The Fate of the YouTube Channel

In 2021 I finally realized that I just didn't want to do YouTube anymore and just wanted to approach all of my online content differently.

Originally, the idea was to just nuke the entire YouTube channel... but, I've softened on that. I'm just not going to upload or pay attention to the channel anymore. I'm going to host content on archive.org, because it's easy to do and there's no ads.

If you'd like to check out these old videos from YouTube, I have uploaded the ones that I want to keep available here. It's probably best to watch them there, unless you for some reason enjoy being part of YouTube's algorithm machine.

The original no more YouTube letter is available below.

Hi friends and fans that watched my YouTube videos,

I have decided that I am going to go ahead and delist all of my videos from YouTube. There's a few different reasons for this that I'll elaborate on, and I'll let my plans be known for the future as well. First, understand that I'm only delisting them - in other words, if you have the link you can still watch them. I will also upload all of the videos on my channel that are currently available on the channel onto archive.org so that they can still be watched. I have delisted quite a few videos and I just feel that I didn't like how they turned out and I don't really want anyone to see them.

I want to move away from YouTube for a few reasons. First, the ads situation. I don't believe that most people are aware, but YouTube now places ads on essentially all content that it deems ad safe. Ads on YouTube have a weird history, but it used to be if you chose to run ads, you got paid for it. Then, due to advertisers fleeing because of political content it became "you can get paid for ads if you have 1000 subscribers minimum and at least 4,000 hours of watch time in a year." The ad policy is now "you all get ads but you can only get paid if you meet the subscriber and watch time minimum."

My issue here isn't the fact that I'm not being paid. It's mostly a personal thing. I like the idea of YouTube. I like that anyone can just upload a video and put as much or as little effort into it as possible and find an audience for it. I don't like the reality of YouTube, where putting a red arrow in your thumbnail and making a clickbait title is a necessity. Bonus points if you put a dollar amount in your thumbnail or video title. I uploaded videos really erratically and in 3 or 4 week bursts because I'd occasionally manage to overcome my trepidation about participating in the YouTube machine. I got on a pretty good streak of releasing videos toward the end of 2020 and early 2021 because I finally just thought "fuck this, why am I worried about trying to chase trends? I just want to make good content, and I'm not going to monetize this even if the channel does take off ever," but then YouTube monetized it for themselves. That kind of just broke me on the whole thing. I don't want someone to have to sit through a fucking State Farm commercial to watch my video and I don't want someone clicking away from my video because they had to watch a State Farm video to see it.

I understand that this is Google's platform and they've got to make some money off of it - but I find it hard to believe that anything really changed with their money situation behind the scenes to necessitate this. Personally, my belief is that with more and more creators foregoing traditional advertising with YouTube and electing to take sponsorships and collect money through Patreon they realized that they were missing out and could make more money by forcing ads on everyone's content.

The other reason that I'm delisting my YouTube videos is that gaming YouTube is just horrendously awful - especially when it comes to retro type content. Retro gaming YouTube has a small handful of tastemakers that all sort of run in the same circle, create the same kind of content, and shill the same products. Remember when Polymega got bad press? They just shipped MetalJesusRocks one of them and a few other people in his orbit and it was all good. To date, it seems that YouTube influencers are still the only people that have received a Polymega. MJR got his and shilled it almost a year ago and no one else without a YouTube channel has. People have been waiting for years for pre-orders to be filled at this point, but most of the retro YouTubers are just excited to get some press mentions because they did a video about a shiny new toy.

I am avoiding naming a lot of names - I think that if you are someone who is very in tune to going ons with the retro community then you know the names that come up frequently.

In general, I think the major channels have just made it impossible for anyone to really break in with a new opinion or make much of a difference at this point. If you want to make a video about buying an SNES you have to call it "IS BUYING AN SNES IN 2021 WORTH IT?" and soyface in the thumbnail. If you want to make a video about a relatively unknown game it has to be called "IS AERO THE ACRO-BAT A HIDDEN GEM???" (absolutely not) along with a soyface thumbnail. Alternately, if the soyface isn't your thing then you can pay someone $50 on Twitter to draw yourself as a cartoon character making an obnoxious facial expression - these artists can improve your hairline, too.

So, what's going on from here? Well, I'm not putting any deadline for when I'm delisting my videos or anything like that. It'll happen when I've got the website put back together. I'm not going to stop making videos - it's just not going to be on YouTube. I don't know what I'll do for hosting - I think I'll probably put them on archive.org. They're not a fast website but it lets people either watch them on the site or torrent them if they want.

My dream here is that I'll..

Re-organize everything that was on the website and make it available again
Upload all of my YouTube content to archive.org and make a page here where you can just find links for all the videos
The big one - make a sort of online game library

What I mean by an online game library - I want to go through all of my games and just sort of make pages for them, photograph them, do sort of casual written reviews and make videos about them if I feel so inclined. Maybe write some strategies that I used to finish the game. I also want to do this for my Laserdiscs too - and YouTube would not make that easy with copyright claims.

Just writing this feels like a relief to an extent. The YouTube chapter is closed. I will never again look at watch time metrics. I will make videos when I feel like it and if I want to and I will try to make something that people are interested in games will enjoy. I won't ever stop and think "I wonder if some random person will care about this" or "I might lose subscribers over this." This will be something that people will have to seek out instead of having YouTube throw it in their face because the algorithm went oh fuck this video hits different.

I don't regret the YouTube chapter, I just didn't like it much. I do sincerely thank everyone that supported me, though. Especially thanks to Jenovi who is probably responsible for like 50% of the subscribers I racked up and HarryAtomic because somehow this man was there practically from day 1 when no one else was.

Anyhow, thank you for reading. If you want to reach out to me on non-Twitter or social media then please use the email I set up for YouTube - comradejaredyt@gmail.com

-Jared