A rant about the traditional media

As you may or may not have noticed there has been some recent incidents between various Youtubers and the traditional media, been this way from the start of the year really. There was the whole “Pewdiepie is a nazi” thing, a while after it was the incident with Jontron, and yesterday something happened that made me rather upset. I will not talk about neither Pewdiepie nor Jontron, so if you want to know about that you are at the wrong place.

Yesterday on the 2nd of April a Youtuber with the name Joerg Sprave, more commonly known as The Slingshot Channel, uploaded a video where he talked about a recent strike he got on his channel and got a video removed for being “A violation of YouTube’s policy on harmful or dangerous content”. This all happened after the UK media outlet Daily Mail published an article about Joerg and two of his videos. The article in question is linked at the bottom of this post if you would like to read it, it is an archived link so that you do not actually visit their site just to be a hundred percent sure that they do not make any additional ad revenue from it.

I am even hesitating to call it an “article”, it doesn’t deserve that title, it’s an abomination! I would call it a direct attack on a successful Youtuber, only for the sake money. Every single thing that is said in the “article” is taken completely out of context, twisted and turned, and made it so that Joerg is put in a bad light and thereby damaging his reputation. Daily Mail even contacted Google and advertisers that had their ads displayed during the video and asked them for a comment on the basis of their article. An article which includes accusations that his videos is used as training for terrorists!? Wait what? What on earth would a terrorist learn from videos like that, that is not already obvious? If you stab hard enough at a cheap vest bought of Amazon the knife goes through, big freaking surprise!

I view it as a problem that various big media outlets, like the Daily Mail, have the “power” to push advertisers and Google to screw over the content creators. And the reason for doing it is probably the fact that less and less people read their content as it is much more engaging to watch a video. They are getting more and more irrelevant in today’s internet culture, they are losing money and they see all these YouTubers that are making a living off their work and they desperately want a chunk of that money. Their desperation can be seen in how the sharticles are written; there are no research done what so ever and things are taken out of context. If they are so scared of getting irrelevant maybe, just maybe, it’s time to get their shit together and move with the time, to try to actually compete on a fair basis with other forms of media.

This is as I said not the first time something like this has happened. Recently there has been incidents where the traditional media has written about ads being displayed on “inappropriate content”, which has led to companies pulling their ads completely off the YouTube platform. It doesn’t look like this is going to be a problem as of right now, although there are several Youtubers that are making an effort to make it look like it’s the end, probably to make some extra money of the drama. But even if it’s not a problem right now doesn’t mean it couldn’t be in the future, if more companies continue to leave the platform it could result in quite a decent chunk of people losing their job, this is pure speculation however.

Something else that is a bit funny (not actually funny, but more idiotic) is how some people argue that YouTube was better before people made money off it, that it was more quality videos back then, that now there are only “a bunch of people screaming behind a screen”. To those people I have only one thing to say; Maybe you are watching the wrong channels then! There are countless off great channels out there, many of which I have probably not discovered yet, and in between the tens of channels that I regularly watch I see no one that behaves in the described way. I will not deny that those channels exist, but that is only a very small part of YouTube. Yes if you only look at the most popular channels on the platform you will find, among others, Pewdiepie, Jacksepticeye and Markiplier. All of which gained popularity in about the same way, by playing video games with and overly excited personality. But hey, it turns out there is a huge market for that. Yes it might not be the best content out there by any stretch of the imagination, and making it might also be kind of effortless compared to other content. But are you telling me that everything on Daily Mail, every cringeworthy reality TV-series, or any other form of media is good? No! There are plenty of “bad” content everywhere, but there is also a market for it, as sad as that might be.

Link to the “article”: http://archive.is/gQwv6