Early week, we released an article detailing the controversy surrounding influential YouTuber, Logan Paul. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, the whole scandal started when Paul uploaded a vlog of his trek to the Japanese ‘suicide forest’ Aokigahara, where he and his friends made fun of a human corpse – presumably a suicide victim. The video received universal criticism, with hundreds of thousands of people calling for Paul’s channel to be taken down.
Paul has since apologised and taken the video down, but the damage has already been done to his reputation, with YouTube taking steps to ‘punish’ his insensitivity:
“In light of recent events,” said a YouTube spokesman to the Hollywood Reporter.“We have decided to remove Logan Paul’s channels from Google Preferred. Additionally, we will not feature Logan in Season 4 of Foursome and his Originals are on hold.”
Google Preferred assembles YouTube channels into easy-to-buy packages, and benefits popular channels like Paul’s by giving them access to the most sponsored and lucrative ads online, allowing them to make much more money than the average YouTuber.
Removing Paul from Google Preferred will cut quite a bit into his YouTube profits, and in addition, will be taken off the YouTube: Red rom-com series, Foursome.
But as many people have pointed out – Has YouTube been strict enough?
It’s hard to determine. Removing Paul from Google Preferred will definitely cut into his ‘profits’ (he earned more than $12.5 million in 2016 alone) and halting his work on other projects like the Thinning sequel and Foursome will cut him off further and halt his influence.
But nonetheless, he will still earn money from his views on YouTube and despite the controversy, he still has close to fifteen million followers and counting – that’s not even counting the followers and revenue he might earn from Twitter.
What are your thoughts? Do you think YouTube’s actions is a rightful punishment for Logan Paul, or is it too early to tell?