Ariel Bardin didn’t explicitly mention Logan Paul by name, but many are interpreting a Friday blog post by YouTube’s Vice President of Product Management as a directive against Paul and those of his ilk. In a post entitled, “Preventing Harm to the Broader YouTube Community,” Bardin laid out YouTube’s updated penalties for punishing content creators who violate the streaming video service’s community guidelines.
“When one creator does something particularly blatant—like conducts a heinous prank where people are traumatized, promotes violence or hate toward a group, demonstrates cruelty, or sensationalizes the pain of others in an attempt to gain views or subscribers—it can cause lasting damage to the community, including viewers, creators and the outside world,” Bardin wrote.
As it relates to Paul, one of his previous videos featured him showing the corpse of a person who appeared to be a suicide victim. That post earned Paul a one-month ban, and days after his ban was lifted Paul uploaded a video of himself using a Taser on a dead rat.
In response to Logan Paul’s recent pattern of behavior, we’ve temporarily suspended ads on his channels.
Friday, YouTube publicly confirmed temporarily suspending Paul’s ad revenue, but the length of Paul’s most recent ban has not been publicized.
Bardin’s post essentially incorporates the penalties levied against Paul into YouTube’s official legislative structure. Some of the same penalties Paul was hit with—removal from Google Preferred, removal or cancellation of a YouTube channel, and suspension of ad revenue—are stated verbatim in Bardin’s post.
Per a recent NPR report by Vanessa Romo, the suspension nearly halved Paul’s YouTube earnings from pre-roll advertisements and other initiatives.
“Paul is one of YouTube’s biggest stars with more than 16.5 million subscribers, according to Social Blade,” Romo reported. “But, the site reports, his ad revenue has plummeted from about $1.3 million per month to under $700,000 in recent weeks.”
While Bardin stressed that the updated sanctioning guidelines would likely only apply in a “rare handful of egregious cases,” several content creators posted comments about the perception of inconsistent punishments being levied due to the YouTube Advertiser-friendly content guidelines.
You can view Ariel Bardin’s full post with YouTube’s updated guidelines via the YouTube Creator Blog.
