Verizon Returns Its Ads To YouTube After A Five-Month Freeze

One of the last remaining holdouts from this year’s YouTube advertising boycott has resumed its partnership with the world’s top video site. Verizon, which was one of several brands to pull its ads from YouTube after learning that those spots could be running next to hate speech and terrorist videos, has decided to resume its pre-roll campaigns on the platform.

Verizon’s boycott began back in March, when it and AT&T pulled content from YouTube, citing brand safety concerns. After several other companies followed suit, YouTube responded to the pressure it faced from its partners by implementing new safeguards that would prevent concerned advertisers from being associated with violent, criminal, or terroristic content. Those updates in turn cause many creators to lose significant amounts of ad revenue, and YouTube has spend the last few months appeasing its creative community by offering them new tools and faculties.

The new safeguards satisfied some of the original boycotters, and the premium advertising program Google Preferred has rebounded after dipping earlier in 2017. Some companies, Verizon among them,

continued to hold out, but the telecom giant seems to now be satisfied with the current state of affairs in the world of YouTube advertising. To ensure its ads appear next to the right types of videos, it has enlisted the help of third-party analytics company Integral Ad Science.

“This is an overall industry issue that Verizon is trying to address across the board, not just with Google and YouTube, but with all of our partners,” said Verizon chief media officer John Nitti. “The need to have consistency and measurement and for us to deploy the Verizon standard is pinnacle to get to the transparency that every marketer deserves.”

The ad boycott, while serious, did not seem to have a major impact on YouTube’s bottom line. While the video site’s parent company posted shaky numbers during Q2 2017, YouTube itself showed strong growth over that period. “YouTube is scaling really well globally,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last month.