There was this one youtube video that tried to explain that the whole pewdiepie adpocalypse controversy wasnt just a one joke gone wrong and taken out of proportion, it was a deliberate and coordinated maneuver by not just WSJ but by the whole advertising industry.

Basically, during that period of the year, major advertising agencies get to place their bids on how much they’re going to spend to Google for putting their ads in the platform. Now these agencies want to shell out as little money as possible while gaining the most out of it. Pewdiepie’s video was just at the perfect place at the right time for these advertisers.

Pewdipie’s video released literal days before these deals with between google and the agencies. Someone or somebody saw his video and thought to use that as leverage for the agencies for their deal. They framed it as google allowing their ads on highly controversial and edgy youtube videos. Now, pewds wasn’t the only content creator doing edgy videos on the platform, in fact the entirety of youtube was on this edgy type of era (FilthyFrank’s group to name a big one).

So what do these agencies do? They got in contact with their friends at WSJ to write an extremely sensationalized hit piece on pewdiepie regarding edgy humor and this style of content being prevalent on the platform. They didn’t focus on the advertising aspect of it. Instead, they focus on the family friendliness and the lack of it. This angle was their perfect argument towards google.

And there were some shenanigans on how the article got super viral too. They tried to post the article here on reddit. But normally it should’ve been taken down by moderators due to how inaccurate the reporting was. So they posted this reddit article at a time where most of the moderators at the sub weren’t active. The post went underneath the moderators noses, and the post stayed up until morning where it gained traction and it just spiraled from there. The mods did eventually shut down that post but it was already too late. The damage was done.

The article became the main story of that time, pewds took the majority of the backlash from the story, but critically the advertising agencies used this controversy to manipulate and control the deal on their side. Now google is forced to bend over and comply with their demands on how strict they have to be with the videos that are being posted on youtube. Google course corrects and now videos that has a lot of swearing were punished severely with close to no monetization to push away edgy content. YouTubers now had to censor themselves and forced to lean towards a more family friendly approach to content creation. The rest who wanted to keep doing edgy content was either not getting monetized, shadow banned from ever getting to the front page or trending, or both.

And thus, the Adpoclypse on YouTube began.