Addendum on YouTube

As long as we are in a timeframe where we are focused on YouTube, we should talk about the things going on with it right now.

Google is getting weird with YouTube

Right now YouTube is going through the "Adpocalypse" where they have been cutting advertising revenue on certain channels, forcing the affected people to get into the e-begging circus of Patreon, always living in the shadow of Chapo Trap House, the podcast that brings in the most money on the service. That situation has been going on since February and it's now become "the new normal." Business Insider pointed out in 2015 that Google (or Alphabet, Inc. to be exact now) made no real money off of YouTube, and that issue hasn't changed. It is really expensive to run a video storage/streaming website, and YouTube has a number of issues, as this Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) video points out while also nailing the new site VidMe*:

This annoying SEO/Internet branding stuff has become a big deal because YouTube corporate is now seeing itself as this Internet version of a premier cable network (!) and they want everything to be "advertiser friendly", so they have created things like "restricted modes" while not increasing the levels of severity and other settings ("granularity"). YouTube has a massive problem in who "the face" of the site is; Felix  Kjellberg, aka Pewdiepie, who became a millionaire playing video games on YouTube and is now screwing that up because he likes making Nazi jokes and saying racist statements while livestreaming. Jim Sterling  discusses these issues from an insider's perspective in this video (forward it to 8:28):

.....And he's totally right, because we've never had Internet video before, we have no true historical precedents - thus the probability of regulation becomes a thing and YouTube videos will wind up with a system like movie or TV ratings....all overseen by 'bots because Alphabet, Inc. is too cheap to hire humans in America or elsewhere to look over stuff because allegedly a thousand terabytes of data hit YouTube's servers a day, and they would be forced to hire an army of video watchers.

Where is this going?

I have nary a clue, much like Stuart Ashen talking about his YouTube career.....YouTube might just be sold off in the end because the upkeep is just too damned expensive and any ad revenue will never cover operations. That is the downfall of having advertising pay for platforms and websites, and having lived through the rise and fall of the "New Economy", I can easily see this version of the Internet go under.

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* I've seen a lot of people from the Channel Awesome ghetto use VidMe as an alternate space to keep videos online and under their control that YouTube flagged or removed outright (their most ancient way of dealing with "problem videos") which is why Brad Jones ("The Cinema Snob") has a channel there, as does Bennett White ("Anime Abandon") and so do others....Todd Nathanson ("Todd in the Shadows") uses Vimeo for the same trick. All to hedge a bet that robots at YouTube will take down videos sooner or later.

We broke the 100,000 view mark at the beginning of this month, right now we are sitting at 102,016 views! Thanks to all our readers around the world!

                               Above: Every separate IP that has looked at this blog.