Manufacturing Cruelty: Macaques Exploited by Content Farms for Profit in Vietnam

Exploiting animals for money is a dark consequence of developing nations like Vietnam rushing to profit from the global digital economy. With Vietnam’s digital sector reaching US$43 billion by 2025, companies are eager to profit from foreign viewership, catering to demands regardless of ethical concerns. To reduce the scale of exploitation, netizens and digital platforms need to exert effective pressure on the revenue of these companies.

In this video, a baby macaque in baby clothes bathes another with a toy shower in a dollhouse-sized bathroom — an unnatural, man-made scenario highly distressing for both. In two other videos, baby macaques eat lollipops and cookies in a miniature living room. Such sugary treats disrupt their natural eating habits, causing long-term health issues like diabetes. Another video shows a baby macaque, motionless with hazy eyes, being “put to bed” — a likely sign of drug-induced sedation.

These videos are part of a broader trend of mass-produced, monetised animal content on platforms like YouTube. This pattern of content creation has drawn the attention of fans and detractors alike from as early as 2022. Companies like Future Media — a Vietnam-based “content farm” specialising in mass-produced videos ranging from cartoons to animals — are key players in this industry of exploitation for profit.

Future Media’s website boasts over 30 million subscribers across 50 YouTube channels. A significant portion comes from animal-focused channels like “KUDO ANIMAL KIKI” and “Animal Monkey Rio”.

Manufacturing Cruelty

Figure 1: Screenshot of YouTube Channel “KUDO ANIMAL KIKI”

These channels upload multiple videos daily featuring infant macaques trained to perform human-like behaviours on camera, often under duress. This includes wearing baby clothes, eating junk food, interacting with toys or small animals like ducklings, and walking bipedally as a child would. Scenarios are often recycled with slight variations (for example, eating ice cream from a truck or machine) to maximise content output. The videos are given attention-grabbing titles with search-optimised keywords like “baby”, “funny”, and “cute” and then paired with colourful thumbnails and playful sounds. This strategy attracts and engages children, prompting YouTube’s auto-play system to recommend more videos from the content farm.

The channels are registered in the US to maximise revenue. This is because YouTube’s Revenue per Mille (RPM) — a metric that helps content creators measure their channels’ earnings per 1,000 views — greatly favours US-based channels. This setup also allows the content farms to earn US dollars rather than the depreciating Vietnamese dong, significantly boosting their revenue and profits.

Thus, the financial incentive fuelling such content is substantial. KUDO ANIMAL KIKI alone has over 3 million subscribers and 276 million views on YouTube. Under YouTube’s existing monetisation system, this generates an estimated US$14,700 to US$44,100 in average monthly revenue — excluding earnings from sister channels re-uploading content. For Future Media and its contemporaries, this outweighs any ethical concerns.

… balancing effective moderation with creative freedom is essential to providing entertaining content while also protecting vulnerable audiences.

By dressing macaques in baby clothes and feeding them candies and fried foods, these videos mislead viewers — especially children — into believing such practices constitute proper animal care. Their popularity also normalises exotic animals as house pets, fuelling worldwide demand for their trafficking and sale.

YouTube’s moderation policies have failed to curb this form of animal exploitation. Previously, pressure from netizens and NGOs led to the removal of explicit instances of animal abuse, such as YouTube channels posting staged rescues where animals are deliberately put into dangerous scenarios for videos. However, YouTube’s automated moderation systems, trained primarily to detect explicit violence, struggle to identify videos showcasing subtle exploitation, especially when said videos receive positive engagement from viewers who regard the content as endearing.

The concerns surrounding the animals in these videos have not gone unnoticed. Several prominent YouTubers have criticised these content farms, contributing to increased scrutiny and criticism from netizens. This was accompanied by a call to action to report the content farms’ channels to YouTube’s moderation team. Since then, Future Media has removed its monkey-related channels from its public portfolio.

Damning Evidence

Figure 2: Future Media’s YouTube Portfolio in July 2024 vs March 2025

However, this is a superficial change. Channels like KUDO ANIMAL KIKI still upload content twice a day. The exploitation remains profitable and continues unabated. Despite Vietnam’s animal cruelty laws, content farms evade legal action by registering their YouTube channels in the US, exploiting jurisdictional gaps and the lack of a global framework for cross-border enforcement against animal cruelty. Moreover, existing protections focus on livestock and conventional pets. 

Because this exploitation thrives on profitability, combatting it requires closing gaps in YouTube’s moderation with nuanced manual oversight. This can be done by working with animal behaviour experts to identify and demonetise channels engaging in subtle forms of abuse that skirt the line between ill-treatment and proper care. It would be similar to Google’s collaboration with social service groups to serve as ‘Community Partners’ to remove videos harmful to children. Netizens can also pressure YouTube to act against these content farms by urging advertisers to pull their advertisements from the platform, threatening revenue loss. Both approaches damage the profit incentive for such content, greatly diminishing the scale of exploitation.

However, vetting everything is unrealistic — YouTube processes over 500 hours of video footage per minute. Even so, demonetising and removing the larger channels of these content farms would still significantly reduce the monetary incentive to create such videos, as building a large YouTube audience takes significant time and effort. It would also limit the visibility of their sister channels, which depend on algorithm-driven recommendations from the main channel.

Moreover, balancing effective moderation with creative freedom is essential to providing entertaining content while also protecting vulnerable audiences. Including wildlife experts in the moderation process who balance animal welfare with entertainment and education, such as zookeepers, can ensure YouTube hosts engaging, child-friendly animal videos promoting proper animal care practices.

The mass production of exploitative animal videos thrives in Vietnam due to gaps in YouTube’s policies. However, a concerted effort of stricter vigilance and the threat of demonetisation can help dismantle this industry.

2025/132