Hate Speech Still Pays on YouTube. Regulators Should Follow the Money

For every dollar an advertiser spends on a YouTube video, the platform keeps 45 cents. YouTube is not a neutral host that occasionally misses bad actors. It is a business partner in every monetized video, and it profits when those videos perform, including, new research suggests, ones that could break its own rules.

A new report from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), “Monetizing Hate,” puts a price on that partnership. GDI estimates that 100 English-language channels publishing what it classifies as hate speech are on track to earn about $13.3 million in ad revenue in 2026: $7.3 million for creators, $6 million for YouTube. One channel, earning an estimated $2.2 million a year, carried content that may breach YouTube’s Community Guidelines and German law. In September, it was still online, still showing ads and still viewable in Germany.

The report’s most revealing finding is not the size of these sums. It is how little anyone outside YouTube can know about them, and how conveniently that serves the company.

Little money, strong incentives

Six million dollars is a rounding error for a platform that took in $60 billion from ads and subscriptions in 2025 alone. The more plausible explanation for weak enforcement is not that hate is too lucrative to give up, but that enforcement costs time, staff and creator goodwill, while inaction costs little.

For creators, though, $2.2 million a year is a career. Recommendation systems tend to reward content that edges toward a platform’s policy line, and because YouTube shares the revenue, its interest in a high-performing video is aligned with the creator’s, not with the people that video targets.

GDI’s numbers deserve scrutiny. Five large language models labeled 19,297 videos; analysts manually reviewed 200. Its definition of hate speech follows the Council of Europe’s and is broader than YouTube’s, so much of what it flagged is permitted on the platform. Critics will say GDI is counting lawful speech. But that gap is the point: YouTube’s narrow definitions decide what is monetizable, and only YouTube can test GDI’s estimates against real data.

YouTube’s repeat-offender clause applies in “rare cases” and never defines “repeatedly.” GDI found no evidence it had been used against the content it reviewed. A rule with an undefined trigger and unreported use is not really a rule. It is discretion. YouTube pledged to tighten its rules on monetizing hateful content after an advertiser revolt in 2017 and again in 2019. The pattern suggests enforcement tightens when revenue is threatened, then slackens when attention moves on.

What meaningful transparency would look like

YouTube’s transparency reports count removals, not videos that stay online but lose ads. Meaningful transparency would measure money, not takedowns. In practice, that means:

• Enforcement data that matches the business model: how many videos and channels are demonetized under the hate speech policy, by country of viewing.

• A defined repeat-offender threshold, with annual figures on how often it is triggered. A rule YouTube must report on is a rule it must use.

• A measure of delay: how much a video earned before demonetization, and how long it took. This shows whether enforcement removes the incentive or arrives after the money is made.

• Video-level placement reports, so advertisers can see, and stop paying for, what their budgets fund.

Much of this sits within existing law. The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires platforms to explain any “restriction of monetary payments” to the affected user (Article 17), and those explanations feed the Commission’s public Transparency Database. Regulators could check whether YouTube logs hate speech demonetizations there at all. The Commission can demand data on viewer location and revenue under Article 67, and a delegated act adopted in July 2025 lets vetted researchers request non-public platform data. In the UK, Category 1 transparency reports under the Online Safety Act, due in 2027, give Ofcom a chance to require demonetization figures, not just removals.

Disclosure has limits. YouTube’s own DSA audit, as GDI summarizes it, found trusted-flagger notices alleging illegal hate speech were not prioritized. Reporting can harden into box-ticking, and a demonetization figure means little without an independent sense of how much violating content exists. That is why researcher access matters as much as company reporting.

Following the money sidesteps the censorship fight

US-based creators account for 81% of the estimated revenue, an easy target in the transatlantic row over the DSA. But EU users were shown ads on sampled videos. If even 10% of views came from the EU, GDI estimates, that would mean $0.9 million in hate-linked ad revenue from January to August. This is only an estimate because YouTube alone knows where its viewers are.

Demonetization removes no video and silences no one. It asks a company to stop paying for, and profiting from, content that breaks its own rules or the law where it is viewed. That shifts the question from “what should come down” to “what should be paid for.” A platform that cannot answer it with data has already told regulators something.