Palestinian graphic designer Bilal Tamimi’s YouTube videos from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank have received 6 million views during the past 13 years. His uploads document joyous festivals and peaceful protests—but also violent skirmishes between Nabi Saleh’s 600 residents and occupying Israeli soldiers. “I need to show to the world what’s happening in my village and the suffering of my people from occupation,” he says.
The platform has helped Tamimi broadcast to his more than 20,000 subscribers, but he’s locked out of YouTube’s revenue sharing program that pays a share of ad sales to more than 2 million video creators in 137 countries or territories. When Tamimi tries to sign up, YouTube’s app says, “The YouTube Partner Program is not available in your current location Palestine.”
The internet has given some Palestinians a global audience, but many benefits of online life that billions around the world can take for granted simply don’t work for people in Gaza and the West Bank. In addition to YouTube’s partner program, money transfer services such as PayPal and ecommerce marketplaces, including Amazon, largely bar Palestinian merchants from entry. Google tools for generating revenue from web ads or in-app purchases are technically open to Palestinians but can, in practice, be inaccessible due to challenges verifying their identity or collecting payment.
As Israeli forces have bombarded Gaza in pursuit of Hamas, tech workers’ and rights activists’ frustrations with the region’s digital inequality has grown. Palestinians are barred from YouTube’s Partner Program and struggle with intermittent connectivity. Israeli YouTube channels in the program could be bringing in some revenue from conflict-related content. Popular Israeli singers have drawn views with songs honoring victims of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, while travel advice channel Traveling Israel has received millions of views on historical explainers.
Human rights organizations say the disparity in access to online sources of income weakens the Palestinian economy. “Many Palestinians who work online struggle to be paid,” says Marwa Fatafta, a policy and advocacy manager at the rights organization Access Now. YouTube’s policy “fits a larger pattern of tech companies’ discriminatory approach to Palestinians.”
Google spokespeople, who asked not to be named for safety concerns, say in a statement that the company is committed to creating economic opportunities for Palestinians through services and training. The YouTube Partner Program won’t be available in the Palestinian territories until Google launches a local version of YouTube, which involves customizing features and options to the language and culture. “We continue to invest in the infrastructure that’s needed to offer more tools to monetize with Google to ensure it’s a seamless process and follows local legal requirements,” one of the spokespeople says.
To get a sense of how Palestinians are excluded from or face barriers to tapping the world’s largest ecosystem for making money online—Google’s—WIRED reviewed popular Palestinian YouTube channels, news websites, and apps associated with the region. Interviews with content creators, activists, and current and former Google staff familiar with the region and company policies helped fill out the picture. The investigation revealed how a series of Palestinian projects and companies hit financial dead ends when attempting to monetize online in ways easy for people in countries such as the US and Israel. Others resorted to complicated geographic workarounds that siphon off revenue.
The Google sources not authorized to speak to media allege those challenges reflect years of internal politics and neglect of Palestinian users at the company. The sources say a localized version of the company’s search engine, Google.ps, launched in 2009 only after a desire to provide more relevant results narrowly beat out concerns about public backlash for an action some people could view as endorsing disputed territories. But there hasn’t been management resolve in recent years to risk changing the status quo to introduce a Palestinian YouTube that would give local creators access to monetization.
US congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin says Israel’s current attack on Gaza underscores how wrong that pattern of online exclusion is. “When massive companies make money hand over fist from creators but deny them their fair share just because of where they live, that is just plain wrong,” he says. It is crucial, he argues, that “Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have equal opportunities for economic participation.” In May, Pocan led several Democratic US lawmakers in urging PayPal to allow Palestinian accounts. PayPal, which declined to comment, hasn’t changed its policies.
Tamimi, 57, started posting on YouTube in 2010 and views it as a duty in service of his villagers, not a way to get rich. He first tried to join the service’s revenue sharing program a few years ago as a way to defray his costs. “I would for sure try to improve my work, to have a good camera,” he says. “And maybe I can help other people who are doing what I am doing through workshops and cameras.”
Today Tamimi uses an iPhone 12 Pro Max he bought himself and camcorders and equipment donated by B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit organization that aims to document human rights issues in Palestinian territories.
Tamimi’s focus on winning attention over profit is no different than other YouTube creators, says Bing Chen, who once led global creator initiatives at YouTube. “Revenue is of course an incentive, but fame is more so,” says Chen, who now develops and invests in creators through his company AU Holdings.
You don’t need a fancy camera or editing to draw an audience. When Israeli professors analyzed about 340 TikTok videos from 2021 related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they found pro-Israeli videos had higher production values but received lower engagement. They argued that viewers preferred Palestinian content because public sentiment tends to favor those seen as victims.
At a time of widespread suffering now on both sides of the border and an intense period of global attention on the region, Palestinian channels like Tamimi’s could be drawing record engagement and revenue—money that could, one day, make rebuilding easier.
Instead, Tamimi has withdrawn from YouTube. He started posting only infrequently after his village stopped organizing weekly protests around 2018 and with no income available feels no loyalty to the Google service. When an incident flares up, he is now more likely to livestream on Meta’s Facebook, where he draws thousands of viewers. “YouTube is like an archive,” he says, not a place to share new content.
YouTube’s revenue program for creators, known as YPP, launched in 2007 and pioneered the concept of a major social media platform turning amateur stardom into a well-paying job. It now has competition from Meta, X, and TikTok—which also don’t offer their programs to people in Palestinian territories—but remains the leader in influence and geographic reach.
Despite YouTube’s dominant position, WIRED’s review found that YPP doesn’t let in creators from over a quarter of the world’s 100 most populous countries, most of them in Africa. It welcomes people from many countries with smaller populations than the Palestinian territories, where, combined, an estimated 5 million people reside. Creators from Iraq and Yemen, also Arabic-speaking places troubled by conflict, are listed as supported.
Chen, who helped develop YPP while working at YouTube, believes that the platform’s leaders may want to avoid funding creators whose content puts them at risk from local authorities, and also worry that language barriers or limited staffing could make it difficult to provide suitable customer service.
But it’s not impossible for platforms to work with creators in Palestine. California-based fundraising service Patreon gets money to Palestinian users through the payments provider Payoneer, and smaller money-moving tools such as Saudi Arabia’s PayTabs say they support transactions with Palestinian accounts.
Other parts of Google’s vast empire claim to serve Palestinians businesses, but people reached by WIRED say the reality is very different.
Google documentation says the Google Play app store allows developers from 163 markets, including one listed as “Palestine,” to sell apps and in-app purchases and that Google’s AdSense advertising system supports 232 countries or territories, including “Palestinian Territory.”
Odeh Quraan, who runs a Ramallah-based software development agency called iPhase with overseas customers, says the sign-up process for AdSense requires entering a PIN mailed by Google. But Israel controls the flow of mail to the West Bank, and many items never arrive, he says. He circumvented that by using Stripe’s Atlas service to establish a company in the US state of Delaware without ever setting foot there. But it comes with downsides. “Taxes are a headache, and transferring money from the US bank account to the local banks has turned out costly,” Quraan says.
Three out of 12 popular Palestinian news websites display ads using Google technology, compared with 11 out of 12 well-known Israeli news sources, WIRED found. One of the Google spokespeople says the company in late October began notifying websites in the region about a virtual alternative to the mailed PINs, though the option is not stated in public support documentation.
Elsewhere in Ramallah, software development company Mongid stopped offering in-app purchases from an ecommerce app on Google Play and abandoned a YouTube channel with tutorials on using online learning tools because it was too difficult to receive revenue via Google, says CEO Mongid Abu-Baker.
This month, he and two other app developers interviewed by WIRED have been stymied by a new Google Play requirement that all developers get verified by global professional services firm Dun & Bradstreet. Neither the Palestinian territories nor their country code for phone numbers are listed as options on sign-up webpages, and Palestinian developers must seek customer service from Dun & Bradstreet through offices in Israel rather than an Arab country.
Abu-Baker calls the lack of recognition an affront on his identity. “Palestinian companies hold an importance no less significant than any other worldwide,” he says. He downgraded his account to avoid verification and now worries about losing access to some Google Play features.
Efrat Segev, chief of data and product for Dun & Bradstreet in Israel, says hundreds of Palestinian businesses have finished verification over the past two years and that complaints are few but that it is trying to remedy the concerns. Google declined to comment.
The difficulties faced by Abu-Baker and others in Palestine clash with messaging from Google’s leaders in California about its work in the Middle East. Last year, Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat announced that the company would spend $10 million over three years to help Palestinian graduates, developers, and entrepreneurs “advance their digital skills and find employment.” Just weeks before the recent war broke out, Google said it aims to serve 3,500 Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem through the investment.
Asked on stage at a conference this month about Google’s role in contested areas like Gaza, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company can be a critical technology partner. “We don’t see it in the geopolitical context,” he said. “We see it in an enabling context.”
Some Israeli creators, like those in Palestine, feel Google isn’t living up to that. Oren Cahanovitc, owner of the Traveling Israel channel, says videos discussing politics are being flagged by YouTube as not suitable for ads. Corey Gil-Shuster, the Tel Aviv-based creator behind the Ask Project, which interviews Israelis and Palestinians about their views on the conflict, says he’s seen the same pattern.
YouTube’s screening tools can deem videos showing violence or capitalizing on war as inappropriate for advertisers, although partner program participants also get some revenue from paid subscribers to YouTube who don’t see ads. That business, and revenue stream for creators, is growing.
Palestinians lack the opportunity to receive checks from YouTube at all. The Israeli creator Gil-Shuster says the disparity was news to him and that the fix seems clear. “Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, obviously,” he says, “should have equal right to benefit from monetization as anyone else.”
Source : Wired
