Youtubers Union Weekly Update 10, 4th June 2018

Hi everyone

So this month (yes weekly newsletter monthly this time lol, I was giving you a break from the spam) we have been discussing where each platform fits. We are on a lot of platforms. Personally I see the Discord like a clubhouse, its there for informal chats and hanging out. The Facebook group is like the blog, we can post official stuff there and it gets seen quickly by a lot of people. The forum is like a meeting room. We gather there to discuss the important stuff. Let me know what you think guys , what do you use each platform for, how do you see each one and are we missing any you like to use?

The guys over on the discord have started a "YouTuber of the month" campaign. Each month they select a YouTuber by voting on who is popular and then everyone messages that YouTuber to encourage them to join the Union. You can head on over to the Discord to see nominate someone for next month. This months winner was EmpLemon. Go hop on their YouTube, Twitter and Reddit to encourage them to Join the Union. Tell them how great it is and how it will improve YouTube for us all. I think this is a fantastic middle ground between spamming comments asking everyone to join and getting others involved. I have created a Reddit post on his subreddit asking him to Join, please go upvote, and say your own piece.

Some of you will notice I have added some further instructions to the top of the Members list in order to help people get listed. I encourage you all to go make a membership card. It will help your SEO to be listed on the website and I have been using the members list to find new Channels. My favourite so far has been Vals Noisy toys. I encourage you all to take a look around the membership cards section and show your support for other members channels. I am a gamer so I have been looking into gaming channels. Channels that have logged in recently will show near the top of the list. In the future we will add a recommended feed to help you find new videos you might like from other members, but that is a fair was off yet. If there are any browser add-on developers out there. Please get in touch. It would be great to embed our feed in YouTube itself via a browser extension.

This month saw the strike. this will have had several positive impacts for the Union. It will have demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of lots of different platforms. It will encourage other platforms to expand their offering, which in turn pushes the market closer to teh point where YouTube might have a serious competitor. It also gave everyone the chance to test out posting to multiple platforms so if you are staying on YouTube you now won't have all your eggs in one basket. It will also have made a difference to YouTube's view stats. Sadly that is one we have no idea how much impact it made. YouTube is extremely unlikely to share their stats with us, and even if they did this was a warning strike anyway. Most creators made 1 video on another platform, then went back to YouTube. Personally since most of my YouTube content is streaming I tried out twitch. I already have more regular viewers on Twitch that I had after 2 years on YouTube. I have been active on Twitch for around 2 months. I also tested out some new website setups to host my videos on my own website. The results were promising. It is far easier than people think to host videos yourself. Most small hobby channels have enough bandwidth to serve the videos from a home connection using an old spare PC as a server. The problem comes when you have thousands of views in a short space of time. Which also means advertising revenue and a budget to pay for more bandwidth.

Our next action will be a letter writing campaign to send real world letters to YouTube to voice our concerns. Hard to ignore us when someone has to spend 2 hours signing for letters. The details are being discussed still so check out the threads below from 22nd May onwards.

As usual guys, for your reference here is a summary of posts form the Facebook group this month.

Facebook post 9th May 2018