Cisco is pulling all online advertisements from YouTube due to fears of the ads appearing on sensitive content on the platform.
That’s according to Cisco chief marketing officer, Karen Walker, who unveiled the news via an official company blog last week.
The blog, which now seems to have been removed from the vendor’s website, said the company would not like its ads to "accidentally end up in the wrong place, such as on a streaming video with sensitive content," adding that the network gear maker will continue to use YouTube as a platform to share Cisco's video content.
Alphabet’s Google, which owns YouTube, said it has partnered with advertisers to make changes.
"We have partnered with advertisers to make significant changes to how we approach monetisation on YouTube with stricter policies, better controls and greater transparency,” a Google spokesperson told Reuters.
“We are committed to continuing this dialogue and getting this right.”
Cisco's action follows a CNN report in April that said ads from over 300 companies, including Cisco, ran on extremist channels on YouTube.
Under the headline of, YouTube ran ads from hundreds of brands on extremist channels, the report claimed the companies included “tech giants, major retailers, newspapers and government agencies”, with content running on channels promoting “white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories and North Korean propaganda”.
The companies may have unknowingly helped finance some of these channels through the advertisements they paid for YouTube, according to the CNN report.
Cisco did not respond to a request seeking comment on the blog's removal from its website.
YouTube said in a report released last month that it had deleted about five million videos from its platform for content policy violations in last year's fourth quarter before any viewers saw them.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler)
