Well, this is the first day of May and what a fantastic way to start off with this topic. who couldn't forget about the infamous trend known as Elsagate? As a matter of fact, I mentioned Elsagate once in the past and that was when I was talking about GameToons and how their artstyle/animations resemble to what you would find on those channels. Regardless of how you saw them, it was pretty problematic during its YouTube life cycle for at least a year causing so much devastation and a lot of YouTuber's to talk about it. Unfortunately, with YouTube stepping in and not doing as much to stop this problem, Elsagate is still a huge issue to this day and YouTube refuses to do anything about it.
Brief History:
There's not much to talk about in terms of the history but Elsagate was created back in 2016. The first discovery for this problematic trend was unknown until The Guardian reported on a channel titled 'Webs & Tiaras.' The channel featured characters like Spiderman and Elsa apparently having a bonding relationship with no dialogue. That's pretty much what all they did throughout their videos with other characters being presented as well. At the time, they had over 550k subscribers and over 316k views before it was shut down.
Why Their Bad:
Graphic Content / YouTube's Response:
Over the next year or so, new channels started to form and take over YouTube. The worst part about it is that they were labelled as 'Kid Friendly' when in reality it wasn't. Not only that this was a major problem on YouTube, but it was also flooding the YouTube Kids app causing so much of the damage. Many of the videos that were very problematic include pregnancy, violence, abuse, fetishes, racism and it goes on from there and it's fucking disgusting. The big issue with all of these channels is that most of them were created by bots, essentially breaking the YouTube system for clicks with the AUTOPLAY function. That kept these channels running and garnered them with over millions of views. Most of which was exploitation.
During the light of this, more and more articles were coming out and various YouTuber's were talking about the issue. It got so much attention that between the end of summer and around the fall of 2017, YouTube actually responded to the controversy and decided to update their guidelines regarding the content and monetization. From this point on, YouTube manage to remove 50 channels and over 3.5 million videos however this wasn't enough as there were still these types of channels out there. So, by removing just 50 channels is a small number and it isn't enough. Due to updating their guidelines, every good channel got hit with monetization issues leading to even more negativity towards YouTube.
The Return:
Unfortunately, this trend surrounding Elsagate dialed down for a while, but it has since returned to the surface as if it never left. Just when you thought that it was horrible back when it started, it is now ten times worse with all those channels trying to find new ways to milk anything dry. Many YouTuber's covered this topic once again with YouTube barely doing a damn thing about it. It may be too much to talk about it but I might continue to update this post if anything new comes along.
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