YouTube has introduced new rules about which publishers can earn money from ads on its platform. Videos will now only be allowed to have adverts running on them if the publisher meets two criteria: they must have more than 1,000 subscribers and they must have had over 4,000 hours of their content viewed in the last 12 months. These requirements are stricter than they were before, meaning that the number of eligible publishers has gone down substantially. There will now also be human moderators, who will check all videos that have ads running on them to make sure that they do not break any of YouTube's guidelines. The move to tighten standards comes after the video site was hit by a number of controversies recently. Last year, it suffered an “adpocalypse” where over 200 brands stopped their YouTube advertising campaigns after it was revealed that the ads had appeared on videos containing extremist content. More recently, it came under pressure after the vlogger Logan Paul, one of YouTube's top earners of advertising revenue, posted a video containing a suicide victim. YouTube hopes that the new rules and the addition of human moderators will decrease the likelihood of these events happening again.
