Following AT&T, Verizon, Volkswagen and several other companies, now PepsiCo, WalMart and Starbucks have confirmed that they have also suspended their advertising on YouTube. This major decision of the companies to boycott advertising with YouTube came after Wall Street Journal found that Google's automated program placed their ads on five videos containing racism, terrorism and other unsavoury contents.
Google depends largely on automated programs to place ads in YouTube videos because the job is too much for humans to handle on their own. About 400 hours of video is now posted on YouTube each minute.
All these brands decisions of boycotting YouTube shows that Google's ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos is seriously in question even after the tech giant apologised for the same and announced the steps taken to ensure it doesn't happen again in the future.
"We know that this is unacceptable to the advertisers and agencies who put their trust in us," Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, wrote in a blog post earlier this week.
The other companies in the list of boycotting ads with Google include, reported Associated Press.
AT&T has gone a step further, as it has not only pulled ads from YouTube but has said that it's effectively pulling ads from more than two million other websites that depend on Google to deliver ads to their pages
According to analysts and experts, if Google fails to attract the advertising clients, it could result in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
