This will probably be a bit of a controversial blog – at least for me – but I’m going to talk about YouTube partnerships.

As you might probably already know, my own YouTube account has the monetization feature enabled on it. I presume I got it  from some sort of automated system seeing as I never actually applied for anything, and the circumstances for getting it is unknown yet.

Now recently I have been noticing a few of the gaming people I subscribe to, who have similar sub counts, have been starting to get partnerships, from whatever content network they signed up to. While I’m not attempting to be a bah humbug about it, I do tend to wonder sometimes why everyone else is getting accepted to these things and not me – especially when I tend to consider that I make a lot of high video quality videos and have put a decent amount of investment into them.

I also want to talk about the partnership guidelines that the various content networks put on people looking to try and get partnership from them. Very recently I noticed that Yeousch changed their requirements to be 1,500 subscribers – but the part that irks me is that they only have a video view count requirement of 75k. I find a view count like that to be very low indeed. By comparison, my sub count of somewhere over 900 (it’s hard to give an exact number given the fluctuations and the impending drop from YouTube’s recent account purging) is now only two-thirds of the sub requirement, yet my view count is now nearing one million total views. Every place these days seems to always care only about sub counts and never about any of the other metrics.

However, submission guidelines for these various networks is rather obnoxious. Machinima (for Respawn related videos) force you to submit to their “Respawn Army” Facebook application, and hope that you get enough “bumps” for them to notice it – so it’s basically luck of the draw unless you have a lot of friends on the service; and Yeousch allow you to submit one video a week using the form on their website (when logged in), but you don’t get that capability unless you are active on the forums and, well, the Yeousch forums are filled with 13-year-olds who have no idea how to compose themselves, or spell and use correct grammar. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that the Yeousch forums are worse than the Xbox.com forums.

Recently though, acquiring and keeping subscribers has been harder, firstly following the loss of subscribers from the account purge (everyone dropped on average 3%), and also the new home page and channels make it easier to lose subs and harder to gain subs. It makes me wonder how some people can acquire subscribers so quickly from scratch.

I suppose it must boil down to the whole aspect of knowing someone popular to get a “buff” from their popularity. Getting even a brief mention by someone popular would generally knock up your sub count by a fair notch. It’s almost like YouTube’s version of nepotism…

And one final thing I want to mention is how people involved with the content networks on social media only seem to care about the people on their network and ignore everyone else. I’ve seen this with a fair few Machinima related people on Twitter. Getting their attention is nigh impossible unless someone who is already involved with Machinima mentions you in a tweet, which is a pain especially when sometimes these people tweet things to indicate that they are looking for new creators to partner.

I probably wouldn’t have this harsh of a view on the subject if it wasn’t for everyone else I can compare to getting this…

Suppose I should say this in the first sentence: I use AdBlock. I like using AdBlock since it blocks and removes the annoying flash ads, animated ads, music playing or other noise-making ads, most video pre-roll ads etc.

This is especially true for websites which add a huge leaderboard ad to the very top of the website before their head content, thus pushing their entire website down by about 100 pixels. Or those that have an annoying ad placed right in the middle of their site’s main content, like halfway through a news post, breaking up the flow of the article.

The main unfortunate side-effect of this mass-blocking is that non-intrusive advertising gets blacked out also. Now I’m not a complete Nazi towards online advertising, I don’t mind the banner ads, small boxes etc. that sit off to the side or the bottom of the site, especially when the site owner puts them there knowing full well that they are most likely to only get revenue from impressions as opposed to clicks.

Nor do I mind advertising that isn’t completely corporate driven, this particular example being Project Wonderful. They are one ad network I’ve expressly allowed to show in my filters, along with a bunch of other sites I either don’t mind supporting, that I know don’t have intrusive advertising, or (unfortunately) that don’t work when you turn off the ads – several site video players are notorious for that.

I know several site owners who do expressly ask – and always in an off-the-cuff sort of passing mention, never specifically pushing people to do so – to whitelist their site in AdBlock for the revenue, and in most cases I’m cool with that particularly if I’m an avid reader and like what they’re doing. Sites/comics like Real Life Comics, Nerd Junkies, Manly Guys Doing Manly Things I keep AdBlock off as I both enjoy their content and they don’t run intrusive advertising.

One aspect that I really hate though, is when people specifically ask for ad clicks. Especially when it’s always against the ToS of whatever ad network you’re in to game the system in any way or to ask people to submit invalid clicks.

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And to think it hasn’t even been a few weeks since the Steam Autumn Sale, in which my credit card was royally buttfucked. And now we’re already into the Christmas Holiday Sale… I’ve barely managed to pay off my current maxed-out card (thank you very much Mr. “Can you take a cheque some other time?” Eirtakon Treasurer who owes me some games prizes and taxi trips…) and now I’m going to be loading more onto it.

Ah well, at least it makes for cheap Christmas presents for those I know who use Steam, which is pretty much Avy and… Yea.

So, the “funky” thing that Steam are doing with the sale this year is by playing around by giving everyone gifts via the Steam Inventory system. Using objectives (á la the Summer Sale with its prize tickets), you will either earn gifts or lumps of coal. There are a wide variety of gifts you can receive. One little bit of a “fuck you” though are coupons for however much of whatever, but for the most part they can’t be redeemed until AFTER the sale, and most of them are worthless considering the discount on the coupon is less than the discount offered during the sale. Oh, and they also don’t work for anything released after the sale, either.

So, the other thing is a lump of coal. However, here’s where it gets a bit interesting. You can craft seven lumps of coal into a gift (whether it’s random or chosen, who knows), or you can keep all your coal and each lump grants you an extra entry into the overall sweepstakes where the winners will win FUCKING EVERYTHING ON STEAM. There’s also some wishlist grants (50 x Top 10, 100 x Top 5) and 1k Valve Complete Packs too, but meh.

So anyway, I’ll be updating this post during the sale with my progress with the objectives and what crap gifts, or coal I earned. Yay…

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Alright, I know that this new functionality has only just been released, but it already has a bit of an impact when it comes to me and my usage of Facebook.

As you probably know, I interact on Facebook through two primary methods: my own personal profile, and my Page. I initially made my page after a few… instances where people who were following me for all of my gaming and YouTube related stuff started getting a little too keen on my profile on Facebook. This then spurred me to create a second Twitter account and a Facebook page to handle the people who only knew me from my dealings on the Internet.

At that point, it was the best course of action since I didn’t want to start opening up my personal profile and everything I might say, to people I didn’t really fully know or trust enough. Of course, that’s not to say that everything I post is completely private, in fact most of the time I will post the same thing to my main Twitter and my Facebook profile simultaneously with TweetDeck, but it helps to have that individual post privacy selector on Facebook to keep things only to people who I know.

However, not long after that I started to realise that gaming and YouTube related stuff actually constituted quite an amount of my overall activities, and as such my personal Twitter has a lot less going on now than it used to. It kinda shows in my gaming Twitter as I’ve made over 1500 Tweets from that account since I started it in December last year while my main account has dropped from around 300 Tweets a month to just 100 a month.

So, this new subscribe functionality on Facebook is making me think about whether I should delete my secondary accounts and use just the one once again. Everyone could continue to follow me on Twitter, and those who I don’t fully know could just subscribe to my Facebook rather than having to add me as a friend. This would then enable a fair bit more functionality that I’ve had to stop using recently, or find a workaround for, since some Facebook tools don’t work with Pages, including YouTube Autoshare, Raptr’s connections, and others.

The main benefactors from this change that I know would be higher-profile YouTubers who are well-known for who they are, rather than their online persona. Two who immediately come to my mind would be Jory Caron and Jonny Paula from the old “Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?” YouTube show, but it could also be of use to some other smaller people like MegaGWolf, and to some extent (and I can’t believe I’m actually saying her name) ssskinner.

Right now I’m still debating what to do. The main things I have against merging them would be the fact that my second accounts are already too well-established to really just pull the plug on them, and they are helping me to keep my two “audiences” separate.

I suppose it’s something that would have to be thought of over the next while, I’d say it would all depend on the uptake of the new subscription functionality.

So, much earlier this morning when I went to just randomly watch a stream over on NGame.tv, I was greeted with a very large and red error message:

NGame, flagged...?

When the bloody fuck did that happen? I had been watching the site without any problems 3 hours before that and got nothing in my way. A quick look on Twitter shows that other had been experiencing the issue too. Since I have faith in Avast, I went ahead anyway and had no issues at all.

I will point out that at this point in time, the Safe Browsing diagnostic page for NGame was completely clean, nothing mentioned.

Fast-forward to about an hour ago, and…

Say wha?

Jesus, where the hell did that come from. But on further reading I notice something else – IT’S CLAIMING MY SITE IS INFECTED NOW TOO?!?!?!

Sure enough, I go to visit my own website, and I’m greeted by the exact same big red error page. And the diagnostic for me:

...for fuck's sake.

Upon checking my Google Webmaster Tools, I was told that the page on my site in which I embed my NGame channel page was what had caused my site to be flagged also – bearing in mind they said nothing about just the physical stream video itself on my homepage – so I went to go file for a malware review after privatisation of that page until this issue blows over…

EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING LINK ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND.

As they claim: “Very rarely, it can take up to a day for malware warnings (and links to the malware review request form) to be visible in Webmaster Tools after your search has been flagged in search results. If you don’t see a warning in Webmaster Tools, but your site is flagged, please check back later.”

Searching around for other instance like this show that this is the complete opposite of “very rare”, rather it’s more of a “happens all the fucking time”.

Moral of the story? Google is shit. Go disable this stuff in Options -> Under the Bonnet -> Privacy -> Uncheck “Enable phishing and malware protection”. And then go download Avast, which has been a hell of a lot more use than this browser “feature” has.

Sometimes I do forget that I have a blog sitting around that I can update with goings-on. Problem is usually that there goings-on aren’t really very interesting or worth blogging about.

Not much has really gone on over the past few weeks. I’m still making my YouTube videos, doing a lot of streaming over on NGame, and getting pissed and annoyed with a few people as always. The NASCAR, F1 and IndyCars have also sucked away a fair few hours.

More recently however, there has also been a couple of cases of conflict in areas.

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So, to bring in the new year, and to try coincide with my recent shift of focus from the “normal blogger” to the “gamer and video editor”, I’ve slightly re-organised my site a bit to try and help that. I’ve basically reverted the previous change of putting the entire blog on the homepage, to put more information relevant to my current interests there.

A slight rewrite of the About page was done as well, the Stream page has been updated to my current Livestream channel, and I should hopefully soon be working on the Videos section a bit more as I believe I’ve found a good WordPress plugin for it.

Might still jiggle stuff around a bit, knowing my tendencies to never be happy with the way my site looks. Thankfully I’m not this anal with the bear’s site…

So I hear the bloggies are dated and coming up soon:

Campaign for the bear for Best Newcomer…?

So, despite the fact it’s barely even up a day, I’m already starting to get some flak over that new Facebook page I created for myself. As such, I’m going to explain the main reasons why.

Over the past year or so, I’ve had two main personas that have manifested – my own: that is to say, me the blogger, Twitter addict, boards.ie semi-lurker; and a more gaming-centric one: so that’d be my YouTube channel, Raptr, TrueAchievements, UKCS, Xbox and the like. Recently though I’ve started to feel that these two main personas have started to mix in with each other, and that’s not really something I want.

To put it into more detail… Well, I was following a crap-ton of gaming/YouTube related accounts on Twitter, and my own tweets were getting filled with YouTube tweets, gaming stuff and the like that I really don’t think those who follow me really cared about all that much. On Facebook, I was starting to get friend requests from people who followed my YouTube, thus I had to set my privacy so that only friends of friends can request me.

I feel that now with a separate Twitter account and Facebook page, then I can be the massive gaming/YouTube nerd I want to be, and those who actually want to listen to that stuff can read it there. This way my YouTube subscribers and gaming acquaintances can go follow my ramblings on either (or both!) sites without having all of my random banal rants getting in their way, and also my normal feed can be a lot more true to me.

This whole thing is not a new trend. I know plenty of YouTubers who have a separate FB fan page for people to follow them on. Chuggaaconroy, SuperSkarmory, FPS Russia, the guys from Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This; and more all have separate FB pages, so that their video fans can keep up with them there, while their personal profiles can stay true to their personal lives, family and friends. Yes, I’m nowhere near as popular as them, so I may be jumping the gun a bit with creating it at this stage with only 500 subscribers, but at this stage, I’d rather make things perfectly clear, rather than having to try do this at a later stage having already had everything mix together too much (a perfect example of that would be Jonny Paula and Jory Caron from the Microwave show – they hit the 5k friend cap simply because they were so popular, so an FB page made perfect sense).

This last bit is in direct response to Samm’s tweet:

What would you think of someone who made his/her own fanpage on social media? What about someone who “liked” him/herself?

I needed to “like” myself to do a few connection thing with the page so it would work. But I guess if that makes me seem really sad, then fine…

So over the past week, there was a bit of a rumour going around on the YouTube help forums saying that YouTube are slowly but surely removing the upload limits for all users who are in good standing when it comes to copyright and Community Guidelines. At first I was sceptical of reading this, thinking it was yet another hoax, as it usually is.

However, over the past couple of days I’ve been noticing a few videos uploaded that ARE longer than 15 minutes on channels that are neither partnered, nor are from 2006 and have the grandfathered Director’s clause (that is to say, in 2006 an account could be changed to the “Director” type, and after approval was given unlimited length uploads – essentially an early form of the partner program) and have been recently apparently allowed to upload long videos. See the examples below:

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