Why I'll always skip Youtube ads at 10:26 AM

 

We're coming in hot!

 

You know, I've been using Youtube for over 10 years.  To some of you who are younger, for whom Youtube has always been Youtube from after Google buying it, it may seem that Youtube has not changed all that much in a decade. And indeed there's still many things that are basically unchanged.

Yes, this is where you put in the jokes about the comments section.

And I'm not here to lament that it went from a  social network (I had "Youtube Friends") to something that tries to sell you Batman and Robin when you look up clips of it. If YT us is now a service then YT is now a service and there's no fighting back against that.

With that said, if Youtube is a service, then we judge it as a service. Here's the service: You browse through  the millions of vids, find one you like,  click and the video plays. There's channels native to Youtbe providing original content, there's officially hosted preexisting content suppliers, and there's "guy at home trying to get you to help him steal superman." varieties of quality. You can rent or I think buy movies for Youtube, you can..."find" movies on Youtube, you can find somebody who hosted just that good clip from that good show or movie.

There might be some ads, too. 

 

Now, skipping ads is something I generally did not do...because I used my internet browser to watch YT instead of  the dedicated app, so I did not get ads. I didn't do it for that reason, I just thought Google had enough control of our lives that I should also be using their app for something I could see on the internet. I considered it a failure on their part not to put ads in the browser, and no, I wasn't gonna reward their failure by watching it in their app.

But I understood that watching this ads helped  Creators, so if ads ever played I did not skip them, because I knew at least there was a solid chance Lewis Louhaug or Phelan Porteus or Lindsay Ellis or Larry Bundy or Bob Chipman might see some money from it. I know how this works, a single view is /nothing/ but little by little you fill the cart, as my momma used to say.

I did not like the ads. I don't remember ever seeing a Youtube ad  that made me want what it was selling. And while I might have tolerated them, there where certainly ones that crossed some lines. Like I like you guys, but I'm not watching 20 minutes of Prager U just to watch 8 minutes of you. I do not like you THAT much, I don't think I like ANYBODY that much.

 

But it was understood that watching the ads was broadly good for Youtubers and skipping them, I assumed, sent some kind of virtual signal to YT HQ that you weren't ENGAGING with the ads. When you saw that ad you knew you where doing your part.

Unless Youtube chose to just give all that money to somebody who  claimed the copyrights of the work. 

Yes indeed, YT has been notorious for years by handling  copyright disputes by just  putting  the ads and giving the entire winnings of that video to whoever claims owns some copyrighted material in it, even if the material is 10 seconds long and the "owner" can't prove it owns anything. This happened to me recently, as a midi of the first 30 seconds  of Smoke in the water was met with offers to just put some ads in there and give the money to Deep Purple, or delete the clip.

I am not allowed to monetize my own channel. I used to , but YT changed the rules so that you had to have a lot of views to monetize. So I'm not allowed to put ads for my own gain. If you see ads in my videos just skip them, it's just money going to some company. It does not support me. 

This Partnership can't be held together.

So watching the ads supports creators unless it doesn't and they don't even let you know, either. They don't let you know you might be putting up with these garbage ads for nothing. Depending on the content you're watching there's a solid chance that money is going straight to nobody related to the video.

And lately there's been a lot more ads, if you've noticed. That's because Youtube recently rolled out a policy where they're just gonna be monetizing unmonetized content for themselves, off of the people they don't allow to monetize because it "just didn't get enough views" before. They're putting ads in just old videos or videos of clips of shows, and you can't even know if the money is going to Fox or themselves.

So that's Youtube as a service: Where your video you made for fun in 2010 is now making anybody money but you. What's where "prosumers" went. So if you aren't skipping the ads because it might support the creators, remember that there's a solid change it isn't. Like, imagine one of those  "antipiracy nags about how  15,000 people worked in this film" and then there's an asterisk like "*and some of them might have even been paid! Who knows? Well not YOU, that's for sure."

Personally on my end   I'm always gonna skip, and if I can't skip I'll refresh the page. Maybe it won't be always, maybe sometimes I'll be to busy, but I'll do it when I can. Pretty much  all my favorite creators all have said YT barely gives them money anyway, and they're all on Patreon at this point.  Supporting authors is a nice sentiment, which is why those who exploit authors always have  that one up their old sleeve. They'll then say supporting them is supporting creators.

And no, I don't think I'm important enough to tip the scales of YT with an "ad boycott" that will force it to treat it's creators fairly. I'm just one guy. But if it's all the same, this one guy isn't  putting up with more Manscaped ads until you give me a reason. 

See? I can change my terms as well.

Everything goes with Tito El Mambino...especially Resident Evil. at 5:18 PM

#WTFU Watch: In the defense of Youtube at 7:55 AM

There is a saying in my country that goes: The rope always snaps at it's thinnest. It is meant to say that, those that are least empowered are always the most likely to feel the negative effects in any situation. I'll come back to that.

Doug "Nostalgia Critic" Walker has apparently set the online world on fire with his simple request that Youtube handle reinvent the system by which it judges copyrighted content  and fair use, which is to say it doesn't, and it's rife with abuse and completely lacking a human component.

And I agree with it. All of it. Youtube needs to reform it's system. They've got the money for it. But let's be fair to Youtube.

Copyright laws as they are, thanks to the Digital Millenium  Copyright Act, make Youtube responsible for it's user submitted content. It was designed to prod hosting websites to police copyrighted content on their sites, or face steep, steep fines.


Copyright is supposed to produce innovation, but lot's of elements of  current copyright are doing the opposite, trampling the innovations and formats of the internet to serve old models and those with a stake on them. That's not just ME saying that.

The American government commissioned a Task Force to investigate how to make copyright do more what it's supposed to. It took them 3 years and millions of dollars to make a series of recommendations that I could have told you for the meager ad revenue it would bring me: that steep fines encourage copyright trolling and chill innovation. That Remix culture need to be let breath.

However, that's not the recommendations they are planning to act on. They know their copyright system is broken, and the only way to fix it is FORCE EVERY NATION ON THE EARTH TO ADOPT THE SAME BROKEN SYSTEM. So we can all be even in our wrongness.

Youtube needs to revise the ways it handles  copyrighted material on it's site, yes. I completely agree with that. For one, the algorithm that detects the content should  take into consideration amount, and there should be penalties for fake and malicious claims, and Youtube should request that only the owner of the content, verified, can make a claim. It should definitively not be telling me a public domain movie belongs to someone else. But it is not a coincidence that Youtube's system is broken, when they are also under a very broken copyright law system.

I mean, let's face it, Youtube isn't the only  website with user submitted content out there. Practically all social networks work like that, and while it is entirely possible someone could upload illegal content, or just content they wouldn't have on their site at all, you don't see THEM going to this level.

Somebody once flagged me for pornography on Facebook. It was a drawing of Lady Deathstrike fighting Tiffany Lords.

It got looked at pretty fast, it was determined it was NOT pornography, and we all moved on.  Is it any harder for YT? I would think the user base of Facebook is even larger (1.19 billion) and much more likely to put unwanted content than in Youtube (1 billion ), were many users aren't even uploading anything, just watching.  But they don't sweat it. You don't see takedowns like in Youtube. There's people in there.



I'm not trying to let Youtube off the hook. But this bigger than  Doug Walker not getting payed, or me not being able to show my stupid video in Germany. This is bigger than that. This is the very reason we need to reform our copyright system in a way that makes sense for everyone in the now, not just  big entertainment companies in the mid 70's. I made Limited Times , this very blog, precisely to address this kind of issue and to bring it to light.

The rope always does break at the thinnest. Big Entertainment wants laws that make other people (I.E. Government and  Web Hosting sites)carry out a defense of IT'S copyrighted work, when that's clearly their own responsibility. Youtube isn't gonna take the exaggerated cost of carrying out a copyright defense of Doug Walker's video's on court. Rope's gotta break somewhere.

So yes, I support #WTFU . But I also support #Copyrightreform, which is something we desperately need, and we've needed for a long time. It's something I've been championing on a blog for a while.


I look forward to how this turns out. But regardless, remember that this didn't start now. This didn't start when Google bought Youtube. This is the results of years of wrongheaded  mishandling of the very idea of copyright. It needs to be dealt with at it's core, as a nation.