If you’re watching this, you probably have seen at least one video by Business Casual.
The channel is a great example of what’s possible in terms of business entertainment
content on YouTube and is definitely an influence on some of my videos, but the channel went
silent about a year ago and I wanted to find out why, so I dug into it.
Even if you’ve never heard of the channel before, I think you’ll want to stick around
and watch this video, it’s a really interesting story that highlights a darker side of entrepreneurship
we don’t often hear about.
Usually, when YouTube channels die off, they do it slowly.
The content gets boring and repetitive and view numbers start declining, but that’s
not the case for Business Casual.
The last video on the channel got nearly 2 million views and, at 40 minutes long, it
was clearly a ton of work to put together.
So why would a successful channel like Business Casual just throw in the towel all of a sudden?
The answer was not what I was expecting at all and contains a really important lesson
for entrepreneurs working on any big project, not just YouTube creators.
Long story short, the folks behind Business Casual are suing YouTube, which is pretty
weird because it seems like YouTube has been quite good to the channel in general.
Business Casual has nearly a million subscribers and none of their content seems to be controversial
or demonetized.
But if you scroll through the Business Casual twitter feed, you will see that whoever is
running the account now is on a crusade against YouTube.
In fact, the Twitter account has posted basically the same tweet every day for the last 100
days straight, so I had to figure out what was driving this.
As a little bit of backstory, Business Casual was started by this guy, Jordan Kouzmanoff.
He lives in Bulgaria and started the channel back in 2016 when he was studying business
at the Rotterdam School of Management.
I went back through some of his old reddit posts and he seems like a really genuine guy.
He’s just super interested in entrepreneurial stories and explaining business concepts in
clear and creative ways.
The channel grew significantly over the past few years and he was even able to bring on
a narrator and animators to help make the videos.
The channel currently has about 80 million views, which means it easily could have generated
a million dollars in revenue across YouTube ads and sponsorship deals.
But looking at Jordan’s LinkedIn profile, it looks like he ended his relationship with
the channel in September of 2019.
So I started looking into what happened around that time.
I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like he either sold part or all of the channel to
a guy named Alex Edson, who runs a company in Scottsdale, Arizona named eBrands.
This guy Alex has started a few different businesses and has been involved with a bunch
of YouTube channels over the past few years.
And it’s Alex’s name on the YouTube lawsuit that Business Casual is filing.
So it looks like Alex is really the one driving everything now and constantly posting to Twitter.
Interestingly, the Business Casual twitter account actually posted the full 243-page
lawsuit against YouTube, Google, and Alphabet, and so I read through it to get an idea of
what’s really going on here.
Basically, the lawsuit comes down to some pretty standard copyright infringement claims.
Essentially, it looks like another YouTube channel took clips from Business Casual videos
and used them in new videos without permission from the Business Casual team.
For obvious reasons, I’m not going to show any of the copyrighted footage, but if you
want to check it out, I’ll link to the clips in the description below.
The actual offending clips are fairly short, one is just 7 seconds long, and it’s just
a slow zoom on a public domain image.
It’s clear that the video was stolen, but it’s not like they reuploaded a whole video
or anything like that.
YouTube actually did take down the videos that contained the offending clips, but Alex
Edson doesn’t seem to think that’s enough.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
See, the channels that used the copyrighted footage from Business Casual were affiliated
with RT, which is a Russian state-controlled network.
RT used to be called Russia Today, and has been accused of spreading disinformation and
conspiracy theories.
In fact, in 2017, RT America was ordered to register as a foreign agent with the United
States Department of Justice.
So when I first saw the tweets from Business Casual and the lawsuit, I thought that maybe
this was a personal vendetta.
Jordan, the original creator of the channel, is from Bulgaria after all and Bulgaria’s
relationship with Russia has been deteriorating over the past decade.
I assumed that Jordan had taken the copyright infringement as an opportunity to punish Russia
and maybe he had some personal family history with Russia that motivated him to stop making
new videos just to focus on this lawsuit, but now I think it’s more complicated.
Jordan isn’t listed on any of the lawsuit filings and it doesn’t look like he’s
affiliated with the channel in a meaningful way anymore.
Alex Edson, on the other hand, is on every email thread with RT and YouTube representatives
and seems to be the sole driving force behind the lawsuit.
So why does this entrepreneur from Arizona want to get Russia Today kicked off YouTube
so badly?
Well, there are a few factors here.
First is the obvious political angle.
Russia has been a major American rival for the past hundred years and tensions between
Russia and America were particularly high during the Cold War.
More recently, Russian interference in the 2016 United States election became an extremely
hot topic.
Donald Trump was a deeply unpopular President throughout his time in office, and many of
his detractors hold Russia accountable for his election.
More recently though, the narrative has flipped a bit.
With Trump kicked off of nearly every social media platform, conservatives have been asking
the question, why is the President of the United States banned from social media, but
Russia’s state-run account aren’t?
So it’s possible that Alex Edson has a strong stance here, and wants to get Russia kicked
off of YouTube for political reasons, but I actually think there’s another layer to
this story…
I’m not a legal expert, but the Business Casual lawsuit looks weak.
We’re talking about a few short clips used for just a few seconds on channels that publish
dozens of videos per day.
YouTube should definitely take them down, and Business Casual should receive the advertising
revenue from those videos, since they produced the original content, but it looks like the
footage was used in the context of a larger video and the RT channels weren’t directly
reuploading whole videos from Business Casual in order to steal ad revenue.
If you consider the actual economic damage done to the Business Casual channel here,
it looks pretty minimal.
The clips were used on Arabic channels, and Business Casual doesn’t even post content
in Arabic, so there isn’t really a good argument that people would watch the stolen
videos instead of Business Casual’s original content, thus depriving them of views and
ad revenue.
But I think Alex is playing a bigger economic game with this lawsuit.
See, YouTube and really all the big tech companies are under immense pressure right now from
the U.S.
Government.
As I’ve mentioned in previous videos, both Elizabeth Warren on the left, and Josh Hawley
on the right, are calling to break up big tech companies.
The last thing YouTube needs right now is a lawsuit gaining steam that makes them look
like they are helping spread Russian disinformation.
So this case could just get settled out of court.
Essentially, YouTube might just pay Alex to go away.
That could be a great outcome for him.
Even though Business Casual brings in decent viewer numbers and probably makes thousands
of dollars every month, that content costs a lot to produce, and getting a big payday
from YouTube could be significantly more profitable.
Regardless of what happens with the lawsuit, it looks like Business Casual isn’t working
on any new content at the moment, so if you’re looking to hear interesting stories about
successful companies, you should subscribe to my channel.
I just put out a great story about how Discord grew into a multi-billion dollar company and
next week will be releasing the full story of Epic Games, who created Fortnite.
In every video, I try to not only tell the story of the company in an engaging way, but
also pull out some key takeaways that any entrepreneur could apply to their own business.
And there’s a big takeaway here about the Business Casual story.
Getting copied happens all the time in business, sometimes it’s a direct copy, and you can
take legal action, but sometimes it’s just a competitive business and you can’t do
anything about it.
Regardless, you can’t lose sight of what you’re building.
The Business Casual fanbase just wants to watch engaging documentaries about business,
and all this focus on suing YouTube doesn’t help them at all.
When I started my first company, Soylent, someone in Russia funnily enough actually
put up a copycat website designed to steal customer’s credit card information.
People thought they were buying from us, but they were actually just sending money directly
to these Russian hackers.
It was annoying, but we didn’t let it distract us from our mission of making a great product.
If someone copies you, it might be extremely frustrating, but you can’t let it consume
you.
You need to stay focused on your business.
There is another option for Business Casual though.
One that would let them put pressure on Russian media while still making great content.
They could start making videos about this whole story!
The most successful channels on YouTube are personality driven, and I know I would definitely
watch behind the scenes content of Alex Edson’s fight against Russian media.
That would be extremely interesting content and I think a lot of the Business Casual fanbase
would follow along.
Regardless of what you think about Russia, or where you stand on copyright infringement,
I think we can all agree it’s unfortunate when a channel that produces great content
just stops.
In the meantime, please consider watching some of the videos on my channel, the YouTube
algorithm thinks you’ll like this one in particular.