August 2018 Production Update

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For August, I'm going to continue work on parts 8 and 9. I'm also still trying to work on the 100K subscriber milestone video, but progress on that is now being interrupted by my efforts to try to rescue Part 2 and Part 7 from YouTube's restricted mode.

If you don't care about the details, then you can stop reading now. I don't have anything else to report this month. 79 of 120 clips recorded, 1 of 120 clips edited (one of the unused clips from a previous video just so happens to work as a starting point for a joke in another one I came up with recently).

I will now tell the tale of my ongoing fight with the dreaded YouTube restricted mode bot. At some point in late June, Part 2 got a copyright claim because the song at the end of it uses the melody of Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." After that, it started making about half as much ad revenue as it used to because the other half was going to the song's right holders. That's a problem because Part 2 used to make about 1/5 of all the ad revenue I make on YouTube.  I also don't think it's very fair because the song only plays for 1/4 of the video's length and according to my analytics, only 40% of viewers watch Part 2 long enough to even see the beginning of the song (it drops down to 23% 10 seconds later).  1/4 of 40% is just 10%, so that means only 10% of watch time is spent watching the part that has their song in it. 

My solution to this was to make the video private and make public another version of Part 2 without the song that I uploaded last year when something similar happened. That worked, except that without the song, Part 2 is no longer more than 10 minutes long, which means it has a lot less ads in it, which means that it only makes about half as much ad revenue. So I'm back to where I started. 

So, in order to make Part 2 again at its original length without getting it copyright claimed, I decided to replace the audio with an extremely generic tune played on an electric keyboard that sounds like it came from "Napoleon Dynamite" while Microsoft Sam just says the lyrics to the song in a monotone voice (You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N5_9mNtWWM). That way, the video would still be the same length it used to be, and I'd also get to satirize American copyright law at the same time.

Unfortunately, when I uploaded the new Part 2 with the monotone version of the song, it was made UnAvailable In Restricted Mode (let's call it "unAIRM"). You might not think that's much of problem since most of my audience doesn't use restricted mode, and it's true that when one of my videos is unAIRM, it doesn't really affect it's viewership (or it hasn't in the past, anyway),  but I've noticed that videos that are unAIRM tend to make less ad revenue for some reason. In fact, last year, when Part 2 was unAIRM, it only made 1/10th of its regular ad revenue even though people were still watching it at the same rate as they always have.  Videos don't make much ad revenue when they're unAIRM.

Usually, when one of my videos becomes unAIRM, all I need to do is change the title to something like "ways" and it will become AIRM again (that's why my videos all have weird synonyms for "die" in the title), but with this new version of Part 2, that isn't working.  Every time I upload it, no matter what the title and thumbnail are, it gets flagged as unAIRM now and I have no idea why. Not only does YouTube not tell me why a video is unAIRM, it doesn't even tell me WHEN a video is unAIRM. I have to figure that out by going into restricted mode and copying the URL of the video I want to check to see if it gives me an error.

Usually, if changing the title doesn't get the video AIRM, then another thing you can do is submit the video to a form on the YouTube Support page and the video will be checked manually. They don't tell you when or even IF the video has been checked by a human being, so you just have to submit it and then check on the video every day after that. This is how I got Part 6 AIRM without having to use a different word for "Die" in the title. Usually, it only takes a week or so for the video to be AIRM after submitting it for review. I submitted the new Part 2 for review over a month ago, and it's still unAIRM. Either the human who reviewed it didn't approve of it or the form lied when it said that they would review every video submitted. I have submitted the new Part 2 and several different clones of it multiple times and none of them have been approved yet. 

So if changing the title and thumbnail didn't do get the video AIRM, there must be something in the video itself that's getting it unAIRMed, right? YouTube won't tell me what that is, so in order to figure out what's wrong with the video, I split the video into 4 pieces and uploaded them all separately to narrow down what part of the video is causing the problem. The first 1/4 of the video and the last 1/4 were unAIRM, but the middle two parts were AIRM. Then, I uploaded them again just to make sure the results were consistent, but the second time, only the third part of four was AIRM. Then, I uploaded the second fourth again and it was AIRM the third time. So YT's restricted mode bot isn't even being consistent with itself. 

So then I submitted the first and last fourth of Part 2 to be reviewed by human beings and they became AIRM after just a few days. So, according to YouTube, all the individual pieces of Part 2 are okay, but for some reason putting them all together into one video is not okay. This is why I'm really glad people like you are supporting me and I hope that someday, I won't even have to put up with this sort of thing anymore to stay in business. I'm going to keep experimenting with Part 2 until I figure out why it keeps getting unAIRMed. I have a few suspicions, but no proof yet.

Part 7 is unAIRM as well, but I think it is because of the Dark Souls scene. I uploaded a version of Part 7 without the Dark Souls scene and it was AIRM. I also discovered that removing the audio from that scene also got it AIRM. Since the audio isn't really necessary for that scene to work, I'm just going to remove the audio for the version I release in September. Hopefully, Part 7 will be released without any further problems.