Cancel Culture Lives: Starving German YouTube Channels of Ad Revenue

Media outlets – unless they are state media – live on advertising. This is as true of newspapers as it is of radio stations or YouTube channels. In a sense, free enterprise guarantees media freedom through advertising. But this only works as long as the companies buying the ads remain ideologically neutral. Once they take sides in the political contest, the traditional financing model of free media begins to reach its limits.

More problematic still is when NGOs, politicians or politicized advertising agencies call for boycotts of individual media outlets. Then the established system threatens to collapse. Unwelcome media outlets are deprived of their financial base. Above all, the last thing still binding our societies together – consumption – becomes politicized. Suddenly there is right-wing and left-wing dish soap, right-wing and left-wing pasta.

For society, this is disastrous. The last supposedly apolitical areas of life are dragged into a culture war with growing potential to paralyze countries in Europe and beyond and endanger democracy. Germany currently shows how this can play out.

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The New Moral Gatekeepers

There, a campaign organization named Campact has called on companies to block their advertising from appearing on 62 YouTube channels which it says “directly or indirectly support the far-right AfD and/or incite hatred against minorities”. According to Campact, it was now the responsibility of the companies it had contacted to “exclude hate channels as advertising partners”. Any company that failed to do so, it said, was supporting “disinformation and hatred against minorities”.

Campact gave the companies an ultimatum and demanded that they state their position. The activist group did not threaten to expose the companies publicly, but the tactic was nonetheless tantamount to blackmail.

It is understandable that the activists’ letter did not go straight into the bin but instead prompted anxious looks in many boardrooms. Few things frighten executives more than an angry mob of the self-righteous and outraged.

Campact has repeatedly shown itself to be a formidable far-left organization. By its own account, it is a “campaigning organization through which more than 4.5 million people stand up for progressive politics and defend our democracy”. It campaigns against “authoritarian forces” and “radical free-market economics”. Campact was founded as an association in 2004, but lost its charitable status – an important legal classification in Germany – in 2019.

In January 2024, the group pulled off its biggest media coup to date. Following an ostensibly investigative report on a meeting of conservative and right-wing politicians and activists in Potsdam, Campact cast the gathering as a "Wannsee Conference 2.0" – a polemical allusion to the meeting in a villa on Berlin’s Wannsee where the extermination of Europe’s Jews was coordinated. The Hamburg Regional Court subsequently barred Campact from repeating two claims about the content and nature of the gathering. Yet in the short term, the campaign brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

The companies contacted by Campact have therefore been warned. A business publicly pilloried by the left-wing activists could well feel the impact on its bottom line. Moreover, the list of YouTube channels published by Campact is remarkably mixed. It includes outlets of the New Right, channels associated with prominent AfD figures, but also conservative and liberal media such as Tichys Einblick, Nius and Apollo News.

Campact’s message is clear: in essence, any outlet that is not left-wing is suspect. A company that allows its advertising to appear on a non-left-wing YouTube channel becomes suspect in turn.

That a far-left organization presumes to act as referee in the democratic contest is bad enough. That it also behaves like a Mafia godfather, tacitly threatening private companies with repercussions if they advertise with the wrong media, makes it scandalous. It has little to do with democracy, freedom or, indeed, the rule of law.

The Politics of the Shopping Basket

There is also a more fundamental problem: the politicization of consumption.

Consumption was never entirely free of ideology. There have always been controversial products or companies. Nor is it new for firms and corporations to trim their sails to the political wind. But now an entirely new prospect looms: the division of the marketplace into left-wing and right-wing products.

On one side are companies that, out of conviction or opportunism, submit to left-liberal rules of conduct. On the other are firms that refuse, either on principle or for commercial reasons, and continue to advertise with outlets that the guardians of political orthodoxy deem unacceptable.

Ultimately, society loses its last common bond: consumption. Until now, it did not matter what toothpaste people used, what cookies they bought or what dish soap they chose. Now every purchasing decision becomes a political statement. In the worst case, the shopping cart at the supermarket checkout reveals the politics of the person ahead of you. Shopping has lost its innocence. Pick up the wrong packet of pasta and you are exposed as a fascist.

Campaigners such as Campact would, of course, prefer every company to submit to their political and moral dictates. And indeed, the reactions of the companies concerned were conspicuously restrained. Anyone hoping that at least two or three of them would take a courageous stand and defend themselves against such an attack on their freedom to conduct business was disappointed. According to Campact, nearly 30 companies had either agreed to add the YouTube channels to their blocklists or said they were considering doing so within the first week of the campaign.

Much of the business world thus continues to behave opportunistically toward ideologues on the left – or even actively supports the same social and political aims.

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The Lost Liberalism of Capitalism

It would be dishonest to claim that companies were always ideologically neutral in the past. Until the end of the 20th century, most boardrooms were dominated by a mixture of social conservatism and economic liberalism.

Yet most companies would never have dreamed of applying sociopolitical pressure to their advertising partners. Even arch-conservative companies bought advertising space in left-leaning newspapers. After all, they knew that a left-wing schoolteacher still buys a vacuum cleaner or canned tomatoes. Advertising was placed according to the target audience – not political propriety.

Yet the refreshing liberality of profit-driven capitalism has increasingly given way to the narrow-minded posture of a self-consciously moral capitalism. What many companies overlook is that in a pluralistic society, there is no longer a single moral code that commands majority support. By publicly committing itself to one moral code or system of norms, a company may alienate most consumers. For marketing reasons alone, it is therefore wiser to signal ideological neutrality.

That is not to say companies should not stand for certain values. But those values should have something to do with what the company actually sells. Reliability, durability and quality are values too. And they are the values customers expect.

Those values, however, come at a real cost. They require investment and care. It is much easier and cheaper to adopt a moral posture and applaud self-appointed guardians of virtue. The fact that this leaves companies dependent on ideologues does not seem to trouble many of them.