About

Access our published paper on: this website (KDD)

In this project titled "Did your child get scared by an inappropriate advertisement on YouTube?", we quantify the influence of advertisements on YouTube videos that are appropriate for young children to watch. We analyze the advertising patterns of 24.6~K YouTube videos that are designed for young children.

We found that:

• 26.9% of toddler-oriented videos (out of a sample of 24.6 K videos) include at least one ad that is inappropriate for young children.

• 9.9% of advertisements (out of a sample of 4.6 K unique advertisements) appearing in such toddler-oriented videos contain inappropriate content for young children.

To encourage other researchers to utilize our work for future research focus, we also publicize our whole dataset in the Download Section.

According to the YouTube Help [1], the categories of ads on YouTube are:

• Video ads: the most common category of YouTube ads that play before, during, or after the actual video is played. These are sponsored videos that appear in monetized organic content. They are also referred to as in-stream ads as per YouTube Help [1]. Video ads consist of skippable video ads (a short video that viewers can skip after 5 seconds), non-skippable video ads (a short video lasting for 15 seconds or shorter and viewers can't skip the ad), bumper ads (a short video lasting for 6 seconds (or shorter) which viewers cannot skip) and in-feed video ads (a short video that gets displayed on a user's homepage or on a channel's homepage).

• Sidebar ads: images or video units that are displayed outside, on the right of the actual video. Users can interact with these ads or turn them off at will. Clicking on one of these ads will take users to a landing page assigned by the advertiser. They are also referred to as outstream ads as per YouTube Help.

• Masthead ads: ads that are displayed at the top of the home feed on YouTube. These are mostly reserved by one advertiser per country per day.

• Paid-promo ads: are ads from a sponsor of a video embedded within the actual content of the video.

• Overlay ads: small banner-like ads that take up about the bottom 20% of a video’s screen without obstructing the user’s view. These ads can contain images or text, and users can interact with them or turn them off at will. Clicking on one of these ads will take users to a landing page assigned by the advertiser.

(See Figure 1 for snippets of all types of advertisements in YouTube)

Our contributions are summarized as follows:

• We conduct an extensive study of ad patterns in young-kid-oriented videos to quantify the presence of inappropriate ads that are shown on appropriate videos on YouTube. We analyze the ads for 24.6 K YouTube videos that are safe for young children to watch. We find that 9.9% of the 4.6 K unique advertisements shown on these 24.6 K videos contain inappropriate content for young children. Moreover, we observe that 26.9% of all the 24.6 K appropriate videos include at least one inappropriate ad for young children.

• We publicly release a comprehensive dataset of YouTube ads displayed in young-kid-oriented videos (The dataset is in the Download Section).

• We offer recommendations for YouTube to address the issue of inappropriate ads shown to young children.