In the past several weeks, major advertisers and ad agenices have pulled ads from Google and YouTube in a boycott that was sparked by a Times investigation which found that ads from prominent brands were being displayed alongside extremist content. By some estimates, the boycott could cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone.

In response, Google has promised change, but the truth of the matter is that the problem appears to be even larger than estimated, as practically everywhere observers look, they are finding examples of offensive content being used to serve ads from major brands.

Heat Street, for instance, has detailed how popular toy channels on YouTube targeting parents and children, some with millions of subscribers, are home to bizarre “poop” videos. “The videos feature children, some as old as 10, playing with fake human excrement-sometimes even eating it. Often these videos will wrack up exponentially more views than straight toy videos on the channel,” it writes.

One disturbing video published on a YouTube channel with 4.5 million subscribers and run by a family that has had a book published by Hachette “shows two young girls who appear to mock defecate in a toilet and smear themselves in fake poop. One of the girls even throws a realistic-looking stool at the other girl, who catches it and then drops it on the floor.”

Another channel features even more bizarre and disturbing content, such as a video with the title “POOP EXPLOSION Silicone Baby Doll Poops and Pees Diaper Change Poop Drink and Wet Feeding Baby Video.” The channel is run by a school teacher who says she’s now making so much money from YouTube that she has stopped making toy dolls, ostensibly to focus on her videos.

That money frequently comes from brand advertisers whose ads are displayed with this content.

It’s not that advertisers are intending to be a piggy bank for YouTubers who produce bizarre poop videos. When Heat Street reached out to Dell and Citibank, whose ads were displayed on some of the disturbing videos it identified in its investigation, Dell explained that it “works with our media partners to indicate what types of sites we’d like to be associated with and which sites to block. Unfortunately these sites are proliferating at an accelerated rate and often slip through the cracks.”

Citibank offered a slightly different spin, telling Heat Street, “We have a number of policies and procedures in place for our vendors designed to help prevent our advertising from appearing in connection with inappropriate content. In the rare event that an ad appears on a site with inappropriate or offensive content, we demand its immediate removal.”

The problem for advertisers is that incidences of their ads being displayed with questionable content are anything but “rare.” On platforms like YouTube, it doesn’t take much time to find ads appearing with videos that are offensive by any reasonable measure.

Take, for example, the countless “prank” videos that have proliferated on Google’s crown jewel of video. Many contain content that is objectively violent, sexual, degrading, racist, sexist or just downright disgusting. No brand would reasonably consider this content “brand safe,” but that doesn’t mean their ads aren’t being displayed with it.

Unfortunately, while there are almost certainly steps Google and advertisers can take to deal with some of the most egregious examples of brand-unsafe content, there is a more fundamental problem: the incentives for advertisers and content creators in the digital ad market are totally perverse.

Whether the industry wants to accept it or not, the digital advertising market is currently in a race to the bottom. Content creators are going to extremes, literally and figuratively, to create content that captures eyeballs because…wait for it…advertisers want eyeballs.

To its credit, Google has started to take action. For example, YouTube last week announced that it will now require content creators to rack up 10,000 views on their channels before those channels can participate in YouTube’s partner program, which allows content creators to monetize their videos. But while that will likely help protect content creators from impersonators who steal their content, it’s not clear that it will do much to improve the overall YouTube advertising ecosystem. After all, as Heat Street’s investigation demonstrated, there are content creators whose videos have generated far more than 10,000 views publishing content that no brand advertiser would see value in.

At the end of the day, unless and until advertisers reign in their unhealthy thirst for reach and efficiency at all costs and start forcing content creators and ad platforms to do better, the digital advertising market will continue to be the source of an unpleasant stench and brands will increasingly find that they are on the receiving end of the complaints about it.

Fortunately, advertisers seem to be wising up about content quality and the YouTube boycott suggests that advertisers may have finally reached a breaking point. But if they expect meaningful change, they will need to continue to put pressure on content creators and digital ad giants like Google because the out of control situation will not be fixed in a matter of weeks or even months.

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