A channel absolutely should be held accountable for the sponsors they accept. Advertisements from YouTube are mostly outside channel owners control, but sponsors are not.
I don't support channels with unethical sponsors. It can be tough sometimes.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Veritasium is YouTube propaganda. It's well documented - Derek takes sponsor money and gets people killed in the process. I blocked Derek on all platforms the day Tom put this documentary video out.
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Mark Rober was a big disappointment too. he made a pretty weird video about autism, using the fact that his son is autistic as like qualification for him to talk about it. autistic folks tried to talk to him about the problematic nature of the video in the comments, and he just blocked them. plus, he partnered with NXT for Autism, which does work with Autism Speaks, which is genuinely a hate group that's trying to exterminate autism, and, last I checked, had no autistic people on the board.
Try to understand that influencers and content creators are human beings and not infallible. I donβt think Mark or Derek are the greatest people in the world, but they are trying to put educational and entertaining content out into the world, and donβt seem to be malicious in intent.
Give them a break and see where they land down the road. If they turn out to be trash, judge em all you want. As someone that doesnβt spend the time and effort to pass my experience on to others, Iβll give them a bit of wiggle room on the politics associated with operating in the public attention economy.
As a parent of a child with Level 1 autism I would never dare speak as an authority on the subject. There's just so much nuance to it. I could give people a surface level introduction but that's it. Being a parent does not make people by default into expert psychotherapists.
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that advert is terrifying, what the hell
Iβm out of the loop, what did Better Help do?
Sharing users' mental health information with advertisers and connecting LGBT users with Christian faith-based therapists are the two big issues I'm aware of
Yikes! Yeah, thatβs messed up. Thanks for the info!
Better Help is also awful for the therapists, it basically turns them into contracted gig workers and they're less invested in their clients' success. It's also awful for the clients, because going to therapy is hard and requires hard work and facing some difficult things. The platform makes it overly easy to switch therapists whenever, and a sizeable chunk of people will jump shark when challenged, continuing to throw money down the Better Help hole with no progress to show for it
Wow π² I'm so surprised that a therapy app with shortened appointments and suspicious pricing is bad for anyone! There's no possible way to have anticipated such a thing would fail in such a harmful way.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The "BetterHelp" YouTube Virus is BACK
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Google got rid of the dislike count on videos for a reason, holding content creators accountable is absolutely what should be done. It's horseshit to think that content creators shouldn't be accountable for the sponsorships they take.
Am I just old, even by internet standards? Because we've been here before. Better Help was blasted on the internet several years ago for their shady business practices. Several major YouTubers published "make good" videos about it, because of how bad the service was. Better Help was giving YouTubers and podcasters a shitload of money to promote their product, and in their terms they explicitly stated that they did not verify the credentials of their "therapists" and that it was on you to do that.
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To some degree, certainly! If at some point it comes out that a certain sponsor is just total shit, a content creator can be made aware of that. Although, with all these things, it is not always as easy to just drop a sponsor i suppose, there is always contracts involved and all of that. So not expecting a creator to be able to drop a sponsor all of a sudden.
I'm curious, what would happen if I, as a creator, had been contacted by a sponsor and then if the sponsor was shady, decided to not only say no to the contract, but also rag on them in the video where the sponsor would have been shilled?
Dr becky (atrology channel) also did a few sponsorships with them and got lots of unhappy comments under those videos. Not sure if she still sticks with them or no. Aaaaaaaand I just checked her last video from 7 hours ago and she still gets sponsorships from them. Top comments are asking her to stop accepting those sponsorships pointing out their doings.
Slightly relevant, install firefox and sponsorblock (works on mobile)
I do that kind of thing, yes. Although I usually find it so distasteful, that I lose interest in watching other videos anyways.
But yeah, especially when it's a channel making educational content, there's a chance that some viewers take the sponsored section as general educational content (no matter, whether that's because they're gullible, young or did not pay attention when the sponsor segway happened).
There's also various tech channels which recommend products that are objectively worse than the alternatives, or even exert malware-like behaviour. Those also immediately lose any and all respect from me.
Obviously, if it was a genuinely good product, it wouldn't need the sponsorship deal for people to make videos about it. So, I do understand the struggle.
But everyone wanting to make a living off of media has that struggle. If I artificially inflate the view numbers of one media creator, the others receive less sponsorship money.
At least consider it. It will make shady sponsors less valuable and more genuine sponsors more valuable.
They absolutely deserve to be blasted in the comments for a bad sponsor. It will make people reconsider their viewing decisions. If the video itself also wasn't great, don't be afraid to give it a big fat dislike, especially if you have the return YouTube dislike extension.
Additionally, if there are too many ads and sponsors, make your voice heard in the comments, and the creator might be sympathetic. I certainly am when I'm on the receiving end of a comment like that on my channel.
Wow, those comments are a dumpster fire.
Not sure what Derek 's best response might be. I'm thinking that this video will likely be taken down and replaced by one without a sponsor.
Right. You have to scroll quite a way to see something other than him being called out.
I made sure to dislike the moment this sponsorship came up and closed the video. With analytics they should see the connection.
i like ur optimism. we need more ppl to do this.
Veratasium had some similar issue a few years ago too, didn't he?
There was a video he did on a startup taxi service using self driving cars. Basically the entire thing was an advertisement for that company.
Then another Youtuber, Tom Nicholas, released a video about that a few months later and how it's an issue. I'll have to watch it again as I don't remember what he specifically talks about.
I recall Tom Nichols making a video on them and also perhaps an incorrect video about electricity so probably.
On the electricity video, he was actually correct. It was mostly a matter of semantics and people clinging to the common models of electricity.
His video with one of those "genetic research" companies was very bad anti-privacy propaganda, where they used the excuse of catching the Golden State Killer as justification for storing and using the related genetic information of masses of unconsenting individuals.
He's also dipped several times into making state department propaganda like Smarter Every Day consistently does. Not nearly quite as bad as him yet though.
And he's made several videos about failures of capitalism, wherein he very obviously refuses to identify it as the problem. Like the one about planned obsolescence or leaded gasoline and another I'm forgetting.
pretty sure his video about Charmin flushable wipes being the only actually flushable wipes on the planet was bullshit
It's likely they signed a contract with them before the (second) controversy, I feel like a better way to do this is to see if they continue with the shitty sponsors
But they should be held accountable for this kind of stuff
I watch basically any channel with 100,000+ subscribers through Piped so that my views or retention or engagement don't get counted by YouTube.
Philip de Franco did a better help sponsor and his community went up in arms about it. now he doesn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. surprised more communities don't care about it
most people don't know anything about it. they skip sponsors and watch the videos. it's not complicated.
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