Youtubers Union Weekly Update 6, 15th April 2018

Submitted by Union Bot on Sun, 04/15/2018 - 22:20

Hi guys,

This week was fairly quiet, compared to last week, until this morning when an important call to action came out. Lets start with Jörg's posts, as usual.

We had a very disappointing moment this week. initially communication from YouTube seemed promising. They had been going out of their way to engage with us, they had arranged meetings with Jörg and they were saying the right things. Then on Wednesday sadly Jörg got sent a very generic canned response. Click the link to his Facebook to read it.

On Thursday Jörg posted a provocative question on Quora, asking if YouTube should be forced to treat full time creators like employees. Personally I like to compare YouTube as a market. In a supermarket the supermarket controls what products are sold, what prices and what quality is made, they also decide who gets paid and who does not. Anyone working in a supermarket is an employee. Look at an independent market and a landlord owns the space but each stall is run by a different business owner who decides himself what he will sell, how he will price his goods and what quality his goods will be. The stall owner gets to decide his own hours, his own pay, and sets their own standards. The difference here is control. In a supermarket the employees are dictated the terms of employment, on an independent market no one is controlling you, except demand for your product. When YouTube started we were all stall owners. We could create content however we like to whatever quality we liked. The only thing that limited us was if people actually watched our content, and even then some of us kept making it anyway. As YouTube places more restrictions and more rules they are edging ever closer to the definition of employer. I'm not really sure where I would actually draw the line but I think we all want them to exert less control on our content.

Jörg also featured on Freedom Phoenix Radio, click the download link above to check that out. Ernest Hancock talks about his thought on YouTube's censorship and discusses impact on creators with Jörg as well as a lot about YouTube's history and how things are going. It was a great discussion. Check it out if you haven't already.

Finally, this morning Jörg announced that following YouTube failing to respond to his questioning it is time for us to take action. Check out Jörg's Post on the Facebook group for information.

This morning I also launched an important feature for the website. We now have a members list which can be found on the main menu at the top of the website. After logging into the website you will find a new section for a membership card on your profile. Fill this section in and your membership card will show on the members list. It will update with any profile data you wish to share and in the near future we will add the option for you to embed your membership card on other websites. You can see a demonstration of how to fill it in and how it works here.

If you are viewing this on the website please leave a comment below with a link to where you are hosting your video on Jörg's call to action.

United We Stand!

Thanks for being here guys

David "BigMonMulgrew" Mulgrew

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