Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing
This is mostly just people like Jörg Sprave and Taofledermaus types, that are angry their videos of making improvised weapons and improvised ammunition, getting demonetized or removed. This started early last year when Jörg got fed up with losing money and getting strikes against videos on his channel.<p>For context he was most famous for his fantastically powerful homemade slingshots, he then started doing stuff like trying to defeat riot shields, stab resistant armor, etc by launching spears&#x2F;metal rods&#x2F;knives&#x2F;swords&#x2F;metal &#x27;missile&#x27; projectiles etc out of homemade weapons that look like something Leonardo would have made if he went on a psychotic break after everyone he loved was killed in an alley to become Renaissance-Vigilanteman. He started posting rant after rant to his channel and ultimately started a union.<p>He, and channels like Taofledermaus started claiming they were being censored, their videos were unjustly being demonetized, yadda yadda and outright ignoring the fact that YouTube is a FREE platform and that YouTube primarily exists as an advertising company, not as a video hosting company. If you pointed this out in their video comment sections you would have rabid fans telling you &quot;freedom of speech is a right!&quot; &quot;this is censorship!&quot; &quot;this is unconstitutional!&quot; and ignoring the fact that serving tens of millions of video views costs money and that the content creators never paid a single cent in hosting fees to Google.<p>Most advertisers don&#x27;t want to touch a guy showing how to defeat riot shields with homemade crossbows or a channel that packs shotgun shells with random crap from their junk drawer and shoots it at barbie dolls claiming they&#x27;re shooting at Taylor Swift (seriously, Taylor Swift is mentioned in a TON of Taofledermaus videos while they shoot nails, ball bearings, legos, marbles, exotic commercial ammunition etc at dolls and other random Goodwill finds).<p>YouTube has nothing to fear and Content Creators need to wake up. If a content creator that gets 100,000 views per video on average in the first month had to pay for hosting on one 10 minute video they are looking at something like 25 gigabytes of data transfer at 1080p or something like 130 gigabytes of data at 4k, at a video a week you&#x27;re looking at the better part of 7 terabytes of data transfer and assuming 10 minute videos with 4k upload quality and at least 800 gigabytes of storage.<p>Now consider some of those videos easily hit millions of views, especially if they go viral, and that many YouTubers that are actually doing this for a significant portion of their income have hundreds of videos, benefit wildly from the recommendation algorithms and trending feature of YouTube and what that sort of exposure would cost them to achieve on their own domain and...<p>I mean, imagine if PSY had to host Gangnam Style, it currently has 3.4 billion views... at YouTube HD (1080p) toolstud.io&#x27; video file size calculator puts it at 219 MB... that&#x27;s 744,600 petabytes of data transfer... I can&#x27;t imagine PSY could afford that bill.<p>They&#x27;re making out like bandits and whining that YouTube isn&#x27;t giving them enough of the ad revenue. Yet there are tons of creators on YouTube making a living purely off of Patreon subscriptions, YouTube has a competing supporting method and you can always sell merch and&#x2F;or do sponsored videos occasionally.