T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for another column. Actually, the next column / video is a couple of weeks overdue by now. I got distracted by my programming project and abandoned the next column mid-paragraph.
Except, I haven’t been doing much with the program lately, because I got caught up writing about the program as opposed to working on it.
Except, I got sidetracked from that when I realized that it’s time to do my end-of-year writeup like I always do. The year is winding down. Cyberpunk 2077 comes out in 10 days. There’s not enough time between now and the end-of-year to give Cyberpunk its due, which means I’m done playing games for 2020. Anything from here on belongs to 2021. It’s time to look back over this train-wreck of a year and try to put things in some kind of order.
Except, I’m not really doing that because I got sidetracked playing last-minute 2020 hopefuls Carrion and Teardown.
Except, I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them because I spent last week hanging out with my oldest two kids for the first time in years. But now that they’re gone, it’s time to finish playing Teardown + Carrion so I can do my end-of-year series so I can finish my next programming article so I can reach the next stage of my programming project so I can shelve it and work on my next column.
Except…
Over the weekend I was watching old Strong Bad emails, which got me thinking about the Strong Bad TellTale games from 2008, which made me realize there are two entire episodes of the game I never got around to playing. I’ve owned the series for a dozen years and didn’t realize I’d somehow missed out on 40% of the available contentTragedy: The games are no longer available for purchase now that TellTale games died.!
So in this incredibly busy season with a huge backlog of work hanging over me, I spent the last couple of days playing point-and-click adventure games leftover from the PS3 / Wii era of gaming. This means I don’t have any content for you right now. Instead let me offer you this stupid random image that’s partially interesting…
This jumped out at me when I was scrolling YouTube last week. Nothing special. It’s the usual avalanche of thumbnails for stuff I’ve watched a dozen times, sprinkled with the occasional new content. Give it a gander and see if anything seems strange to you.
No? Normal? Nothing amiss? Maybe it’s just me then.
Here is what I found interesting: The juxtaposition of the Tom Scott and STYX video. Now, Tom Scott doesn’t really look at all like STYX keyboardist / lead vocalist Dennis DeYoungBoth men are in their 30s in their respective pictures, but the picture of DeYoung was probably taken in 1983. DeYoung is in his 70s today., but something about the angle of the photo makes them look similar. Even the outfits look similar. If I saw the STYX video in isolation I probably wouldn’t think it was Tom Scott, but by placing it beside a Tom Scott video my brain makes the connection and I can’t NOT see Tom Scott.
There are supposedly 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. Which makes it all the more baffling that it keeps suggesting I go archive binge established creators. They still have a (well hidden) search feature that will let you see fresh uploads, but I wish there was some middle ground between “Corporate Approved Internet Television” and “The 4Chan Chaos Feed”. Like, it’s really hard to find creators in the 100-10,000 subscriber range. You can either watch the algorithm-approved superstars, or the random uploads of a thousand burner accounts. (Or in rare occasions, both.)
Ah well. Once I finish this Strong Bad game I’ll get back to doing… whatever I’m supposed to be doing around here.
Footnotes:
[1] Tragedy: The games are no longer available for purchase now that TellTale games died.
[2] Both men are in their 30s in their respective pictures, but the picture of DeYoung was probably taken in 1983. DeYoung is in his 70s today.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Incidentally: That screen shot shows something by MovieBob – who has disappeared without a sound from the Escapist website (again).
Anyone know what happened?
I did notice that it happened around the time of the (very politically charged) US presidential election…
He’s left. Everyone thinks it has something to do with his politics (which are… interesting, and have been for a long time), but noone knows for sure. I’m not sure how you can talk about it without breaking the no politics rule.
“I’m not sure how you can talk about it without breaking the no politics rule.”
Here’s an attempt: He has a long established habit of expressing extreme political views and hatred of those he views as his political enemies, up to and including wishing that “Eugenics” hadn’t been tainted as a science and “There are times when I *REALLY* hate that Jim Crow-era racists pretty-much ruined the idea of intelligence-tests for voting.” That sort of extremism, regardless of which side he’s pulling for, doesn’t play well for a lot of people, including advertisers.
Archive links, because the original tweets have been deleted. Those two are old, not just to establish that he’s been doing this for awhile, but also because that’s about when I stopped paying attention to anything he had to say, or news regarding him, but I knew the statements existed and so they were easy to find.
I hope that didn’t breach the no-politics rule? If it did, my apologies, and I understand if this comment gets deleted.
The escapist made a post on their youtube community page just saying that they didn’t renew his contract. I know he had issues with rants on twitter to the degree he had made a second account though I believe it’s all back on one now. Maybe the numbers weren’t good, maybe he was seen as a liability, I don’t know.
I do know that…a couple weeks ago? He privated his twitter because Lindsay Ellis told him to stop commenting on her stuff and he went dark for awhile. May be back now, but maybe his online persona is deemed too toxic or he’s just in a bad place right now. Either way he still has his stuff on his own youtube channel.
A quick check of his Twitter shows he stopped tweeting for four days, from Nov 12th to 15th. Both he and the Escapist posted anodyne “not renewing contract” announcements. We’ll probably never know why they made the decision, unless some Escapist exec writes a tell-all memoir.
On the Escapist forums, the editor said that the decision came from the parent company, not the Escapist editorial staff.
I know that doesn’t particularly clear up the mystery, but it’s a tidbit for y’all.
I haven’t talked with the Escapist editorial staff, but it seems to me like Bob was let go for a number of reasons. The straw that broke the camel’s back could have been when Bob tried to “cancel” a Honduran Youtuber by claiming said Youtuber was a white supremacist and publicly trying to mobilize his fanbase against them. I don’t know if that was the particular reason, but it did happen around the same time.
As for my opinion, Bob has been a hipster in geek clothing for a very long time, and that’s putting it nicely. Acting like you think you’re better than your audience can be an effective, if risky, entertainment trope (For examples of a reviewer that does this right, see The Cinema Snob). But Bob really, genuinely, seems to think he’s some kind of morally superior Alpha geek that has right to tell all the morally inferior geeks (everyone who likes the same things as him but don’t sufficiently agree with his worldview) what to think. And that’s putting it nicely. And that’s why he never should have been re-hired.
I was a fan because I thought he was performing. I thought his moral crusade was an act. Like AVGN or Nostalgia Critic or countless others who actually do perform characters while reviewing products. But in Bob’s case, sadly, what seemed to be an entertaining persona seems to actually be a sincerely abusive personality. If it was just a very convincing act that he performed 24/7, he would not have tried to “cancel” any of his critics. Or done any of the things that got him fired the first time.
I know, right? YouTube does occasionally manage to suggest me creators that I really like and have subscribed to—yet I always seem to come across them when they’re in the “exponential growth” phase with a few tens of thousands of followers, with comments on their videos like “Wow, look at you at 50,000 subscribers, I remember a few months ago when you only had 2,000!” Like, it’s cool YouTube, I’m happy to find more neat creators doing cool things, and I appreciate when you manage to send me their way, but how about pointing me towards people you think I’ll like before they’ve been validated by Internet Popularity Opinion™?
Wow, you’re getting new channels? Lucky you! But seriously, I hate being shown videos by creators I actively follow. I KNOW WHERE TO FIND THEM, YOU DON’T NEED TO REMIND ME THEY EXIST!!!!
I wish YouTube had a slider where you could regulate the kind of videos ot suggests to you. It could go from “Only show me videos of channels I’ve watched/follow” all the way to “Only show me videos from channels I’ve never seen before”. I mean, it shouldn’t be that technically difficult to do…
But I guess it’s a good thing it doesn’t do that – otherwise, I’d spend all day watching YouTube, and wouldn’t be able to get anything done.
It’s not quite the same, but I use the PocketTube extension in Chrome. It’s slightly sluggish, but it allows you to categorize your subscriptions into different categories, toggle different categories on and off, and hide all videos you’ve already watched. As I now have over 120 subscriptions, it proves useful for me, and occasionally will insert some of the latest content by category onto my YouTube home page.
It’s not a perfect solution and an example of “Google should have built this functionality into YouTube already”, but it’s better than nothing.
Wow, I’ll definitely check it out! It will probably solve some of my problems. But it’s still inexcusable how difficult it is to discover new content! It’s like they DON’T want people finding new creators. And the worst part of it is that the problem I’m describing has nothing to do with their egregious push of late night TV at the expense of their own creators. It’s just the fact that the algorithm’s too dumb, and in the way of even looking for new content.
Being a small creator myself, I find the discoverability problem frustrating as well. But the pareto distribution is a natural phenomena as well as a cultural one, and we can’t lay it entirely at the feet of Google.
I love it when YouTube makes stupid suggestions, because it means Google hasn’t figured out everything about me just yet.
Even then it does gall me that they seem to think I’m even more of a dork than I actually am.
You know, I always thought the corporate cyberpunk dystopia our life would become to be more…. competent? Like, I’ve got nothing against being repressed by the cold, un-feeling AI’s, meticulously programmed by our uncaring coprorate overlords! It’s just the way the cookie crumbles! What I DO mind, however, is being hassled by ads for stuff I’ve already bought one month ago, and being effectively locked out of an app’s most basic interactions (e.g. getting notified about my YouTube subscriptions, and being able to find new content creators).
Goes to show how even the most pessimistic sci-fi writers were a bit optimistic in some regards….
The future dystopia was always going to be Brazil, not Blade Runner. Corporations always have a tendency towards bland incompetence, once they’re big enough for the left hand to not know what the right is doing.
I have to agree. One of my many arguments agains a lot of conspiracy theories is just how chaotic, unplanned and shortsighted the world appears to be. I’d love the Illuminati to exist, just because if they did, it meant SOMEONE is in charge.
No self-respecting cabal of lizard-people would preside over a world this haphazard!
That’s what they want you to think. Never underestimate the lizard-people!
The way this year has gone, I for one would welcome our new lizard overlords. They can’t possibly be any worse than the current bunch.
Regarding YouTube: while there are certainly a LOT of improvements I’d like to see them make to the current algorithm, the most annoying thing by far is getting recommendations for videos I’ve already watched. Just… why? Did they run out of other stuff to recommend me? I don’t understand.
Spotify, on the other hand, actually has quite a good algorithm which has introduced me to a lot of stuff I’d never have heard of otherwise. However, it’s far too biased towards whatever I happen to have listened to recently – I have fairly eclectic tastes in music, and would prefer a mixture of songs based on my entire playlist.
Oh yes, Spotify’s a great example of a discovery algorithm done right! As someone who also listens to all kinds of music genres, at first I had the same issue. It was solved once New Year came. Because that’s when they gave me an end of year summary of all the artists and genres I’ve listened to. And one of the sections was something like “Here are some songs from genres you don’t normally listen to! What do you think?” Which helped me find even more great artists I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
However, I don’t know if they still have that – I switched off of Spotify years ago. But it wasn’t because if the app’s quality – it’s just that my phone plan comes with a free subscription to Tidal. And financially, it just makes more sense to me.
What I’ve noticed with Youtube is they’ll always suggest the same videos to watch next for any given video. I like to listen to music on Youtube occasionally and when I rewatch a music video it will always want to go to the same video it suggested last time. It can take about 6 or 7 videos before it recommends something different.
This is the one that gets me. I wonder if they have a data retention policy that wipes out your history after a certain point.
Problem is sometimes I forget I’ve watched them and click on the video, so I’m part of the problem.
It literally shows a full red load bar and a ‘watched’ symbol on the videos, so it certainly knows I’ve watched them. I can’t understand it at all.
I know, right? Over the weekend (after literal months of waffling), I finally succumbed to buying myself a GoPro camera on my meager student stipend. Guess what ads I haven’t stopped getting ever since?
I’ll be worried about Google knowing too much about me the day I see an ad for something I didn’t know existed, and and actually want to buy it. I have actually discovered and bought a number of nifty gadgets this year I didn’t know about previously, but I discovered exactly zero of them from ads.
Here’s the thing, though.
Ad targeting works.
Even in this current iteration where you get a lot of dumb suggestions for things you don’t want/have already bought or seen. It’s not about you. It’s about revenue.
And the big companies like YouTube and Amazon who target things to users measure their algorithm performance very strongly. They tune them. They parallel test different versions.
And however dumb some of the individual recommendations might be, the collective effect is significant, positive, and very strong on building whichever metric they are interested in (hint: that metric is measured in dollars).
It’s easy to see the individual unwanted recommendations, but these algorithms are far from stupid, and exceedingly effective.
There have been independent studies that came to the exact opposite conclusion though: that it actually doesn’t work and may have far less value than traditional advertising and the whole thing is largely smoke and mirrors.
I also saw a study that suggested traditional marketing has very little effect. Somewhere they’ll have to get to the bottom of this.
Most research into the effectiveness of advertising is commissioned by advertising agencies. Or they use sales data for companies which already run their ad campaigns just before peak sales periods – I think one of the freakonomics guys was asked to research the effectiveness of ads for a company that ran their ads every year just before Christmas. It turns out they sell more at Christmas than other times of the year, who would figure.
The Freakonomics podcast ( https://freakonomics.com/archive/ ) just ran a couple of episodes about advertising. By the sound of it, most companies spend about 15 times more than they should on marketing, but their marketing departments have a vested interest in convincing them not to cut their budget.
Marketing manifestly has real value – but advertising is only one sub-function that may well be wildly overrated. It can get away with that because it’s exceedingly difficult to measure, and at times it works very well. For a real-world case of the difference between Marketing and Advertising, well, do you remember the old “Got Milk” campaign? I know this is reaching way back but it was so successful as an ad campaign that it ended up being parodied for years. The slogan and commercials and all reached deep into the public consciousness. However, it didn’t move milk sales, at least not in a significantly measurable way. What did move more milk was changing the packaging from cardboard to plastic. Customers found these more convenient and easier to handle. That is also a Marketing function.
FWIW I think there’s much more value in advertising that says, “Hey, this product is available and it can do X, Y or Z” than in ads that repeat for old products.
I’ll be happy to believe that the algorithms are far from stupid the day they show me something I didn’t know about beforehand that I actually want to buy. It’s not so much about “individual unwanted recommendations” as it is the fact that no company has made literally a cent off of me from showing me a targeted ad, in, oh, I’m 31, so let’s say a bit over a decade since I’ve had disposable income. And not because of some rabid anti-ad bias on my part, or anything (I don’t even use ad-blockers [gasp, shock, horror]), I’ve just genuinely not seen a single ad making me aware of some product that I then subsequently wanted to get. And I honestly wouldn’t mind that happening! There are all kinds of cool gadgets out there these days that I wouldn’t mind spending a bit of money on… but I’m not discovering them from ads. I can literally remember the two instances in my life where I found something in an ad interesting enough to click on it (though I didn’t end up buying either).
But I don’t know, maybe I’m sort sort of weird outlier and companies actually drive enough click-through sales from these to make it worth it.
Be careful about assuming the actions of corporations – even hugely profitable ones – are necessarily always rational. Corporations are only as smart – and as free of preconceptions – as the people running them. And nearly everyone is walking around with a huge volume of unexamined biases that prompt them to be at least selectively stupid, if not always so.
Add in the range of factors from group dynamics that can make collective behavior dramatically dumber than its constituent individuals, and its sometimes a wonder that we, as a species, ever mastered fire, never mind managed to visit the Moon.
“I KNOW WHERE TO FIND THEM, YOU DON’T NEED TO REMIND ME THEY EXIST!!!! ”
It’s just like advertising. The state of the art is pretty stupid. Buy a pair of sneakers on Amazon and that’s all you’ll see ads for for the next three weeks. That makes them the most useless ads possible, because who buys two of the same pair of sneakers? When you think about it, YT is doing the exact same thing. (And that’s before you consider that they’re actively suppressing some people and subjects for whatever reasons.)
For me, Tom Scott always looks like Matthew MacFadyen
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8df3538af603e072e83cbc36b7162a35bf9cd89e/0_0_2560_1536/master/2560.jpg?width=1020&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=19a2857ddbc66e6cf90952ea879482fd
I know from other people that they’re not _that_ similar but I guess I’m not good with faces, because I can’t convince my brain otherwise.
I’m baffled by the implication that playing Strong Bad games somehow isn’t the best possible use of your time.
For real. I think the Strong Bad games might be the most faithful video game adaptation of anything ever. It’s basically another 100 (200?) SBemails worth of comedy by the original creators except made into a Sam & Max adventure game. The episode where all the characters are (with varying levels of consent/capability
/comprehension) pretending to be characters in Strong Bad’s Dangeresque home movie is one of the most amazing and delightful comedy ideas I’ve ever seen.
What magic is this? How do you specifically search for new uploads?
Yes, how does this work? Don’t tease it without telling us!
When you enter a search and the results come up, just below the search box is the text “FILTER” with a picture of some sliders. You can filter by date, type, duration, “features” (like subtitles, 4K, etc), and adjust the sorting by date, view count, or rating. That’s of this writing though. Perhaps it will be a completely different system by the time you read this.
I find it very useful when searching for tutorials. Filtering by length helps you avoid this problem – https://loadingartist.com/comic/dire-situation/
That 30 Rock clip is pretty funny at least, that’s something.
The more niche your interests are, the easier it is to find small creators. Video games? Impossible. JRPGs? Still nearly impossible. Persona games? Less difficult. Shin Megami Tensei? Not hard. The SMT games that never got Western releases? Easy.
For another example, opening a private window so I’m logged out of Youtube, searching “whiskey” gets me mostly results with millions of views. Searching instead for my favorite distillery, Bruichladdich, gets me one or two big channels, but very quickly drops to channels in the 3k to 30k range. Not quite the 100 subscriber bar… but if I kept scrolling a little longer they’d probably be there.
The youtube algorithm is the worst. I made the mistake of watching the “We built this city” music video one time and literally for the next two weeks it was at the very top of the page every time I went on youtube. The exact same video with it showing at the bottom that I’d already watched it all the way through. I thought the recommended was supposed to be stuff I haven’t seen but might enjoy. But no instead it’s “watch more of these music videos you’ve already watched over and over because we’re buddy buddy with the record labels.”
Amazon is terrible for that with me, as I’ll get the notification “Based on your past viewing history, we thought you might be interested in … this thing that you actually viewed yesterday!”.
Or, even more often, something I only just bought from them that no normal person really needs two of. No, Amazon, I don’t need another microwave just yet.
Exactly. Lord have mercy on you if you shop online for wedding supplies. “Getting married again? No? How about a divorce lawyer!”
Wait, this sounds too funny to be true :D You’ve gotten divorce lawyer adds after looking at wedding supplies?! Usually, the cookies on these sites last for no more than a month or two. Don’t tell me you’ve gotten divorce adds within two months of looking at wedding products!
‘Best to plan ahead!’
You got me; I made it up. It’s probably not true either, since the people who buy wedding supplies are usually not getting married themselves. But it’s just the kind of nonsense stupid robot targeted advertising that results in me actually getting motorcycle tire advertisements when I just replaced them. Or, you know, get’s Shamus to stop using advertising altogether.
This is compounded by Amazon not apparently understanding how people shop and make purchases.
If I’m planning a significant purchase, I’ll likely want to compare several models and see which one is best for me. If there’s one I like, I’ll buy it.
In my experience, Amazon is somewhat (not fully) competent in “don’t show me that specific thing I purchased.” But they’re awful about “Hey, you viewed this other thing and didn’t buy it! Maybe we can change your mind?” The more options I shop before buying, the more things I viewed and didn’t buy, which MUST mean I’m really eager to buy another one.
I really wish Amazon had some concept of a shopping transaction that would understand “I’ve chosen and purchased a product from this list of things I browsed. You can let it go now.”
It’s not just Amazon. I just finished refinancing, and I’m being inundated with cold calls from other mortgage brokers. When we remodelled a few years ago, I got cold calls from contractors for years. No, I just replaced my windows, with your product no less – why the blazes are you calling me?
I still remember Facebook tossing constant ads about meeting local singles at me.
“We know you’re happily married and all, but we thought you might be interested in some adultery. Whaddya say?”
I rebuilt our bathroom back in April.
The onslaught of adverts for toilets has only just subsided.
It’s so incredibly dumb – why are these algorithms assuming people buy large items twice in quick succession?
Surely it’s blatantly obvious from existing patterns that nobody at all buys two toilets, two TVs, two washing machines or indeed two of any physically large object within a few weeks or months of each other?
I’ve heard an explanation that actually makes sense. A random person has a very low chance of wanting a big purchase at any given time. Someone who just bought, though, has a low chance of being unhappy and returning their purchase, then wanting a new (working) one. Low > Very low, so it’s still better odds than sending ads to any random person.
I wonder if maybe, just maybe, it’s being biased by people—surely they must exist—who actually place large orders of identical devices, like for hotel room furnishings or something. “Well, that one person bought 100 identical TVs and microwaves, I should weight that event very highly in my algorithm and keep trying it with everyone until it happens again!”
My suspicion in that case, actually, is that the ads are being triggered from something ELSE you bought while redoing the bathroom and so the algorithm has properly detected that you are redoing a bathroom and so might want to buy a toilet but hasn’t figured out that you already bought one.
Maybe the algorithm found out after a certain amount of years cheating peaks, and you’re right at that peak
I can’t rule that out, but by the time I had a Facebook account, I was past the time frame for the seven-year itch. I would have expected a journal article from someone if another ‘infidelity peak’ had been discovered.
This is absolutely a pain. Worse still is how the youtube algorithm integrates with other google products.
I listened to a lot of David Bowie while at work, and for months afterwards many of the top headlines recommended for me on the news app had to do with David Bowie-related museum exhibitions opening in cities I’ll never visit.
I wish there were a way to tell youtube: “I’m interested in watching this video, but I don’t want to build my sense of identity around it”.
Yeah, after seeing what music recommendations did to my wife’s account, I’ve done my best to make YouTube think I have no interest in music. I only click on music videos when signed out or incognito.
Yeah, I often delete stuff out of my youtube history to keep it out of my recommendations. At the least they make that pretty easy and painless to do.
I didn’t know I could delete individual videos from the history. Thanks for the information!
Of course, I mostly use YouTube through its off-brand PS4 software, so who knows if it has that functionality?
Ah SBCG4AP, one of the best Point and Click adventures I’ve ever played. Although not drawing from a large pile.
Not sure what is baffling about this. Youtube exists for the sole purpose of making Google money. The highest paying advertisers get inserted into Youtube’s curated group of channels that its algorithm pushes. You watching new creators is detrimental to Google’s bottom line.
Especially as new/low-subscriber creators (sitting at approximately 500 subs, give or take a gain and loss every week, been doing this since 2013, so not exactly “new”) are also not allowed to even monetize these days until they’ve gotten a large following.
No one really knows how YouTube’s algorithm works, but it’s no longer the “Public Access” concept it was back when it started.
You get the same results without being cynical. The majority of youtube videos suck, and less the subscribers they have the more they’re likely to suck. Even if they’re good, there’s not data to _prove_ they’re good. It’s no surprise the algorithm favours big channels.
This seems weird. As RamblePak said, small creators can’t monetize with ads. Yet their videos still have them. Which means that YouTube doesn’t have to share that revenue with anyone. So why don’t they recommend new creators more? Yes, with big creators they can rely on better retention – they have more data to confidently make assumptions lime that (i.e. those creators’ large view counts mean they must be doing something right to engage their audience). But be that as it may, they should still have some incentive to push smaller creators. Not only can that give YouTube money they don’t have to share with anyone, but creating competition for large creators is good for the platform, because it means the relative strength of those large creators is even smaller than it is now.
If smaller creators make them 40% more ad dollars per view but have half the retention (made-up numbers), the “ads are worth more” incentive is outweighed by the “you run way less ads” incentive.
But that’s the thing – it’s not always like that. Whenever I hear an industry expert (either video games or marketing) talking about using influencer marketing, they always say how surprised they are that smaller creators convert better than larger ones. A common line of advice goes along the lines of “Instead of spending a huge amount of money paying one big streamer, spend that same money paying 10 small streamers, or 100 even smaller ones” (made-up numbers). This is so much so that there are even apps that help you find smaller influencers (“nano” influencers – with followers in the thousands, and “micro” – with followers in the tens or hundreds of thousands). I don’t want to link to any articles with data about this, because ghey fall under SEO, and I’m afraid of Shamus’ Spam Filter :D But if you’re interested, type in “4 Ways to Use Nano and Micro-Influencers to Gain More Customers”, for example. That one talks mostly about Instagram, but it checks out with what I’ve been hearing about Twitch, as well. I’m sure the same is true for YouTube.
But then again, maybe it isn’t true for YouTube? Maybe YouTube is a crazy outlier in all of this, and they know exactly what they’re doing… But it still makes for a shittier platform.
The Youtube retention problem is “what can we put in people’s recommended videos that makes them most likely to keep watching instead of wandering off to play Candy Crush?”, and that’s a fundamentally different thing than “Where can we put this ad for Hami-Os that makes people most likely to buy our cereal instead of ignoring it?”
It is almost tautological that larger creators do better on retention because they are by definition the creators whose content inspired a bunch of people to hit the subscribe button (yes, discoverability is a real problem, thus almost tautological), while there’s not much reason to think that an ad run on their content will sell your cereal any better than ten ads run on ten smaller channels.
YouTube got in a lot of trouble with advertisers after the companies realised their ads were being shown in front of creepy videos – and sometimes terrorist videos, which was getting the ad companies bad press and they threatened to boycott YouTube.
Part of YouTubes answer to the advertiser was to focus on putting their ads in front of large creators where there’s a better chance the creator has been vetted. So YouTube make more money from the ads on videos with a large audience.
Sounds like an excuse to link some channels I like!
I’ve found a lot of neat games through thevoiceofdog’s channel: among other thing’s he’s currently playing through Weird And Unfortunate Things Are Happening, a cool RPG Maker game that is inexplicably free.
TheStrawHatNO is less informative, but I think they’re pretty funny ( [reverse succulent meat sounds] is possibly the greatest subtitle I’ve seen in my life). And it told me about Paul McCartney’s “Temporary Secretary”, which… I mean it’s too late to unhear that but the channel’s still been a net positive overall.
TieTuesday seems to have stopped posting to Youtube but there’s a lot of high-quality nonsense on there.
supergreatfriend plays some amazing trash.
Yak Shaving
that’s my phrase of the day. I was sent a link to the Urban Dictionary entry on it out of context, and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered its not a sex thing but refers to the programmers habit of doing a thing, to do a thing, to do a thing, etc.
Not quite what Shamus is doing, since Yak Shaving is ultimately towards a goal (at least in principle). Still, I guess he did get this post out of it so maybe it’s less Yak Shaving and more Yak Goatee?
Did you check all the definitions? I’m pretty sure the Rule 34 of Urban Dictionary is “everything is a sex thing.”
Nah, that’s Rule 34 of the Internet in general: if there’s a thing, there’s porn of it online.
Though that means probaby means that there’s a porn version of someone literally shaving a yak…
Or to get really meta, someone, somewhere, has made Rule 34 examples of people browsing for Rule 34 examples
Aw man, there was a Strongbad Telltale game and I missed it? Dang it… well nothing for it but to go yo-hoing…
Alternately this proves that at some point Tom Scott will invent time travel and go back in time to ensure STYXs success.
Is it just me or does “Tom Scott’s Hot Clanging” sound like the title of a robot porno?
Don’t know about porno – maybe a cooking show?
There were FIVE Strongbad games. All very fun.
The 2000’s, when Telltale made amusing games, as opposed to “The Walking Dead reskin no. X”.
A lot of people were surprised when they went out of business, but with such a boring lineup I was surprised they lasted as long as they did.
When they finally went out of business, IIRC, it transpired that only one of their games (TWD1) ever actually made any money. I’ll never forgive them for the way they ruined not only their own studio, but countless others who rushed to imitate them.
Boss… it’s it’s all on the front page again!
I’m legitimately surprised it took this long. I don’t have my copy of the bylaws at hand; is BlueHorus to be shunned for starting the comments with something else?
I don’t know if it matters, but it wasn’t an accident this time. This post is so short that it didn’t seem worth adding a break. (Although if you scroll to the middle you can’t see either the top or the bottom, so maybe it did need a break. I dunno.)
Honestly, I think they’re making significant changes to the YT algorithm again. Everyone I know is currently complaining that recently, their page has been full with suggestions for old videos they watched years ago.
Literally within a week of talking about Strongbad not being available, it appears on GOG! Shamus needs to start talking about other long-lost games, see if his magic powers work for them too.