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Here's what YouTube has to say about its NSFW ad issue (again)
- YouTube has responded after a Redditor encountered more NSFW ads on the platform.
- The company said it had removed these ads and taken action against the offending account.
- The service noted that it had blocked or removed almost 95 million ads featuring adult content last year.
YouTube is no stranger to NSFW ads, and a Redditor recently reported encountering porn ads on the streaming service. Now, YouTube has responded following these latest ads.
Redditor Academic_Yak2513 spotted two NSFW advertisements for a video game, featuring cropped porn. These ads also come after we spotted pornographic ads on YouTube back in December 2023.
“We have strict policies against ads with sexually explicit content. If we find any ads that violate this policy, we remove them,” a YouTube spokesperson told Android Authority.
The company also told us that it removed the most recent offending ads and that action was taken against the account.
YouTube’s ad crackdown so far
The streaming service pointed to the sheer number of ads it blocked or removed last year:
In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year.
YouTube added that it had blocked or removed 94.6 million ads with adult content in 2023.
The company also insisted that large language models (LLM) were helping in the fight against sketchy ads.
“In 2023, in the first policies where we deployed LLMs, we blocked or removed 35 million ads in financial services advertising, sexual content, misrepresentation, and gambling,” it explained.
In any event, fighting sketchy ads is a cat-and-mouse game. But between these most recent NSFW ads and porn bots leaving comments, there’s still plenty of room for YouTube to improve.