not to understand it or more likely pretending not to understand.

        We all want Youtube, Twitter, FB, et al to be policed but besides grand posturing not a lot has happened. Now finally someone has the balls to step forward and all I see is a gigantic derpfest.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: Stupid

          "Boycotting or putting pressure on Google to start policing its platform"

          I understand that much. What I don't understand is what is the problem that such a boycott is demanding be solved? Since I hear about objectionable videos, I assume that they must exist. Since I've never stumbled across objectionable videos (I don't seek them out), I also assume that they are in fact policed and removed. If they weren't, then I'd expect they'd be so rampant that I'd at least get some recommended to my occasionally.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "someone thought the wording could be better and changed it."

      Is there much chance that

      "someone thought the wording could be better"

      might actually mean

      "some middle manager at Cisco thought 'you pillocks, do you have any idea how much revenue/profit/added value Cisco get from Goobook? Would you, as author/approver of that bogpost, like to be held personally accountable for that lost revenue/proft if someone at Goobook gets the wrong idea? If not, you better make it vanish and get it re-worded right now. And you're sacked anyway."

      Just askin.

      1. veti Silver badge

        Re: "someone thought the wording could be better and changed it."

        Your version adds graphic (and speculative) detail, but the burden of it is precisely the same as the parent post, so I don't know why you're "correcting" it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "someone thought the wording could be better and changed it."

          "[extra] version adds graphic (and speculative) detail, but the burden of it is precisely the same as the parent post,"

          That about summmarises the way most of the web works these days, doesn't it?

          More repeats of the same information presented differently means more pageviews. And more pageviews means more click throughs. More clickthroughs means more profit for advertising brokers and agencies. And that's what the web was invented for, isn't it?

          [There may be a flaw in this somewhere. Can anyone spot it?]

  10. Gene Cash Silver badge

    This has the effect of pushing you to sites like NxA people showing you how to kill defenseless watermelons with their guns since that's their constitutional right.

    Fixed that for ya...

    Actually, the Slow Mo Guys (who are British) killed a poor watermelon once with nothing more than a handful of rubber bands!

    Horrid! Red stuff everywhere!

  11. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Does Cisco realize...?

    "...does not align with the values of our brand.”

    Does Cisco realize that every single packet of Internet porn passes through an average of about three of their Cisco-branded routers and switches while being delivered to the lecherous viewers?

    They should be deeply ashamed. Mostly about the inexcusable latency and lost packets.

  12. Dieter Haussmann

    These modern marketing departments staffed by trendies and millenials.

    We don't understand them.

    It's not about advertising, it's all about social media bandwagons and virtue signalling.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "... does not align with the values of our brand." What? Like the Great Firewall and surveillance systems to ensure the suppression of dissent? Virtue signalling by the likes of Cisco should be an embarrasment, but those people have no shame. You also have to wonder about their marketing chops: do they actually think that ads in a venue like YouTube result in any significant number of sales of Cisco product? Or do they know something about how the idle rich who direct enterprise purchases really spend their time between meetings?

  14. rmullen0

    CNN started this, they want to defund independent media

    Do not trust mainstream media such as CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. All they do is spew propaganda and promote war. Now they are coming after YouTube trying to attack a competitor and get independent media such as Jimmy Dore defunded. They labelled him as a conspiracy theorist and lumped him in with pedophiles and white supremacists. Boycott CNN.

    1. veti Silver badge

      Re: CNN started this, they want to defund independent media

      I'm all for not trusting any one media outlet, if by "trust" you mean "uncritically believe". But I fail to see how some random comedian (who maintains his own website so isn't beholden to YouTube anyway) is relevant to the story.

      1. rmullen0

        Re: CNN started this, they want to defund independent media

        Because he was singled out in the "investigation" that CNN did trying to get all the advertisers to pull their adds from YouTube. Fear mongering them, making an issue out of nothing, claiming that YouTube is full of white supremacist and pedophile channels. The truth of the matter is that YouTube is a competitor of CNN. Jimmy Dore has been critical of CNN and that's why he was singled out. He doesn't blindly accept everything that the government say like CNN does. An example, is the Syrian gas attack which looks like a total fraud and a false flag. CNN doesn't do journalism. All they do is push propaganda for the establishment. Keep in mind that when you watch the establishment media, the people you see are not actual journalists. They are more like actors. They are paid to not tell you the truth. They are paid to tell you what the corporations want you to think. It is funny that you should mention "uncritically believing" something. Because that is exactly what the mainstream media does. They do nothing bug propagate lies from the CIA to drum up fear so that the military industrial complex can keep making money.

  15. Florida1920

    uBlock Origin

    There are ads on YouTube?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Translation:

    Folks watching porn don't usually buy Cisco networking hardware. We decided to spend our ad dollars where it would get us something.

  17. John McCallum

    You mean to say that Cisco advertises on You Tube can't be very prominent as I have never seen one in the 2/3 years I have been watching it , not even on computer related channels.

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