Youtube LP General Discussion.

LP General Chat
#41

Lol, it’s cool. I added another url anyway to keep anyone else from getting confused. :3:

Regarding the article: I’ve heard others before talk about the general uselessness of Maker Studios and its ilk. I can’t find it now but Youtube reviewer and former Maker partner Lindsay Ellis has spoken about it before on Twitter. Maker is generally unhelpful and unsupportive even if you’re one of their big clients. If you’re a small- to mid-sized channel you tend to be basically ignored while they take a cut of your revenue. The hands-off approach is double-shady because it not only allows them to collect revenue while not doing a whole lot but also means that whenever one of their clients does something shitty they throw up their hands and say “Don’t look at us! Not our problem!”

#42

I greatly respect the father of LP, slowbeef. He’s a good dude.

3 Likes
#43

that’s basically how MCNs work in general. they buy into volume and then brag about having thousands of channels in their network. if you logic this out, though, how can you as one channel fight for attention among those thousands? it’s, at that point, no different than just being independent, but now someone’s taking a cut of your revenue. And that’s how they thrive. Take a percentage of thousands of channels and it adds up exponentially, even if those individual channels don’t make a whole lot on their own.

on PDP: It’s incredibly callous to make “I wanna make Jew jokes” your hill to die on in today’s climate, there has been a rash of anti-semitic bomb threats being made to Jewish community centers across the country, so much so that the subject has actually made it to a WH press conference. you can’t, I mean you just can’t stoke these flames. it’s fucking irresponsible. i mean… it’s irresponsible! i don’t care what the context is, don’t do it! come up with something else!

these ‘comedians’ aren’t defending the right to make good comedy, they’re defending the right to make lazy comedy, and that’s a pivotal difference. as slowbeef pointed out in their polygon article, offensive humor is not just something you shotgun blast the moment the first idea pops in your head. if you cut corners on comedy, you reap the consequences of those actions. the comedians who have offensive humor in their catalog have worked endlessly refining their jokes. there’s a craft to it. and i think even those comedians, when looking at what’s going on right now, would say “okay that one’s off the table for now”.

anyway… this election has done only one good thing and it’s basically brought out the true colors of a lot of people. i mean, it’s also bad, because it’s pretty much open season, but i’d rather know than not know.

5 Likes
#44

Well DSP had his worst month yet, which makes me wonder if this has happened to other big YouTube let’s players. Just to see if they either packed it in early or waited until they screwed themselves over.

#45

That’s not entirely true. I mean, yes, they are taking some of your revenue, but I joined my MCN (Fullscreen) because I tried handling Youtube monetization by myself and it doesn’t work. It’s been a good 4 or 5 years since I’ve thought about this stuff, but I’m pretty sure Youtube more or less demands to speak to an accredited lawyer who can tell them “Yes, this is all legal, don’t worry.”

It was 100% impossible to get any of my videos monetized when I was independent. One thing I do remember is Youtube demanding written legal permission from everyone involved in production. I think the only video I ever successfully monetized when I was independent was one video I shot myself, in my own home, with my cousin, and I had to submit a PDF file written by my cousin saying he gave consent to be filmed. For a Let’s Play or anything else, that kind of stuff is a nightmare to figure out by yourself.

When you’re with an MCN, all of those headaches go away. For that convenience, I will gladly surrender a small percentage of my earnings to Fullscreen.

Youtube wants to be strictly legal and unless you know how to deal with that you aren’t going to get very far. Or worse: you end up like some channels, like “Videogames Awesome!”, who last I heard were actually permanently banned from monetization and never told why. They handled the monetization independently, and Youtube must’ve found something objectionable and shut them down. No process of appeal, no way to even get in contact with anyone at Youtube. With a MCN like Fullscreen, there’s a better chance that not only will they make sure everything is done by the books, but you have a support network and maybe even a better way to talk to Youtube (through them).

#46

As far as I’m aware, VGA has not been banned from monetizing videos and they’re still independent. There may have been an incident in the past that I’m forgetting, but if there was it was cleared up. Fraser just doesn’t bother counterclaiming anything (especially Nintendo stuff), so they just monetize what they can. He is really cautious of putting all eggs in one basket though, so they have several other means of income beyond ad revenue in case something does happen to them on YouTube.

I doubt YouTube is super strict on demanding legal permission and whatnot for monetization in the past several years because they’re just so big. Just look at the number of channels out there that bootleg videos other people put on YouTube (that are not registered in ContentID), and they’re monetized (surely not through an MCN). Instead, they just care about copyright infringements caught by ContentID.

#47

There was definitely an incident in the past you’re forgetting. I remember this was right around the time I was thinking of turning on monetization for my channel (or I had already applied and been accepted at Fullscreen) when a friend linked me this. He was a huge fan of VGA at the time and was sort of warning me about what I was getting in to.

The next time he talked to me about VGA, he mentioned they were opening a Patreon last year and doing Twitch streams. More recently, I was talking with a different friend about a very similar subject and I brought up the VGA monetization ban, and checked their channel to see that 99% of the stuff they upload are Twitch archives, so I figured those were there for convenience sake and they simply made their money from Twitch and Patreon.

I guess that’s on me, because I never really watched much Videogames Awesome, so I wasn’t up to date on their situation. But there was a ban that happened at some point.

#48

Hbomberguy killin it like usual.

4 Likes
#49

Ah, yeah, I forgot about that. They managed to get YouTube to respond a few months later though; apparently it was a glitch in the system that knocked them off of monetization. Supposedly YouTube didn’t know why it triggered, so they re-enabled monetization. I don’t recall any other story like this one, so it was probably rare and they might have fixed it since 2012.

VGA’s style is just doing streams of games and uploading them to YouTube; the edited playthroughs they did back in the day haven’t been the norm since they started streaming. Although, they are going to bring their actual show, AVG, back this year.

#50

Youtuber Cr1tikal released a video talking about his experiences with Maker.

(Spoiler: they’re not good experiences)

#51

Hearing Cr1tikal talk about that is baffling to me but also not surprising. Buckle in, I’m gonna go in to storyteller mode.

Maker went through two name changes, right. Before they were Maker, they were called Polaris, and before they were called Polaris, they were called The Game Station (TGS). It was 2012 or 2013 when, after multiple Youtube PMs from various MCNs trying to scout my channel to sign me up for monetization, I decided to go ahead and try it out. The Game Station (again, today known as Maker) was the most recent one I had received, about a month prior, and I knew (the brand new, just-launched) Game Grumps were partnered with them, so I decided to apply.

I was new to monetization, I had no idea what was legal or not, and as mentioned earlier in the thread, I had actually tried unsuccessfully to monetize my own stuff directly through Youtube and failed (hence why I was in no rush to monetize through anyone else, because I didn’t think they could do anything about it either).

So, needless to say, I had some questions before I signed up with The Game Station, so I went to their website and found a form to fill out that seemed to be for the press, but I figured I could probably submit something through there and figure out what was up. My questions were pretty simple – I asked about how successful they thought I might be with a video review show, if there was an upload quota (video reviews take me a while to produce) and whether or not they could reverse the fact that Youtube actually blocked me from monetizing several of my existing videos (when I tried to submit monetization credentials myself). All in all, three simple questions.

I hit submit and got a 500 Internal Server Error. Their contact web form wasn’t hooked up properly and I figured it dumped my questions in to the void. Still, I waited to see if maybe something had gone through.

Weeks passed, no response. I tried their website again, asked the same three questions. 500 Internal Server Error. I tried just emailing "webmaster@thegamestation.com" only to have my inbox tell me that my message had bounced because the address didn’t exist. Surely they knew their site was busted, right? Now I had two missions: ask them these questions so I could apply for their MCN, and inform them their web form was broken.

Hmm. If I can’t email them, maybe they have social media? For whatever reason, I couldn’t contact them on Youtube (I can’t remember why, exactly), and they didn’t have a Twitter, but I discovered there was an official The Game Station tumblr account and after some poking around, I figured out a way to send them what Tumblr called “fan mail.” (a feature Tumblr no longer has anymore)

I sent my three questions. The response I got was really confusing; the person on the other end was giving me instructions to log in to a completely different Youtube MCN (the name escapes me) as if I was somebody they had been in contact with. I, obviously, responded not really knowing what they were talking about, when they suddenly clarified: I had been sent the wrong message. What I had received was intended for somebody else on Tumblr.

The person managing this Tumblr account for The Game Station also introduced herself as Holly Conrad. Some of you may know Holly as one of the more famous Commander Shepherd cosplayers from years ago (under the name “Crabcat Industries” I believe), and now she’s apparently married to Ross from Game Grumps/Steam Train. Anyway, I informed her of what was going on with their website and asked if there was a better way to get my questions answered

Holly ended up just giving me the business contact email address for The Game Station and said her bosses would be able to answer my questions. Given what a big deal The Game Station was already becoming, and the fact they were obviously paying for web hosting, I was surprised to find it was just a regular-ass Gmail address (then again, given their site was broken, it was also somewhat understandable).

So, once again, I gathered my three questions and sent them off. I had finally gotten somewhere, now all I had to do was wait for the response. It’d probably be fast, right?

A whole month passed.

I got in contact with Holly again, and asked her if everything was okay. Did she know whether or not they got my email? Was she sure she gave me the right address? She assured me: Yes, that’s the right email address. “They’ve been busy, but they’ll get to you soon.” she told me.

Another month passed. I re-sent my questions with an apology attached for submitting the same message more than once, but I didn’t want to be lost in the fray.

Two more weeks passed. Holly stopped responding to me on Tumblr when I asked her again what was going on.

By now, it had been close to, if not more than three months since I made the decision to sign up with The Game Station. In those three months, I had only ever spoken to a single person who worked there, and now she was blatantly ignoring me.

And, as a reminder, they were the ones who contacted me about the MCN partnership. I was following up on their interest in my channel, only to get stonewalled.

Three months later I got in contact with Fullscreen. They answered my questions within hours, I applied and was instantly accepted.

By the sounds of it, I dodged a bullet by not getting pulled in to this whole Maker Studios mess.

2 Likes
#52

Supposedly Maker is downsizing their userbase (they’ve already dropped around 59,000 channels from their network) to curb these types of issues so they can give their clients more attention. God knows if that’s actually how it’ll turn out, though.

#53

just the thought of them having 59,000 channels itself is insulting as a content creator. why would i ever join a network that had that many people in need of promotion, management, and one on one sessions? it boggles the mind. all we are is a numbers game to these companies.

#54

Well, I mean, to be fair, it is a network. Television networks might only own 5-10 different TV channels, but those also take a supremely large amount of collective effort to produce and manage.

By comparison, there are millions of Youtube accounts generating a literally unwatchable amount of content every single day. I think I did the math, once, and if you watched Youtube 18 hours a day, every day since you were born, it would take you something like 127 years to watch every single video uploaded in just one day. (I don’t remember the exact figure, that’s just me pulling a number out of my ass, but I remember it being similarly gigantic). And yet, for a TV network, we get summer reruns and infomercials on at 3am because it takes them so much time and so many resources to make just one hour of entertainment.

For these MCNs, it’s just a web application you put your information in to, and they run some very basic tests for subscriber numbers (I think Fullscreen’s minimum was 1500 or 2000 when I signed up, and I had more than enough at the time). It’s a super, super low bar to be accepted. And for the network, the 20-30% cut they get of a channel’s profit, even if it’s a small channel, that adds up with every new user that signs up. Why wouldn’t they want vast numbers?

Think about the Steam Marketplace. A lot of people are reselling Counter-Strike weapon skins for under a dollar, and if you figure there’s 100,000 transactions a day, even if Valve gets a $0.10 cut per transaction, that’s still a very non-trivial amount of money. Getting as many users as possible in on that system just means bigger profits.

I think the Polygon article Slowbeef put up spells it out the best: Disney is a company who is typically known for militantly controlling their self-image, and I think they kind of woke up and realized they had connections to tens of thousands of people they didn’t know and probably couldn’t control, so they’re dumping them in favor of people who fit with the House of Mouse’s ideals (and profit margins).

Edit: I couldn’t help but to look this up again. Current Youtube statistics as of February 2017 say that 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. So 432,000 hours a day. Even if you watched the best 1%, it would still take you multiple entire lifetimes to see just a single day’s uploads.

#55

Wow, aside from posts in the LP subforum I hadn’t seen anything by Hbomberguy since his (now disappeared from the internet) Call of Cthulu let’s play from 2009, but this owns and he owns. I feel so enlightened now!

2 Likes
#56

Youtube has rolled out “Restricted Mode” as an option to filter out… some content? Bad content? Unethical content? I don’t know, but I’m curious whether it’s affecting anyone’s channel here in weird ways?

Here’s a screenshot of my recent uploads:

vO0MfXd.jpg1243×856

Now here’s the same thing in “Restricted mode”:

zjD33D0.jpg1240×737

1 Like
#57

So I figure Alien Isolation is filtered since a horror game. Furi I would have thought because it’s violent? But you’ve still got Furi videos in there.

So is Restricted Mode an incredibly bad word filter? I’m super curious on why it’s so shitty.

#58

It has been very indiscriminately restricting LGBTQ+ content and creators regardless of the actual subject matter or content in the videos; putting “gay” in the title of a video is enough for a video to be put behind the wall.

1 Like
#59

Checking on my own channel, Restricted Mode seems to (smartly) hide some gameplay footage of a Doom 2 mod I streamed a couple months ago, as well as a video I did about Resident Evil 7, but it also seems to arbitrarily hide other things.

Like it hides one of the videos I did about an indie game I’m making where you play as Dracula, but not the other. It also hid the stream archive I did of Freedom Planet 2, which is about as harmless as it gets. And then it hid a video where I kinda-sorta get out of bounds in Breath of the Wild.

I think some of it is definitely just a word filter but there seems to be a little more going on than just detecting and blocking words in a video’s title/description. I almost wonder if maybe Youtube’s using their speech-to-text captioning stuff to try and figure out if the video in question involves a sensitive topic and it’s misreading things.

#60

I almost wonder if maybe Youtube’s using their speech-to-text captioning stuff to try and figure out if the video in question involves a sensitive topic and it’s misreading things.

If it’s using it’s own speech to text system then it really shouldn’t. That thing never gets it right and I wouldn’t be surprised it messes up and starts flagging videos incorrectly.

It has been very indiscriminately restricting LGBTQ+ content and creators regardless of the actual subject matter or content in the videos; putting “gay” in the title of a video is enough for a video to be put behind the wall.

That I saw and it’s definitely an incredibly shitty and lazy way to avoid something that may be considered adult content.