If you were watching Pewdiepie, Markiplier, or Dude Perfect’s videos yesterday, you may have seen an ad for an adult cam model website.
A video advertisement featuring a woman gyrating that included a link in the bottom left corner with a thumbnail of two people having sex has been appearing before these channels’ and other popular YouTube videos, Motherboard first reported. For example, it played to at least some viewers before this Dude Perfect video yesterday, which has over 9.7 million views.
The advertisement links to a CamSoda-branded webcam model site, according to Motherboard. Side note—CamSoda actually has its own YouTube channel featuring PG-13 videos starring cam models, with over 17,000 subscribers. (CamSoda’s videos don’t seem to feature any ads.)
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Twitter users have noticed the pornography ads on YouTube and pointed them out to the video platform. Viewers do not approve. Here’s a collection of their reactions on Twitter, and you can see one of them below:
I don’t normally post stuff like this, but my friend asked me to because he doesn’t have twitter. He was watching a Markiplier video when he got an ad with *literal porn* as the thumbnail. @YouTube @TeamYouTube how can this stuff be allowed in your ads, and on content kids watch? pic.twitter.com/rv2k5nAvFn
— Princess Wuffu~ (@PrincessWuffu) April 10, 2018
YouTube has been replying to concerned Twitter users with the Google “AdWords Help” page. The page links to Google’s advertising guidelines, which note “sexually explicit content” is forbidden. However, the AdWords Help page does admit, “While we make every effort to ensure that ads which may violate our policies do not run prior to review, some ads may run on Google before our AdWords Specialists check them.”
Motherboard was able to trace the perpetrating video ad back to a YouTube channel called “1.347.852 Views,” which has since been taken down. A video on the channel featuring the cam site ad has been removed from YouTube “for violating YouTube’s policy on spam, deceptive practices, and scams.”
YouTube has come under fire in the past for serving up inappropriate content, specifically to children. Back in December, the company announced it was hiring 10,000 people to screen for offensive videos and comments on the video platform. Looks like they missed this one.
