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YouTube begins issuing strikes to channels that advertise their Twitch counterparts
@linustech:
Basically they are mad we are publicizing our stream on Twitch. Yet another move towards YouTube owning the audience rather than the creators having control of that relationship. To be clear these guidelines have existed for a long time. The enforcement is new.
I was getting my pitchfork ready based on the headline, then I read the tweets in question.
It sounds like Linus Tech Tips uploaded a YouTube video that was literally just an ad to say "We're live on Twitch!" That's very different than uploading "actual" content to YouTube that also mentions your twitch channel, or including links to your twitch channel in descriptions/videos.
As a consumer, I'd be super annoyed to see something like that show up in my feed. And I'm not sure that I even have a problem with YouTube's policy of "no content/ channels whose sole purpose is to drive people away from YouTube" or their actions here to enforce that policy.
I don't know, people upload advertisement to YouTube all the time. In this case the advertisement is for a competitor service. Why would that cause a strike on the channel?
LinusTechTips have been doing this since the beginning of the WAN Show (their livestream on twitch). Also, as nathan mentioned, they delete the video after the livestream is over.
So to suddenly issue strikes for these videos without any previous warning (after years of it being fine) isn't very "business friendly", for lack of a better word.
Also, they upload the whole livestream to youtube afterwards, so youtube even makes money of it.
Deleting the videos after is even worse, in my opinion as a consumer. When I go to someone's YouTube channel I would expect to see the videos they'd posted, and use that to decide if I want notifications for new content they post. A channel that has a habit of uploading a video to trigger a notification, then deleting it afterwards, feels really deceptive to me. I'd have no way of knowing they do this before subscribing to them and having them hit me with what I would consider spam content.
In fact, perhaps there were just enough viewers that complained about this behavior after being surprised by it that YouTube finally took action. Maybe it wasn't fine for years, but just uncaught. (If I shoplift from a store for years before finally being caught, I don't get to complain about the store not warning me about cracking down on shoplifting when they finally catch me - an extreme example, for sure, but hopefully it conveys a bit about how I'm thinking about various forms of "You let me get away with X for years!").
I know of several channels that do the same, it’s essentially using the subscriber notification feature to send a notification that you’re streaming. Usually the videos are removed after the stream is over.
Not that annoying to me personally since you usually only see those videos if you’ve both opted in as a subscriber and opted in to notications.
I mentioned this in a reply to another comment, but as a viewer that would annoy me. Say I'm browsing YouTube, find a new interesting channel, watch a few of their videos. I decide to follow them, and I like their content enough that I want to be notified of new content under the assumption that it'll be similar to existing content.
My first notification from that channel comes in ... and it's essentially a short ad for "We're live on Twitch!". Nothing about their video history implies that I might get such a notification, since they always delete those vids after. So now as an end-user, I feel deceived. After all, I'd watched their other videos, which always end with "don't forget, we also stream on Twitch, so follow us there" and I'd deliberately chosen not to go to Twitch and subscribe to them. In that scenario, I'd almost certainly report the content to YouTube.
It might take a while (perhaps even years) for enough reports to come in to trigger a review from YouTube, which could explain why LTT seemed to think that YouTube was "ok" with the behavior for so long.
That’s a totally fair criticism. I’m just not sure how often people enjoy someone’s content enough to be immediately notified of new content, but also not interested in being notified when they’re streaming.
That said, I don’t opt into any channels notifications because I find notifications generally annoying, so maybe my perspective is a little skewed.
Yeah I don't quite understand how it's surprising that YT doesn't want a video whose entire content is a static advertisement for Twitch, who is not only a competitor in streaming, but also buddy buddy with Amazon who'd like to think they are going to compete with YT
Some new company really needs to come along and knock YouTube down a peg. We're in dire need of some actual competition in this industry.
Blender is testing out PeerTube right now, as they are currently blocked on YouTube: https://video.blender.org/
I really hope PeerTube is going to take off. The UI looks reasonable, but it needs content in order to get users in order to get more content etc...
I've been thinking of maybe starting a project to easily take a YouTube vid and repost it to a PeerTube instance to fill it with some content, but I've got a moral issue with basically ripping content from an author and reposting it. I'm also not sure if PeerTube sports an API, otherwise it's going to be slightly more work to build up the correct HTTP request.
This is a huge understatement. Youtube hemorrhaged a half a billion dollars per year for a decade before they even started to try and monetize. I'm not even sure they're profitable today.
A text-only site like tildes in its current state could be run on a desktop computer from 10 years ago, and still host thousands of people per day, if not tens of thousands, without a sweat. A video site like youtube requires exponentially more storage, more bandwidth, and more processing power. I don't see a way for this to be practical for a new entrant without a ton of money backing them.
Maybe some day if 1gbit symmetrical internet connections are ubiquitous and 100TB SSDs are like $100, we could do a distributed thing, but we're a long way off from that.
Once that's a reality your expectation of video bitrate will probably be higher, and those specs might not be enough. But we might eventually see a plateau. At one point hosting thousands of text-only clients seemed a daunting task.
Interestingly enough the YouTube support team commented on the statement saying that it's absolutely fine to do these Twitch promotions as long as the promotional video has some kind of content. The guidelines really don't make it clear though whether using the same video everytime is allowed though as this could be seen as "repetitive content" and therefore would go against the guidelines.
Begun the Stream War has.
this is just fucking dumb. you can literally link your twitch channel in banner hahahah