Will Chatham

YouTube has imple­mented a three-phased attack to thor­oughly rid me of any rea­son to ever talk nice about it again.  They have succeeded.

Phase I — Google Search Drops My Site

It started in late Decem­ber.  I run a site called TheBestOfYouTube.com which is just a blog I use to fea­ture ran­dom videos I find on YouTube.  I write a lit­tle about them, and link to the video.  No harm done, and this is com­pletely accept­able (and encour­aged through video embed­ding) by YouTube.

For two years, a search for “best of you tube” or “you tube best” would show my site either first or sec­ond in the search results.  There is another site sim­i­lar to mine (though more suc­ces­ful) at bestofyoutube.com which would be right there at the top of the search results with me.

One day in late Decem­ber, that all changed.  I was nowhere to be found for those searches, but bestofyoutube.com was still there.  If I searched Google for “thebestofyoutube.com” it would still show the site.  Using Google’s Web­mas­ter Tools and Google Ana­lyt­ics, it was revealed the site was still being indexed by Google.

There didn’t seem to be any sand­box­ing of my site, as it’s still find­able, just not using those impor­tant key­words.  Need­less to say, my traf­fic dropped by about 85%, and thus my ad rev­enue fell with it.  Curi­ously, in Decem­ber, I had received my largest-ever pay­ment from Adsense, as the site had been steadily gain­ing traf­fic the pre­vi­ous cou­ple of months.

In case you were late to the meet­ing and didn’t hear, Google owns YouTube.

Was this a penal­iza­tion of some sort by Google?  Did the bestofyoutube.com guys do some­thing to get my site unlisted for those key­words?  I have no idea, and I have no idea how to fig­ure it out.  Either way, the fact that my site is still in Google’s index leads me to believe it was some­thing that tar­geted me specifically.

Phase II — The Empire Strikes Back

On Jan­u­ary 18, I received a let­ter from YouTube stat­ing that Warner Music Group was claim­ing infringe­ment on my “Star Wars on a Banjo” video.  This was sim­ply a video of me loosely inter­pret­ing the Star Wars theme on my banjo.  It had been up for over 2 years, had gar­nered over 1.5 mil­lion views, and was fea­tured on the front page of sites such as Fark.com and Metafilter.com.  It led to me being inter­viewed by the local paper.

So they yanked it down, and I inquired about what to do on both Reddit.com and Metafilter.com. I received many var­ied responses, but the gen­eral con­sen­sus was that peo­ple were sup­port­ive of me, and that YouTube was overreacting.

Even though Warner claimed infringe­ment, the video could eas­ily be con­sid­ered a par­ody, in which case it falls under fair use.  Still, YouTube has to take things like this down if a copy­right holder com­plains, just to pro­tect them­selves under the DMCA laws.  The pro­ce­dures state that it is now my turn to file a counter-claim, which might get my video back online if Warner doesn’t respond in 10 days.

I have filed the counter claim with YouTube, and am hop­ing to see the video return.  Stay tuned.

Phase III — Shock and Awe

This morn­ing, I got another email from YouTube.  This time, they were let­ting me know that my Fin­ger­nail Col­lec­tion video had been yanked for vio­lat­ing the YouTube Com­mu­nity Guide­lines.

I guess that a video of some­one lick­ing fin­ger­nail clip­pings is con­sid­ered a “shock” video. The funny thing is, in my opin­ion, it is com­pletely ironic that peo­ple get grossed out by it.  What is the dif­fer­ence between bit­ing your fin­ger­nails while they are on your fin­ger and merely touch­ing your tongue to them when they are off your finger?

I just don’t get it.

The video has been up for nearly two years, and for this to hap­pen just a few days after my Star Wars banjo video take­down got a lot of atten­tion in the Inter­net press, seems too coin­ci­den­tal to me.

In Sum­mary

I have been dis­heart­ened by all of this.  I’ve always been a big fan of Google and their ven­tures (YouTube included), and to get the triple smack­down in three dif­fer­ent areas has been quite demoralizing.

I do plan on con­test­ing the Star Wars On A Banjo and fin­ger­nail video takedowns.

If the per­son at the other end of the line has an iota of rea­son­ing abil­i­ties, they will hope­fully see my point of view and put the videos back online.

I’m inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this mat­ter. Please comment!