Friday, April 9, 2010

YouTube/Google & Their Family Safe Content BS

YouTube, which is now owned by Google, allows you to run ads now on your videos, something that helps pay for the cameras and other recording gear used by JHO. Google recently rejected two JHO videos from their ad program. One is a ground squirrel shooting video which I admit can get a bit gory. This latest rejection of our turkey skinning video has me scratching my head. Google/YouTube is known as anti hunter leaning and this video rejection supports that notion.

Imagine a child or non hunter being subjected to actually learning how to clean and prepare their own food? The horror. Here's the YouTube rejection email.

Thanks for submitting your video How To Skin A Turkey (Breasts & Legs) for revenue sharing. We have disabled revenue sharing on this video for one of the following reasons:

* You have not provided adequate documentation that you have the necessary rights to commercially use all the video material and music
* Advertisers on YouTube are currently looking to advertise next to family safe content

Please note that we reserve the right to make the final determination on whether to enable revenue sharing for a video.

Thanks for your understanding,

The YouTube Team




What's also indicative of how this company operates is you cannot reply to the rejection email, it has one of those "noreply" email addresses. If you want to really waste some precious time I guess you could wade through YouTube's Help menus trying to find out who to appeal to, if they even allow that.

Thanks for your understanding? Ha! What kind of mamby pambies do they have running this company? Looks like the time has come to shift off Google, there are other video hosts to use like Vimeo, BrightCove and our own JHO Photo/Video Gallery . I'm also looking for another way to lose the Google ads on our website. Enough is enough. Heck, even this blog is run on Google's Blogger which means I need to find a new blog host. Feel free to let me know any blog alternatives that are gun and turkey skinning friendly.

As one of our forum members pointed out recently, how can we be in bed with Google by running their Google Ads on our forum when Google is a well known anti gun company? Looking around the other hunting and fishing websites I see Google Ads on many of them, it's hard not to jump on their gravy train. Google is the shizzle if you want higher search engine ranking and to make money off ads, no one is even close to them. Yahoo just shut down their Publisher Network web ad program that was comparable to Google's AdSense because Google kicked their tail.

Google also gave us crap over submitting feeds from our store for their Froogle listing because we sold ammo and knives, oh my! We finally pulled those items from sale to get the feed working but I really regret caving in to the PC crowd BS.

What are your experiences with YouTube/Google? Any nightmares or PC tales to relate? Hopefully this huge 100 ton gorilla will collapse from their own weight and someone with some common sense will take over. In the meantime I'm hoping the Chinese wreak havoc on them, Google needs a wake up call.

4 comments:

Will Sitch said...

Hi Jesse,

The video may have been flagged because it had the word "breast" in it.

Anyway, this is the reason I feel so strongly about hosting all my content (images, videos, text, whatever) on servers that I control.

I wrote about this a while ago on my blog, yes, here's some shameless self-promotion:
http://will.sitch.org/blog-archive/2009/07/wordpress-wpg2-wordbook-facebook

It's not as easy as blogger.com, but you _can_ own and manage all of your own content. I'll be damned if some marketing dweeb at facebook/flickr/blogger/etc decides they want to use one of my photos/videos. Under the TOC they make you agree to, they can do just that!

Have a good one,
Will

Holly Heyser said...

What crap!!!

Will may be right about the word "breast," but good lord, doe Google use any human brains in its screening process? (I once worked for a company - Knight Ridder - with a spam filter so aggressive that when I emailed a copy of a story about a state worker with porn on his state computer, the spam filter rejected it.)

Thanks, Jesse, for writing about this. I'll pass it around and see if we can get Google's attention. Oh, I know. But a girl can dream.

Jesses Hunting And Outdoors said...

YouTube/Google actually replied to my appeal and allowed the ads to run now on the video after I changed the title. The word "breast" was what caught the word police's eye.

Will, I hear ya on hosting your own content but the masses are on YouTube, Facebook etc. The other huge drawback is say you host a video that goes viral, most of us can't afford to pay for that kind of data transfer. Say you get real popular, which is what most of us want, you'll be paying thousands a month for server data transfer.

As far as giving up our copyrights when we post something on Facebook, Yahoo tried that in 1997 with our images and a huge boycott changed their minds. I wonder why no one hasn't sued FB or YT for their TOS that says they can claim/use someone's copyrighted images or video.

Anonymous said...

Ok, so I got the same thing today (and yes, it's a gun video)...no usage of the word "breast" though ;-)

How did you appeal?