If you're a YouTube content creator in Russia making those insane dashcam car-crash collages and blow-up-a-truck-in-a-potato-field-with-a-bazooka videos that are all so popular over there, I'm sorry to inform you that your business model is temporarily going dosvedanya:
Russian YouTube creators will lose a source of income now that the company has suspended Ad sales during the war with Ukraine.
The move is the second action Google, which owns Youtube, has taken against Russia amid the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The first ad sales decision came a day after Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, demanded Google to block ads on YouTube that contained what it called "false political information" about Ukraine.
"We've recently paused all Google and YouTube ads in Russia," a YouTube spokesperson told Newsweek. "As a follow-up, we're now extending this pause to all our monetization features, including YouTube Premium, Channel Memberships, Super Chat, and Merchandise, for viewers in Russia."
This is obviously meant to be a major pressure move against Vladimir Putin, meant to humiliate him on the national stage, put another cinch around the Russian economy, and—most importantly—stir up major opposition to Putin from the country's digital creator class.
And who knows: The digital creators may very well turn against Putin over this!
But it could also have the unintended effect of generating intense anti-U.S. sentiment in Russia—more so than it already exists, anyway—with legions of onetime-solvent YouTube creators losing a critical stream of income and deciding that the United States is an evil belligerent waging an anti-Russian offensive.
At which point...well, it probably doesn't get great from there.
I'm erring on the side of not a good move here. I hope I'm wrong.
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