Friday, March 23, 2018

Trying To Figure Out The Post-Google/YouTube World

I spent a bit of time today trying to figure out what the post Google/YouTube world is going to look like for me.  It's not really clear, yet, but here are some ramblings.

YouTube:  I have one real gun video up there,  cutting the fire control pocket on my 80% AR.  The name of the file isn't likely to attract attention, but the description specifically says that's what it is: "A short segment of milling the fire control pocket on an AR-15 lower receiver. The mill is a CNC Sherline/A2Z CNC mill under control of Mach3."  I suspect that they're going to delete it. 

This isn't about "monetization" that drove guys like Hickok45 over to Full30.  Taken at the literal word of what they're saying, any or all of the firearm companies will be gone on April 1st, or soon thereafter.  I subscribe to Springfield Armory, Sig Sauer, and Savage;  the "black letter" text of YouTube's policy says those company sites will be gone.  My AR-15 video has 9567 views in seven years, so it's not exactly viral (but it's not exactly exciting, either).  I think it's safe to say nobody involved, from me to YouTube to anyone in the universe, made a fraction of a penny off that video. 

What bothers me the most about YouTube is that they're going to stop being a source of information on how to take down new guns, reloading, or anything related to the vast majority of things to learn about guns.  It's not just that they're removing all references to hobbies or interests they disapprove of, it's that they're definitely "othering" us.

What YouTube is doing is nothing new for YouTube or media in general.  No Lawyers - Only Guns and Money links to a good column by Jim Scoutten on The Shooting Wire with some good perspectives on this.  Take my video with a dinky 9500 views.  He points out some stats on the very high quality "Night of the SAINT" video series Springfield Armory produced for the product release of their SAINT AR-15.
One major firearms company commissioned a reality series of episodes, with a group of selected women competing in physical and firearms challenges.  It was nicely, and expensively, produced and might well have made a successful TV show.

But in one full year of promotion of the series through Internet advertising placement, the viewership of the seven episodes has averaged a hair over 6,900 interested watchers.  Not 69,000 that might be the household reach of an outdoor category television show in a single airing, and definitely not Internet viral, matching the millions of views of the latest cat video on YouTube.

What happened?  The unseen “algorithms” apparently detected “Guns" and suppressed viewership.
His most relevant point might be this:
The major broadcast and cable channels have prohibited any form of firearm advertising for years.  25 years ago we struggled with ESPN in the first year of our gun show series when Colt was a sponsor, but couldn’t advertise their guns.  Since then we’ve moved three times to new networks as each was taken over by anti-gun New York City-based owners. We’re pleased to make our television home now on the pro-second amendment Outdoor Channel.
So do I take down my 25 videos and tell YouTube to take a hike?  That will break every embedded link I have here.  Then where do I put those videos?  Only one fits on a gun video site; the other 24 are machine tool related.  I have no particular reason to take down those 24 videos except that I dislike YouTube as a company for how they're punishing us for the actions of a psycho.  Who's the number two video site: Vimeo?  Which then flows to the bigger point: where do I go for videos on things like fixing a printer, or replacing a window.  YouTube has done both of those for me over the years. Vimeo appears more interested in art than that. 

What about Blogger?  I just had my 8th anniversary, so there's a lot to move.  I need to look into finding a hosting service.  I don't care about a lot of features that a business might want to have because I'm not a business.  I need a blog with an email address and a place to host a couple of gigs of old postings.  

Without Blogger and YouTube, I'll have virtually zero interaction with Google. 

The rest of the companies to avoid or encourage is still too unsettled for me to know if it's all done.  Dick's is out, but I haven't been there since the last time they got stupid about ARs; I don't have a Citi card; I think Visa was good, Bank of America was stupid; don't rent a car from the major chains, but I have trouble keeping them straight.  It's getting hard to figure out which businesses are opposed to freedom and which ones are OK. 


18 comments:

  1. The CIA has turned Youtube, Google, etc. into fascist captive state businesses like national airlines. A few national businesses are standouts, like Air Canada. But most are like Amtrak.

    The gun culture is not a minority. Therefore, Youtube is not "othering" the gun culture, because you can't other a majority.

    Which group would you want to end up with on a desert island? The CIA, which produces nothing good, or the gun culture? And yet you are on a desert island. Planet Earth is an economic island with 7 billion residents, surrounded by uninhabitable vacuum.

    Without Blogger and YouTube, I'll have virtually zero interaction with Google.

    Who does this calm and orderly divorce hurt more, you or Google? How many computer nerd friends do you have who could move your site to another platform? Prod the entire gun culture to watch their hosting carefully for backstabbing, keep their options open, make backups, cultivate local tech support. Move to more defensible ground. Stop depending on crumbs off the enemy's table. Don't throw me in that brier patch, brother google.

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  2. SAN FRANCISCO — An advertising boycott of Google's video service YouTube has slashed billions from parent company Alphabet's market cap.

    Shares of GOOGL have fallen nearly 4% since Friday after major advertisers began pulling marketing campaigns from YouTube and Google after learning their brands may have appeared alongside videos promoting terrorism and other offensive content.


    https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/23/youtube-boycott-google-alphabet-shares-extremist-ads/99537874/

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    Replies
    1. All depends on what's considered "promoting terrorism and offensive content". I bet it has nothing to do with ISIS beheading videos or teaching bomb making.

      Five will get you ten they will allow lots of things that you and I find offensive but will ban the guy telling you how to take down that new pistol you just got with multiple camera angles instead of the line drawings in the manual.

      Your suggestion about DuckDuckGo, though, doesn't cover blog hosting or alternatives to YouTube. All of these blogspot dot com addresses are Goggle.

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  3. Boycott Google and YouTube use DuckDuckGo

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boycott+google+and+youtube&t=hh&ia=videos

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    Replies
    1. I use Ixquick Search. Been good to me.

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  4. The CIA has wanted to kill the internet for the last decade. Barring that they have decided to divide the most feared enemy of the US Government-the American people, and punish the rightwingnuts for not doing as they are told

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  5. It is your fine local "Law Enforcement" who enable this. Thank dear ol' Sheriff Wayne Ivey for all he has done. He and his sty, along with every other sty across the country, prop up the evil.

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    1. If gun owners wanted smaller government, then as a group they could stop paying taxes any day they wanted. Sheriff whathisname would no longer have his salary paid and would find another job. Voters are the root cause, not LEO. The people who hire the hit man are just as guilty of murder as the hit man.

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    2. And anyone who dares do so will be hunted down by the "good" Sheriff and his pigs, and arrested or executed. Keep on suckin' them goats!

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    3. Yes if it were one person, but not if there were millions. This rejection of big government could have been organized any time since the postal mail newsletter was popularized, much less telephones, much less social media. Thus I conclude there aren't even a million in America who want liberty. The LEO are consumable equipment who could be replaced; the logistics comes from the American voters.

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  6. I'm working on the same metric. I've had my blog up for 9 years and I guess that it's time to go off into the sunset. I don't think that I'll shut it off on 1 April. But best that it goes in this environment.

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    1. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about hanging up the blogging. Starting all over again with a different host is going to mess up a lot of readers.

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    2. There are a lot of us lurking here who don't post that often, SiG, but you are usually the first site I hit when I go online. Do what you have to, but I for one will gladly follow to wherever you end up, if you move rather than shut down.

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    3. With all the contacts you have of people who have visited your site, isn't there some way to "broadcast" a message to them when you have a new site up and running, regardless of where it is? I don't know myself, just wondering. Or is that info in the domain of the host and unaccessible to you?

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    4. It's all in the host's world. I get statistics of how many page views I've had and what country they're from, but that's all. I only know comments from people whose names I come to recognize.

      Say Google tells me I get 1300 page views a day; I have no way of knowing how many are users and how many are bots - except that when I suddenly get more views from Russia than the US, I assume it's all Russian bots.

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  7. I second Reg T post. If you go to Word Press you could put links on the side to your videos at Vimeo or any other video site. YouTube censoring may very well deconstruct their entire video empire...think a video service for Guns, another for machining, another for ham projects, another for car repair, and before long no one can remember YouTube. Good luck.

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  8. As soon as I heard about YouTube/Googles plans, I made a beeline to Vimeo. I don't really look for info on guns but lots of other content and will be giving my "clicks" to someone else from now on. Turns out there are plenty of YouTube competitors out there and this should help them get better.

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    Replies
    1. Vimeo is the only other one that's comes to the top of my mind, but there are others. I think I've read YouTube itself is something like 70% of web traffic, which is mind-boggling. Between YouTube and Vimeo, that's got to be 80 to 90% of online videos.

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