Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5270762-20140718160747

So I've been looking over a few videos that have popped up after YogDiscovery's annoncement, specifically TotalBiscuit and Nerd3's videos as well as TB's audio blog on the topic and a few statistics that both TB and Nerd3 brought up and I thought I might as well make a little article that (hopefully) shows off the counter-arguments to YogDiscovery and the idea surrounding it. If you don't already know what YogDiscovery is, then you can find out about it here.

The main point I can see popping up from stance is that YogDiscovery could seen as a form of Payola for Youtuber Coverage and as such could increase the amount of Payola on youtube. If you don't know what Payola is, it's the illegal act of an artist or record company paying a radio station to play a specific track (without obviously telling the audience) in order to make the artist and/or record company more popular and make more money. I should mention by the way, that to my knowledge this law in full only concerns the music industry so developers paying youtubers money to play games is fine as long as the youtuber clearly discloses that they were paid to cover that game. One example of this type payola would be an email that Nerd3 publicly stated from in his video in which he was offered $8,000 for one video of their game that would get at least 350,000 views (which is lower than the amount of views Dan gets on his videos on a daily basis), so basically Dan was offered 8 grand for something which to him would be one day's work. Why is this such a big concern you may ask? Well, for one if Payola were to become a common thing across the Youtube gaming space, it could literally eliminate any coverage of Indie Games on Youtube as their developers wouldn't have the money that the AAA games developers have to pay youtubers for coverage. You can probably figure out a couple of other reasons yourself so i'll just leave this point here since I'd rather not make this more long and probably more boring than this post most likely already is.

Another main concern that a lot of people have pointed out is that what happens if say The Yogscast out a video of a game on the same day as TB or Nerd3 or NorthernLion or some other big youtuber put out a video of the same game? How do they determine how much of the popularity spike's money is for them and how much is for the devs if the popularity spike on the same day is from different people and The Yogscast have no referal links or any other way of precisely telling how much of that popularity spike came from Yogscast. The only "solution" I can see from that problem would to be to just give the popularity spike's money percentage to The Yogscast even if some of that popularity spike came from other people and that could result in some very serious issues. Some of you might be saying right now that that situation would happen in a very high rarity, not so...in fact, it would actually happen very commonly as most of youtube's biggest gaming names upload on a daily or bi-daily basis much like yogscast. It would also happen even more commonly with new games that are just being released as the situation that always happens when it comes to videos of new release is that the faster you get that video out of that new game, more views your going to get because people want to see that new game as quickly as possible and hence the chances of The Yogscast and some other big youtuber uploading a video of the same game on the same day and both causing a big popularity spike increase massively.

Those are just two of quite a few counter arguments i've found out about in not just YogDiscovery it's self, but with the idea of Youtube Payola surrounding YogDiscovery, If anyone wants to counter-argue any of my points then feel free to post in the comments. 