New YouTube Policies

Have you guys heard about the new YouTube policies? Most of the smaller channels are having their videos flagged for copyright violations.

I hate copyright BS. The laws behind all this crap are outdated.

Fastmav347 wrote:

Have you guys heard about the new YouTube policies? Most of the smaller channels are having their videos flagged for copyright violations.

I run a small YouTube channel that's currently not partnered and thankfully, hasn't been smacked around by this stuff because I don't run trailers and mostly cover retro games. This is a complex issue so strap in, this is going to be long.

There's a lot of speculation going on right now because as usual, YouTube dropped a system-breaking change without telling anyone and is sitting silent about it. It's unfortunately complicated to explain. Basically, you've heard about YouTubers who make money (and in some cases, a living) off their channels? They do that by becoming "YouTube partners", which allows them to run ads on their videos and take a piece of that revenue. The bigger your channel is, the more you make. My channel is a YouTube partner and it's a massive hassle. You earn almost nothing per view (my channel's been partnered for several months and I've earned less than $10, they don't pay out until you hit $50) and YouTube only promotes channels that are already popular at the expense of everything else so it's very hard to get noticed to make real money.

If you're lucky and manage to build a base audience, you can also get partnered with a Multi-Channel Network or MCN. MCNs are organisations that are officially sanctioned by YouTube and which represent groups of channels under their banner. The supposed benefits of them is that they can offer their own revenue splits (which are often better than the 60/40 YouTube offers), promotion methods and other tools and benefits to their partners. Key among these is that MCN partners get to skip YouTube's automated copyright review process.

When I post a video on my channel right now, YouTube's automated system checks it to see if the footage doesn't violate any copyrights. It's a useless tool and whether you get approved is completely random. Most of my videos do but some won't for no reason (you're never told why.) If I upload them again, they'll often sail right through. If a video is not approved, they will not let you monetise it unless you can provide proof that you have written permission to do so. Even if you can provide this proof, the manual re-review can take days, week or in some cases, never happen. I have two videos where I did have permission to use the game footage (one explicit, one Fair Use) and I appealed. One of these was uploaded in July and it's still "Under Review." Even if it gets approved, only future views generate money for me. All the views up to this point, I worked for free essentially. I've been trying to get a partnership with an MCN for a long time now and none of them will accept me because I'm not popular enough. None of them ever tell you how to get yourself more popular, they just deny you. My struggle with that's another story.

The big problem now is two fold, YouTube and the MCNs. MCNs are supposed to be directly responsible for the channels under them. That is, they vouch for you to YouTube. Copyright issues, improper content issues, other disputes, they are supposed to be there as the middlemen and back up their channels. The problem is, MCNs got greedy and started abusing the system YouTube put in place. Instead of focusing on nurturing a core group of channels, many of them started sub networks and offering partnerships to just about anyone, no matter how small they were. We're talking channels half the size of mine and I'm miniscule. These channels were often run by naive kids who agreed to very exploitative contracts because they didn't know better. Most of these channels make only a few hundred dollars a month at best but some of these networks were scooping up 20,000+ channels each. Those small amounts add up fast. The problem is these networks don't have the resources to properly support all these tiny channels under their umbrellas. So in the same vein as the blog post I linked above, only the big guys get supported. The little guys (and even some of the medium guys) pretty much are giving the MCN a big cut of their money for absolutely nothing. The one big bright spot was the getting around YouTube's copyright review. If you were with a network, every video you put up was monetised without question. That's the biggest reason people partnered up and it's the main reason I wanted to get with a network. I don't care that much about the money. I'd like my channel to not cost me money but I have no desire to make it a job.

All that changed this week. Because of the massive abuse of the system by MCNs, YouTube's changed the rules. MCNs now have to designate their partners as "Managed" or "Affiliates". Simply put, the big guys get Managed, everyone else gets Affiliate. The theory is that the MCNs have to completely vouch for their Managed partners and are more accountable for their actions than they were before. Affiliates have less of this accountability. The thing is, if you're Affiliate, you now have to go through the copyright review process. That basically means 90% of channels have lost the one major benefit MCNs still provided them. Of course, the majority of MCNs are not letting people out of their contracts, despite this massive change and the fact that most small channels are now paying a substantial chunk of their money for basically nothing in return.

What happened is that when YouTube flipped the switch on this, a ton of automated copyright claims all hit at once, in some cases wiping out the revenue streams of entire channels. This is where YouTube/Google's responsibility in this mess kicks in. When a video is flagged later after initially being approved, it can either be taken down or can stay monetized but the revenue split goes between YouTube and the channel to YouTube and the claimant. In other words, if a game publisher says your video infringes, it can stay up and YouTube still gets their money, you just lose your money and the publisher gets it. The problem is, YouTube's system for doing this is so broken and has no little oversight that many videos got flagged because of random claimants who have no ownership of the content whatsoever. Numerous game publishers came out and said "We are not initiating these claims, please dispute them." In many cases, the stuff being disputed isn't even game footage but music used in the game, which is usually contested by some nebulous licensing company that no one's heard of. In some cases, claims are being made outright fraudulently by scumbags who are trying to scam as much undeserved money off of this as they can before they get caught.

The problem is, YouTube's broken system is allowing this to happen. Any scumbag can file a claim, they have to provide no proof and the channels are guilty until proven innocent. Disputing a claim takes forever (if it even works at all) and when a claimant is proven to be false or fraudulent, nothing happens to them. They don't have to give back any money they got and didn't earn, they don't get forbidden from making future claims, no legal action is brought against them. The claim is just switched off and that's it. Meanwhile, some people who have been making a comfortable (but well-earned) living on YouTube for 2-3 years have had their livelihoods wiped out and as stated above, if you aren't TotalBiscuit, PewDiePie or something of their level, the MCNs are leaving you twisting in the wind. But even some still big guys like Angry Joe (who I can't stand but whatever) have been screwed too. He had all his biggest, most viewed videos claimed yesterday.

As you can see, there's a lot more to this than what's being reported in the mainstream press. I really like a lot of the big YouTubers but I've been very disappointed in how they're discussing it too. Most of them are sitting in their Managed positions of privilege going "Well this sucks but you guys knew it had to be coming some day." They're trying to place all the place on YouTube and not the MCNs who are frankly ripping off thousands of content creators. But they're the big guys who get protected so of course "Networks are amazing! You guys are all just bitter!" Overall, it's a really sh*tty situation. The MCNs were scumbags, YouTube let them do it for too long and now they've changed the rules and the only people getting screwed are the actual content creators, without whom there would be no YouTube. The scummy MCNs got their money, YouTube's getting its money, the fraudsters claiming content they don't own are getting their money, the only people suffering are the channels themselves.

There are a lot of people angry about this and a lot of them make a lot of money for YouTube. If they decide to stop producing content or go somewhere else (make no mistake, if some of the biggest channels got together, they could raise capital and start their own thing), it's going to hurt YouTube a lot. The partner program was invented because YouTube was bleeding money and some people say that it's still not profitable for Google. If a bunch of people leave, it's going to suck. YouTube ultimately has the power to fix this. They created MCNs, they can reform them to be fair. They can alter how they handle incoming copyright claims and lobby harder to change the broken laws. If they don't, their time will come.

TotalBiscuit's put out a video on the matter. I still don't think he's putting nearly enough burden on the MCNs who frankly are the reason a lot of this crap is happening because he doesn't want to piss off his own but beyond that, it's a good perspective on things.

Thanks for dropping a load of perspective on this, PXA. You really think a few channels could go off and start their own video site and do real damage to YouTube's dominance? I know the audience of some of the channels is pretty big, but within the video game space isn't there a lot of subscriber overlap between channels? (PewDiePie's 17M + Toby's 5M ≠ 22M uniques) Is this corner of the market a big enough piece of YouTube's business that it would make a difference?

Lots of videos on this.

Adam

Joe

Boogie

My video here
http://www.youtube.com/audio?video_r...
has an Ian Anderson song in the background. It was flagged and I acknowledged that the song had this in it.

Now when you click the Audio butotn when viewing it I see this message

We detected your video has copyrighted audio that may affect its availability. You can fix this by removing a song below

and under the video

Ads may appear on your video due to the presence of this song. Removing this song may remove ads from your video

It gives me the option to remove the song and on the right side a list of songs, I suppose I am able to replace it with.

Thing is, if I remove the song I expect my vocals will also disappear?

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7779045/youtube-audio.JPG)

Boogie is damn good at this stuff. I don't like his Francis character but when he steps out of that...damn. Angry Joe is well...yeah. I get why he's so pissed off but he's directing his anger at the wrong places, or at least partially. And he doesn't at all understand how Fair Use works in the real world. But I get his general sentiment and I feel for him.

psoplayer wrote:

Thanks for dropping a load of perspective on this, PXA. You really think a few channels could go off and start their own video site and do real damage to YouTube's dominance? I know the audience of some of the channels is pretty big, but within the video game space isn't there a lot of subscriber overlap between channels? (PewDiePie's 17M + Toby's 5M ≠ 22M uniques) Is this corner of the market a big enough piece of YouTube's business that it would make a difference?

I honestly don't know what they'd do or if it would work. But I could see them trying. Almost all the top channels on YouTube that aren't VEVO (i.e. the record labels) are gaming related. These guys make millions between them and if even a couple of them banded together and asked for meetings with venture capitalists, they would get them. The little guys are going to get people away from YouTube and this garbage, the big guys are. If they all leave, there's a massive void created. Whether or not it happens remains to be seen but I guarantee you, it's being talked about.

It looks like classic game room has started its own website and is only using YouTube as a promotional video for the ones on the website.

I've seen a few channels or shows do this. I think they share a few problems. Having the videos on their own site is good but they should have it on another site also. Most aren't getting 10% of the views they get from youtube. They don't give direct links to the video. Some of the sites are poorly organized.

I think the negatives might drive the subscriptions down.

Google. Man, those guys.

YouTube has been descending into the toilet for a while. Search is useless because of blatant and unrestrained keyword abuse. The broken video thumbnail system now have everyone putting skimpily dressed women as thumbnails for videos of any kind.