TechRaptor has been going over some of the issues that have been seen on Youtube over the last couple of weeks, as the service seems to be having trouble keeping up with the issues that are occurring on its service. With incidents of channels getting taken down and YouTubers getting hacked, it seems like it's a minefield out when it comes to being a YouTube creator. And sadly, that trend is continuing, as more problems have surfaced with a lack of YouTube support and response.
Many of the readers here may know of a YouTube personality named the Nostalgia Critic. He specializes in ripping apart movies in a comedic like fashion, and may be one of the most recognizable icons in the industry. Today, he uploaded a video describing some of the recent changes the channel has been going through, and the interaction (or lack of) between YouTube and their channel, Channel Awesome. The video can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3NIdiZF_E Doug Walker goes into the details of what's happening on his channel. Monetization on his channel was disabled due to a claim by Japanese company Studio Ghibli against their Disneycember video, My Neighbor Totoro. In fact, it looks like all Miyazaki videos have been taken down at the time of this article. The Disneycember video series goes over Disney owned properties in a short and sweet review, and falls into the realm of Fair Use. While Japanese copyright law is a bit different then American copyright law, YouTube indicated late last year that they'd be doing their best to help YouTubers fight against false DMCA claims. However, that hasn't seemed to translated into any specific action yet.
Doug indicates in the video that he's lost the ability to monetize videos and the ability to upload over 15 minute videos, and some of the features they lost were features that they haven't lost before (as with his kind of content, he gets a bunch of strikes from large movie studios). And despite his and his companies best efforts, the issue has gone 3 weeks without answers, as they have struggled with automated responses, and forms that show differently for managers within the same account.
It has affected his work slightly: as his Shamalyan month has had to break down The Happening and The Lady in the Water reviews into multiple parts. In addition, despite the fact that his work has changed over the years with relying more on skits in his big videos, it should be noted that the video claimed in this one is straight up video footage, as with the rest of his Disneycember series. He has taken little jabs at the current system in place in some of his reviews, such as Jurassic World.
This is well over the said limits for response times, ranging from 1 business day, to up to 10 business days with counter notifications (which is not this specific case). It got worse: they got server errors when trying to make a counter claim against the DMCA claim, and even when they got a response, they said they were missing information (which seems to be linked to the managers on the account getting different forms and different information to fill out). Even with all that said, the channel has still not gotten any answers on the situation, and has left the business unable to earn revenue for several weeks now.
The main issue seems to be a lack of human interaction in the DMCA and Community Guidelines Strikes process, as several Youtubers have had their accounts shut down or limited over the last several weeks. YouTube has not made a formal response in many of the cases, although in one case of the education video channel Blippi, it was said that it was a "fluke in the system".
When more information about the story develops, TechRaptor will update this story as appropriate.
Update:
Monetization has returned to Channel Awesome, but the strike is still on the channel. However, Doug Walker has shown a big problem in the fact that it took an entire social media presence, and it took that for Youtube to finally react. The issue is FAR from over. But it's showing that at least YouTube is paying at least a TINY bit of attention.
https://youtu.be/xFlgx2LTdeY
Quick Take
This hits way too close to home for me, as Doug said in the video: those who are starting out and don't have the large subscriber base, what chance do those people have when a channel like theirs is not getting the attention from Youtube. I've spent the last year and a half trying to build up my own channel, and it's scary how much Youtube doesn't seem to care about their own creators, despite this issue happening time and time and time again.