We Released a Video (and then it got demonetised...) | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

Welcome to another edition of the Friday Update; which, yet again, is coming to you on a Monday!

I know… I know… I will aim to get things back on track in the coming weeks!

I have a good excuse though, because over the past few days, we’ve been working incredibly hard putting the final touches to our latest video: Vape-o-nomics: Why Everything is Addictive Now. Which you can now watch on either YouTube or Nebula.

The launch has been a little frustrating. When it was first release, the video began to go what I would describe as “viral”. It was smashing all previous records for my videos.

At one point, it had twice the number views of the next-best-performing video at the equivalent time after launch.

Unfortunately, a few hours in, it got falsely flagged as breaking YouTube’s monetisation and community guidelines.

My assumption is that the video mentioning vaping, tobacco and alcohol was mistaken for “promoting” those behaviours.

It was placed on limited monetisation and restricted to viewers 18+ (which also means those users have to be logged in).

Both these things heavily limit the reach of a video and therefore that incredible virality was brought to an end.

After an incredibly late night in which I stayed up until 2:30am using every means I could think of to contact YouTube, I appear to have now managed to fix it.

The creator support team had initially refused to look into it. Their position was that the video had already been reviewed twice, including once by a human (although given that review only took 5 minutes for a 38 minute video, I’m very doubtful).

The key to getting it sorted turned out to be complaining loudly over Twitter!

A tweet to the @TeamYouTube account, with some support in replies and likes from viewers, prompted someone to do what I’d previously been told was impossible: actually watch the video.

Whoever watched the video (finally!) clearly recognised that the video wasn’t promoting harmful behaviours and set the video free from its confines!

It’s bizarre that one of the largest companies in the world relies on complaints through Twitter as a primary means of communication with many of its creators.

It’s also devastating to think of the viewership and revenue we’ll have lost through the video being falsely flagged in this way.

Nevertheless, all this gives me another opportunity to thank all of you for supporting me here. Independent support through Patreon helps to smooth over some of the bumps in revenue that come from working with unpredictable companies such as YouTube.

Thanks as ever for your support then and I hope you enjoyed the video!

Above is a snap of the video going viral before it's wrongful imprisonment! This graph usually trends downwards after the most-dedicated viewers have watched the video. 

And outside of work?

This week, I’ve been largely trying to suffer through some wisdom tooth pain!

It just so happened that during an incredibly busy week work-wise, my rear right wisdom tooth decided that it wanted to start pushing through.

And it’s been really sore!

This has meant that most of my evening plans have been thrown off a little; either through having to make up for work that I didn’t manage to get done in the day or through just needing to rest up!

I’ve needed a lot of pain killers to get through this week but I *hope* things are beginning to get better now. At least this morning hasn’t been as bad as some!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

So, I’m currently reading Beowulf.

I’ve always been a bit of a completionist so Beowulf has always been on my list of books to read given it’s one of the earliest known English poems.

A few months ago, I popped into my local Oxfam shop and they happened to have a copy on the shelf. And that felt like a sign that now was the time!

The version I’m reading is a relatively recent translation by Maria Dahvana Headly.

In her introduction, Headly outlines that her translation is one which is explicitly feminist. She seeks to draw-out the role gender plays in the mythical world of this very early poem.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself searching though other translations of the poem as I’ve been reading and it’s fascinated me the extent to which the poem is ridden with anxieties about masculinity.

Throughout, there is this notion of “proper masculinity” being a thing of the past.

We hear such rhetoric in a modern context all the time. Folks such as Jordan Peterson constantly try to suggest that masculinity is in crisis.

The reality, however, is that masculinity always has been in crisis; perhaps an integral party of masculinity is the idea that it is in crisis.

Anyway, I’ve still got the latter half of the poem to go; and then I guess I can start on whatever the second-oldest poem in the English language is!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!