The most popular YouTuber forum is Yttalk.com and I’ve had an account there for a good number of years, though I mostly lurked.
But today I was banned for defending the Freedom network in this thread,
You can see my ban screen and that it clearly says it was for ‘Spam’.
Of course I wasn’t spamming; as shown by replies back to my posts (such as the one below), I was participating in the discussion. I wrote several details posts explaining how Freedom actually does help channels grow, and that it is possible for small channels to grow.
If I was “spamming” then people wouldn’t be writing detailed responses back to me.
After talking to others in the Freedom network who also posted defending Freedom, it seems YtTalk.com has a nasty habit of banning people who express positive viewpoints about networks other than Maker Studios, especially Freedom.
Which makes sense, because the site is an astro-turf landing page for Maker Studios recruitment, as shown by the green “Apply to Maker Gen” button.
The worst thing is that Maker Studios wants to use Yttalk.com’s authority rankings to have its users talk negatively about other networks and then have those search engine results display these kind of negative threads at the top of Google search results for things like ‘Freedom mcn’.
And it’ll always be negative because Yttalk’s astro-turfing mods ban and delete the viewpoints of anyone who has a different point of view.
If they only want people to speak highly of Maker Studios they ought to make it more clear in their ToS, rather than astroturf and deceive YouTubers about the true purpose and motivations behind Yttalk.com
Fun fact: I can also also play the SEO game. With the way I’ve titled this post and my own authority ranking from this blog, I expect this post to come up at the top of search results for YTtalk.com now.
The tl:dr version is that Yttalk.com is NOT a place where you can speak freely about YouTube, and that it exists solely as a place for Maker Studios to trash other networks while generating application leads for the Maker Studios network.
Let me also refute some of the misinformation in that thread:
- Freedom networks do give promotion to our Partners. My network, Power Up Tv, is part of the Freedom family of networks. We display our Partners on our own website http://powerup.tv/channels ; please do show me where the MakerGen websites lists all of its Partners. I’d like to know.
- I personally wrote and setup the Creator Academy that all Freedom Partners have free access to. The course is based on my eight years of experience using the platform and working as a consultant for many small businesses. It has all the information needed to take a channel from zero to 10,000 subscribers. To say Freedom doesn’t help channels grow is just misguided; we can’t produce videos for our Partners but we can educate them and give them access to resources they wouldn’t ordinarily have starting out from scratch.
- We also have social media presences we’re building up, but since Freedom and its networks are less than a year old, this is taking time. But make no mistake that we will gain large social media presences and we will give lots of promotion to all our Partners. We’re doing it right now and will continue to do so.
- The $100,000 sponsorship offer is more than Maker Studios has ever done for its Partners. Maker Studios has such love for the channels that belong to it that they lock them into long-term contracts after promising them the world and failing to deliver.
- My network under the Freedom family of networks, Power Up TV, offers its own sponsorship deal where we choose one Partner a month to receive a free greenscreen and lighting kit. Details here.
Maker Studios has an advantage in having been around for many years and the luxury of being able to establish its brand early on in the YouTube scene, without a lot of competitors around who have way more resources. But Freedom has grown rapidly within less than a year because our offer is better. Rather than step their game up, Maker Studios is choosing to engage in black hat astroturfing to damage their competitor’s reputations, and it is sad to see. There may come a day that Maker Studios wants to work with my company, and it will be challenging to forget how they behaved at this point in time.
And now that I have gotten this rant out of my system, I will go back to doing what I usually do with my day; working on Power Up TV.
