YouTube has had a dilemma on its hands for years with content that breaks community guidelines. The solution? Automated systems which take down content quickly if it detects a problem. This week, YouTube has revealed some numbers on how much content was removed last quarter, including for the first time, channels taken down.
Since earlier this year, YouTube has made a point of sharing statistics each quarter on content its automated systems and human reviewers take down. Following that April report, we’re getting the first updated report and the results are fairly similar overall.
From July to September of 2018, YouTube took down 7.8 million videos that broke the platform’s guidelines, 81% of which were detected firstly by machines. Of those videos, 74.5% were taken down before receiving even a single view.
Further digging into those numbers, YouTube explains “over 90% of the channels and over 80% of the videos that we removed in September 2018 were removed for violating our policies on spam or adult content.”
Over 90% of those videos never received more than 10 views before being taken down. YouTube also notes that “10.2% of video removals were for child safety, while Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) represents a fraction of a percent” of removed content.
YouTube channels removed – July-Sept 2018
Especially notable in this report is that, for the first time, YouTube is specifically breaking down the number of channels it shut down. As noted on the transparency report, Q3 saw 1.67 million channels taken down for breaking community guidelines. Nearly 80% of channels removed were due to spam with 12.6% being due to nudity or sexual content. 50.2 million videos were removed during Q3 due to channel suspensions. That total is separate from the 7.8 million that were removed due to breaking community guidelines.
YouTube videos removed – July-Sept 2018
YouTube further explains that over 224 million comments were removed during this time period. This was primarily due to spam, and the total number actually represents just a small fraction of the billions of comments left on the platform. YouTube notes that commenting has actually grown this year due to the removals with daily users 11% more likely to comment compared to last year.
YouTube comments removed – July-Sept 2018
More on YouTube:
- YouTube Rewind 2018 beat ‘Baby’ as the most disliked video of all time
- YouTube purging spam accounts this week, creators may see ‘noticeable’ decrease in subscriber count
- YouTube Music now features Top 100 songs and music videos from YouTube Charts
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