Youtubers Union Weekly Update 2, 18th March 2018

Hi guys

This week has been an amazing week. There have been 2 mentions of us in the media, an article on BR24 and a radio interview on rbb24, both in German but the BR24 article translates well. You can see a complete list of media mentions in the media page.

This week started with Jörg posting a draft letter to YouTube on the Facebook group, before he could finish it YouTube contacted him. This is massive. Most of us thought YouTube would need a big shove to even acknowledge our movement. For them to take the initiative and contact us first is a huge deal. It shows at the very least they take us seriously. Jörg has a meeting with Brandy Clegg, global head of monetization on Tuesday afternoon. While we must remain skeptical, this is a great start and it gets the ball rolling. Jörg has posted a list of questions aimed at Brandy and asked for feedback in the Facebook group, his post is here. I also want to highlight Jörg's post following the announcement of his meeting, as this highlights the fact that the union has no political leaning.

I would like to take this time to also talk about a post by Leo Wattenberg (here). I am not highlighting this because it is well written, in fact you will see Jörg, in the comments and myself on page 2 debating the accuracy and validity of Leo's assertions. I am highlighting it here because it demonstrates an argument that we are meeting regularly, an argument that has no basis in facts and needs to be answered. It is a recurring theme from many of our detractors that we are too small or have not thought out our position, this simply isn't the case and most of these issues can easily be answered by spending 5 min on any of our platforms, which Leo didn't, claiming to struggle finding Jörg's original video. I encourage all of you to hop on to the forum and engage Leo in polite discourse about the union. The Union has only existed for a couple of weeks, there is a lot of time for us to grow in scope and purpose.

Tonight I posted on the forum a brief study where I attempted to calculate our total subscriber influence. We are 10,000 members strong, and climbing but it is important to remember that is content creators, most of whom have a large following. I posted on the forum with an attempt to estimate our total influence, which comes out at 108.9 million. Please take a look at the forum post so you can see how that estimate was arrived at. Even considering it is an estimate based on a limited set of data it does demonstrate something very clearly. We are strong.

One last thing, several social logins have been added to the website, to make life easier logging in or registering for new users.

United we stand!

Best Regards

David Mulgrew