The One & Only Time I Agree with Diamond & Silk

In case you haven’t heard by now, Youtube has been cracking down on demonetizing videos along with just straight deleting entire channels out of the blue.  How do I know?  Simple, it happened to me.  I had a Youtube channel titled Onyx Truth that I had started around January of this year.  My channel was alive for about 6 months and had racked up close to 500k views & over 2000 subscribers, then out of nowhere, Youtube pulled the plug.  Now for those of you who didn’t know about my Youtube channel, basically I was taking my catalogue of Onyx Truth podcasts which consisted of over 300 episodes that I had produced since March of 2014 & converting them into you Youtube videos in order to expand my reach & further grow the Onyx Truth platform.  For those of you who have been listening to the Onyx Truth podcast on iTunes or various other podcasting platforms, you know that I tend to produce some rather controversial & offensive material at times.  So if you are familiar with the rule change in regards to Youtube, then one could conclude that my offensive material was what prompted Youtube to delete my channel.  Well, you would be wrong.  When Youtube deleted my channel, I had over 500 videos posted.  One video had racked up almost 100k views in a matter of 3 days.  Now out of all of the so-called offensive stuff that should have caused my channel to be terminated (according to Youtube’s extremely vague rules regarding advertiser-friendly material), the videos that caused my channel to be terminated were videos discussing relationships between black men & women.  Now understand, these particular videos were in no way remotely close to what you might hear coming from a person like Tommy Sotomayor.  These videos were genuine conversations between men & women discussing black relationships with very little to no profanity, no graphic imagery, no nothing.  These videos were literally just respectful casual conversations between men & women talking about the struggles of dating & marriage.  Seriously, that’s what they were.  Well, somehow Youtube felt these videos were too offensive & warranted that my channel be terminated.  So…they terminated me.  But in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I have other Youtube channels that I’m operating off now (actually 2 channels).

Now for those of you unfamiliar with Diamond & Silk, these two black women are basically nothing more than a bunch coons who literally, LITERALLY promote themselves as some sort of minstrel show for Donald Trump.  Every chance these two women get, they get on television or on social media to perpetuate every stereotype about black people they can conjure up all in the name of getting a pat on the head from white people, because there damn sure isn’t any money coming to them…at least not from the Trump organization.  As a matter of fact, Trump’s campaign financials were released recently where it was reported that Diamond & Silk were paid around the neighborhood of $1600 (before taxes) for all of their cooning & buffooning in their efforts to help get Donald Trump elected President.  You’d think with all of the fame & social media followers they racked up over the last year or so, they’d be swimming in the money, but they’re not.  Well, maybe they are, just not Trump’s money.  But who knows.

Anyways, while I highly disagree with damn near every single thing these women say & stand for, what I do agree with them on is Youtube’s bullshit policy of deciding what Youtube thinks an advertiser will deem “friendly” for their ads versus what the actual advertiser may think.  For those of you who don’t have a Youtube channel, Youtube works like this in a nutshell as far as monetization goes:

You post a video (assuming you have more than 10k lifetime views on your channel), you monetize the video, then ads would start popping up on your videos.  If a viewer clicks on an ad or watches a portion of an ad for a certain amount of time, then you the content creator would get “paid”.  I use the word paid loosely for the simple fact that in order for you to make just about $1 in revenue off of 1 video, that video needs to generate around 1000 views.  So unless you are a somewhat big Youtube channel with thousands into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of subscribers, chances are you would be making literal pennies off of your videos….but even still, those literal pennies can ad up over time as you continue to grow your channel.  So that’s the quick & dirty on how people monetize their videos on Youtube.

Now the problem that started happening recently was due a Wall Street Journal article written about Youtube’s biggest channel owned by a guy out in Sweden who goes by the name of PewDiePie.  PewDiePie has over 57M subscribers on Youtube and is a millionaire because of Youtube.  Matter of fact, it’s been reported that PewDiePie made somewhere in the neighborhood of $7M in 2016 alone just off of Youtube ad revenue.  Anyways, the downfall of Youtube monetization started when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about PewDiePie making some antisemitic remarks (because for some reason Jewish people are off limits from criticism).  Anyways, the Wall Street Journal apparently didn’t like it, so they started calling out advertisers who put ads on Youtube and as a result a few hundred major companies pulled ads.  When this happened damn near everybody on Youtube who monetized their content lost around 85% of their revenue.  Now for a person making a few bucks a month, it wasn’t a big deal, but there are people on Youtube who pull in a few grand or more per month…so to them, it was a big deal.  Fast forward a few weeks later, Youtube decided to revamp their monetization platform by implementing a 10k lifetime view count on brand new channels in order to apply for monetization (those who had their channel already monetized were grandfathered in…like me at the time).  But in addition to the new 10k lifetime view policy, Youtube decided to revamp their community guidelines to crack down on channels producing hateful content.  Now out of ALL OF THE CHANNELS on Youtube, it’s literally a tiny percentage of channels dedicated to pure hatred, but Youtube felt that was enough to crack down on the entire network with their new rules.  Now these community guidelines are basically a set of extremely vague rules on Youtube that basically amount to saying:  no cursing, no politics, don’t offend ANYBODY…just post videos of kittens.  That’s basically it.  If you actually read their community guidelines, they are ridiculously vague.

As a result of these new community guidelines, a bunch of videos on a bunch of channels all of a sudden found their videos demonetized and when the content creators appealed Youtube’s decision to demonetize the videos, most content creators (too include myself) were greeted with an email that was like 2 sentences long saying something along the lines of, “We’ve determined that your video is not advertiser-friendly”.  Youtube will offer you a chance to appeal, but 9 times out of 10, you’ll receive another automated email stating that Youtube has decided to stand by their decision to not monetize the video and after that, the case is closed.  You get no more appeals.  Now when it comes to channels being terminated altogether, this is normally due to a combination of a bunch of trolls flagging down videos and marking them as offensive (even if they aren’t offensive), Youtube’s new algorithm that scours videos to determine if they are not “advertiser-friendly” on its own, or some copyright violation stuff.  When this happens, Youtube will email you saying that you have strikes on your channel and if you get 3 strikes within a timeframe of like 90 days or something, Youtube will terminate your channel.  In my case, I kept getting RELATIONSHIP videos flagged.  NONE of my political commentary, just the relationship stuff.  First Youtube banned me for 2 weeks from uploading to the channel, then about 3 weeks later they just terminated my channel altogether because my RELATIONSHIP videos kept getting flagged.  So in the end, the little bit of ad revenue I was making simply vanished.  I did make a few bucks, but nothing life changing or worth bragging about.  Now, I’m in the process of rebuilding my other channels and unfortunately, I fall into the new 10k lifetime views category…so we’ll see how this goes.

Now I fully understand that Google/Youtube are privately owned companies who are capable of doing what they want how they want because at the end of the day, none of us pay to use their platforms.  Anybody can create a Youtube channel for free and possibly monetize the channel.  I also understand that Youtube is trying to make the site more family-friendly because eventually they want to go the route of streaming TV shows and whatnot.  I also understand how advertisers may not want their ads running on videos promoting extremist views along the lines of racism or terrorism.  I get all of that.  But what I don’t get is how Youtube is deciding on behalf of these advertisers versus the advertisers deciding on behalf of themselves.  Just like Diamond & Silk rightfully pointed out, if a channel is racking up thousands if not millions of views per video, then there is an obvious interest from the public to watch these videos.  Also, these same viewers are more than likely consumers of the products these companies are trying to advertise.  So why is Youtube trying to tell content creators that their content isn’t advertiser-friendly especially if the content is being watched by people who probably buy that advertisers stuff in the first place?  The advertiser should be the one to decide what content their ads should be ran on versus Youtube making the decision for them.  Youtube is ass backwards with this approach and to be honest, if I was an advertiser with a fairly decent budget, I’d be pissed to see that Youtube is preventing my ads from being shown to people who may actually end up buying my products.  So like I stated, I don’t agree with a damn thing Diamond & Silk say except for this Youtube issue.  Also in the same breath I don’t think they should be banned for speaking their opinions because I am an advocate for free speech.  I also don’t think Youtube should be deciding for the advertisers as to who gets to see the advertisers ads….leave that up to the advertisers.