By Jack Nicas

YouTube is ordering workers to review thousands of hours of its most popular content and setting new limits on which videos can run ads, in moves to ease advertisers' worries that their brands are showing up alongside offensive or controversial videos.

YouTube said Tuesday that human reviewers would watch every second of video in its curated lineup of top content, dubbed Google Preferred, which brands pay a premium to advertise on. Human reviewers also will have to approve new videos uploaded by Google Preferred channels before the videos can begin running the premium ads.

YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, says Google Preferred includes among the most popular 5% of channels, as determined by their likes, comments and shares, among other factors. The company didn't say how many hours of content that entails.

But YouTube has said since 2015 that users upload 400 hours of video to the site a minute, or 65 years of footage a day, meaning reviewing even a small slice of that total would likely require at least tens of thousands of hours.

They expect to have the full review completed by the end of March, then continue to review new videos as they are posted.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 16, 2018 18:17 ET (23:17 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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