YouTube has suspended adverts on videos by Russell Brand after the comedian was accused of rape and sexual assault.
The Google-owned company said it had suspended the monetisation of Brand’s channel for “violating our Creator Responsibility policy”.
It comes after four women made sexual abuse allegations against the star between 2006 and 2013 as part of an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches.
Brand, 48, denies any allegations against him. He claimed in a video posted online on Friday night that all his relationships have been “consensual”.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “If a creator’s off-platform behaviour harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community.
“This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand.”
Brand’s YouTube channels – the largest of which has more than six million subscribers – remain on the platform, but his videos no longer feature adverts.
The comedian found fame in the early 2000s on the stand-up circuit and as a host of shows including Big Brother’s Big Mouth, before starring in Hollywood films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and presenting a show on BBC Radio 2.
However, in recent years, he has switched to wellness coaching and producing regular YouTube videos – from which he is thought to derive much of his income.
Technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker told Sky News that Brand could earn anything between $70,000 (£57,000) and $1m (£810,000) in advertising revenue each year from his YouTube videos.
“That is a huge differential between the lower band and the upper band and that is because, often these things are quite transparent, but fundamentally whenever you watch a YouTube video, and you see a little advert before or during the video, the creator shares in around half of the income that comes from that,” he said.
Brand maintains a presence on Rumble – a video site popular with some conservatives and far-right groups – where his channel has 1.4m followers.
However, he has not posted since his denial video on Friday.
Brand also has social media pages, including X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has more than 11m followers.
