Greetings, fellow humans, Today, I would like to take a few moments to talk about the infamous YouTube #adpocalypse. Yeah yeah, I know it's a trite topic, but I would like to share my two copper coins from the perspective of a small aspiring YouTuber. Or content creator. Or video maker, or however you wish to call it. This post will be the first part of a trilogy. In this post, I will introduce myself and explain how this has affected me. In my next post, I will explain exactly why I am displeased, and why you should care. And in the season finale, I will explain what could have been done better, as well as what we, as content creators or viewers, can do about this. tl;dr for the benefit of those who aren't yet aware of what it is: Some advertisers got mad that their ads were being shown on videos with allegedly questionable content, and pulled their ads out of YouTube. As such, YouTube has recently been coming down hard on videos that may or may not be "unsuitable for all advertises". If that was all there was to it, it wouldn't be a big deal. However, what is most shocking and unacceptable is that they use an automated bot that seems to flag videos for no reason! This has resulted in several content creators reporting significant damage to their income. Allegedly, "unsuitable" videos receive approximately 5% of the earnings they would have earned if they they were "suitable" (citation needed). Can you possibly survive eating 5% of the food you are currently eating everyday? But enough about the situation, lets talk about me. I have been on YouTube since 2011, and have been making videos about games. You can see my YouTube channel here. As you can see, nothing impressive. I can't even claim the few dollars I earned, as it is below the minimum $100 threshold required to cash out. I am indeed a small YouTuber. Granted, my low revenue might be due to the fact that I refuse to have skippable pre-video ads, but that is my own decision; skippable ads are annoying for me, and I'm sure it's probably the same for my viewers as well. So why exactly am I concerned about this, and how does this affect me? Can gaming videos even be offensive to advertisers? Apparently, YouTube's algorithms seem to think so. Note: Although these videos are arranged in chronological order, they were not necessarily deemed "unsuitable" in that same order. Although you can request a manual review, they will only look at it once you have 1,000 views within the past 7 days. Due to the nature of my gaming channel, I tend to have many videos with a few views each, so that's not going to happen... I think that anyone could tell based on the titles and thumbnails that these videos are clearly not immoral. But lets take a closer look at the videos, just to be sure. First in line, my B3 solo in spirit lunia, from better days before everything went FUBAR and all the bugs came and never got fixed for over six months... ahhh nostalgia. But we aren't here to reminisce about the old days, so lets get on with the explanation. This was my first video to be hit by the "unsuitable algorithm". It actually happened quite some time ago, and was in fact manually confirmed to be unsuitable. I thought that it was just one video. But no. This is the beginning of the end, a slow descent down the slippery slope... Let's move on to the next videos, shall we?
Suddenly, two of my gameplay videos of Dungeon Fighter Online got hit by "the unsuitable". Why even? It makes no sense. I have recorded my runs of other dungeons on this class as well. I've also recorded these dungeons as other classes. Why were these two videos singled out? An explanation would be nice, but as we all know, that's not going to happen... Perhaps, one might argue that even something such as video game violence is unacceptable. Even if that's so, I'd like to see an explanation for this one getting "unsuitabled". It is literally just a 40 second video of me claiming and showing my rewards after sending two of my characters on a dispatch. The only thing to see is the game GUI (Graphical User Interface). Is anyone offended by GUI? But the most ridiculous one of all, was this. This is literally just a stationary image of one of the game's loading screens, in which a train is depicted, and the game's instrumental OST. Is anyone offended by trains? Well I guess they would be, if the trains they were on kept breaking down frequently despite being told that said trains were three times more reliable than they were five years ago... but clearly that isn't the case here. I liek trains. To me, this was the last straw. But wait! There's more! Soon after, some of my other videos faced the same cruel fate.. :( A full list of my affected videos can be found here. The actual list of affected videos will probably increase while I'm away from YouTube if I don't come back to update it I guess... How badly was I affected? It's hard to tell with a low viewer count like mine, but I think the graph speaks for itself; my non-existent revenue is dropping. By my estimation, if you look at the peaks of the graph, my revenue is down by approximately 50%. Give or take a few percent because I only have approximate knowledge of many things, and am too lazy to math it.
Obviously, I am displeased at everything that is going on. In my next post, I will explain why, and it's not just about the money. Stay tuned for more details!
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I'm an Ash. Archives
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Airi's Album (airi-nyan.weebly.com) Self taught artist. Feel free to contact her for commissions! MoeyyAS's GitHub (github.com/moeyyas) Computer programming expert. |