A Conspiracy Of Algorithms

YouTube is finally reckoning with its misleading videos

- Kate Sheridan

LOUIE VELESKI HAS SOME interesting opinions. He thinks ghosts exist and humans have never been to the moon. A resident of Melbourne, Australia, Veleski expounds on his points of view on his YouTube channel, Better Mankind, which earns him up to $5,400 a month.

Conspiracy theories, it turns out, are very profitable for the YouTube inclined entrepreneur. On his channel, Peladophobian, Ryan Silvey, 18 and also from Australia, posts videos like “School Is Illuminati” and “Donald Trump Is Vladimir Putin.” Though satirical, the videos may be lumped in with other contrarian or esoteric posts in search results. Silvey makes more than $7,500 a month on average from advertisements that some of his 628,000 subscribers view.

YouTube also makes a bundle. About 55 percent of the money companies pay to put their 30-second ads at the start of popular videos goes to the content creators. The rest goes to Alphabet, the site’s parent company. It reported more than $110 billion in revenue in 2017 (up from $90 billion in 2016). Nearly 90 percent of that figure came from ads, and a growing number were on YouTube.

Created in 2005, YouTube is the internet’s dominant video content platform. People around the world watch about 1 billion educational videos on the site each day, and more people are using it as a news source. But media reports have implicated YouTube in the spread of fake news and extremism, often on account of conspiracy videos touting false information. With Facebook now under government scrutiny and possibly facing regulation, YouTube is taking measures to ensure its own integrity. And that could mean the end of the conspiracy video business.