Hi I’m Mike.
It was Winston Churchill who said You have enemies?
Good.
That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Are the topics covered on our channel too controversial for the main stream?
Do people not want to put a face to their food?
Today, we get take a look at those questions, and the future of livestock ranching channels
like ours on our Wyoming life.
If you are a follower of Our Wyoming Life, then
you probably know what I am going to talk about this week, our issues with youtube and
how that effects what we do and how we are going to do it from here on out, and if you
are new, thanks for joining us, I would hope that you are going to subscribe but let me
warn you, this isn’t going to be the normal type of episode for us here.
On any given week you can find us working our tails off.
Doing our best to keep ahead of the workload that seems to just flow from everywhere here
on the ranch.
Ranching and farming can sometimes seem like a never-ending battle.
Whether it’s against weather, equipment, animals, and sometimes even yourself.
I can admit it, that sometimes I am my own worst enemy.
I get into my own head sometimes, psych myself out and this week has been one of those weeks.
I guess that’s why I decided that this would be a good time to just sit down with you.
Talk about the week, explain the problems we have had and get it over with.
Put it to bed.
Move on.
So lets talk about the gorilla in the room.
On July 10th we posted a video to YouTube called Putting the bulls in with the cows.
For two weeks that video was up on youtube and it gain good traction and garnered a lot
of views from folks just like you.
In two weeks that video had 330,000 some odd views.
To be blunt, a lot of of those views probably didn’t come from people just like you.
A lot of them came from people who saw the thumbnail of a bull on a cow and came to watch
that act and that act alone.
Which is a little weird.
As with all of our videos we put it out as an attempt to educate people on the farm and
ranch life.
To show people where their food came from and hopefully some where along the line, one,
two or 50 videos in they start to think about that.
On July 25th, somebody reported the video as inappropriate.
I don’t know if they found the fact that we showed a bull up on a cow, mating as offensive
or if they just thought the whole video was rude and vulgar.
I don’t know.
And I don’t really care.
The video was reported to youtube, youtube said whoa! and the views on it basically stopped.
For this next part to make sense, I have to clue you into how YouTube works when it come
to promoting videos.
As videos gain views and become popular, Youtube then starts suggesting them to more people.
Just like if you watch this video to the end, there will be suggested videos for you.
It may lead you to another farm or ranch video, and that video can be from any channel.
As the bull video gained popularity, youtube started suggesting it to more and more people
and as long as those people were clicking on the video, youtube was happy.
Ads were playing, youtube was making money off the video and so were we.
Once the video was reported, like I said, all things stopped.
Erin actually came to me and told me that for some reason the bull video had went from
over 2000 views per hour to only 20, in minutes.
We didn’t know what was going on, it was only later that day when we found out it was
reported as inappropriate.
You might think that we were upset over the fact that we no longer had those views creating
income for the channel.
But if you think that, then you don’t know us well at all.
That’s ok, I hope you take the time to get to know us but if you don’t, that’s fine
too.
Ya see, the money we make off of youtube isn’t much, and in fact that video had only made
us.
In fact ill show you.
Out of those 332,259 views off that episode.
We made $184.55 that’s it.
So if its not the money that made us upset that youtube , the very next day deemed our
video unsuitable for most advertisers than what was it.
Well I’ll tell you.
That video had momentum, it was reaching a ton of people.
I’ll give into the fact that a lot of those views were from people that just came to watch
something that maybe considered shocking or weird or whatever but a few of those people
that were watching the video were getting our message.
They were joining our community and becoming, just like you people that care about agriculture.
About 2% of new viewers to our channel were subscribing and joining the herd.
That may not seem like much but we gained almost 3000 subscribers from that one video
in those two weeks.
With youtubes decision, that was done.
They were no longer suggesting the video to new people and although the video is still
there to watch, that’s all it is, its just there.
We aren’t alone in this boat.
We did a little research, and countless channels have dealt with this issue, and a lot of them
farm and ranch channels dealing with livestock.
There are a lot of bull breeding videos online and you will be hard pressed to find one of
them that is monetized for the creator.
This is a problem we are going to deal with.
Even though our videos are presented in an educational manner.
We didn’t just throw up 3 minutes of bulls doing it to shock and gain views the easy
way - its going to be an issue.
When it comes time to sell calves, is that going to be found inappropriate, we don’t
know.
Youtube is a business and its there to make money.
If they feel that advertisers wont want to put their ad on a certain type of video, they
are not going to let that video make money.
Worse yet, they aren’t going to promote that video.
We were told from youtube that monetization status has no effect on how a video is promoted
or suggested.
That is obviously false.
The moment our video was found to of inappropriate content, suggestions stopped and the good
things it was doing were stopped as well.
So that’s where we sit with that.
Is there anything we can do about it?
Nope.
Not a thing, there is no appeal process but I can say that I am happy for what that video
did in the two weeks it was allowed to live a free life.
That video brought people to us that may never have found our channel, people we never would
have met or had the chance to talk to and people that we hope we help by spreading the
message of how important where our food comes from is.
Because it is important.
But you already know that.
By the way, we aren’t even attempting to monetize this video.
There is no point.
The footage we have shown you would have gotten it dinged in a few weeks anyway for one reason
or another.
I want to thank every one for the support they have show us to this point over this
issue.
We’ve gotten emails and comments asking us if this is going to change the way we do
anything and the answer is no.
As the world becomes more sensitive to things and easily offended, I imagine it is going
to harder and harder for channels such as ours that show the real world of raising livestock
to it fairly.
Over the next five years, experts have told me that channels like ours may not even be
eligible to be monetized because of the sensitive nature of advertisers and people in general.
I get it, I worked in radio and advertising for many years.
Advertisers play to their customers and if you advertise on something your customers
don’t like then they aren’t going to buy from you, its that simple but who gets to
decide what is offensive and what is just nature.
That’s a hard call but I can tell you that policies like that are limiting the reach
of channels like ours, through suggested videos and organic promotion.
Youtube isn’t going to help us, we are too controversial, which is something I never
ever thought I would say about our channel in a million years but just by the pure nature
of our lives we are.
When it comes down to it, its up to us to spread our own message.
And when I say us, I don’t mean me and Erin.
I mean all of us.
If you are still here, you care.
Share our videos, heck make your own.
If you share a post or a video and one person you share it to shares it, it doesn’t take
long to reach thousands.
I’m not saying you have to share everything but share what you care about.
What you care about is important to others, even if they don’t know it yet.
The question of the week has been, whats going to happen to our Wyoming life.
The answer.
We are going to live it.
And we are going to share it with you.
No matter what anybody says, bulls are still going to mate with cows all over the world
and eventually the product will end up feeding millions, if you don’t want to see it, then
you have a choice, turn off the channel.
But we will still be here and we really do hope you will be too.
Coming up this week we start with a brand new breath of fresh air.
The project list is coming up on Tuesday with a major breakdown in haying that will slow
down the entire process but hopefully wont put us our of commission.
Erin and I will be livestreaming on Wednesday night this week, Thursday is our normal night
but its Graces birthday, she turns the big 5, so we will be changing the livestream date
for that and we have a brand new feature coming up in our livestream that I really hope you
are just going to love, I’m really excited for it.
We really hope to see you there.
Until then, remember to forgive you enemies, mostly because it annoys the hell out of them.
Have a great week and thanks for joining us in our Wyoming life.