//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqkIr-rUNpg
I am hereby issuing a retraction to statements I made on August 7, in a newsletter entitled, “Surprise, Surprise!”
In that article, I said that, beginning in 2015, a precipitous drop in advertising revenue from my former website, to 1/5th of its previous levels for 5 years straight, representing 99% of my yearly income had made me suspicious that Google was actively (if robotically) trying to put me (and others like me) out of business.
My subscribers who were users of Gmail and Google Android mobile phones were receiving my newsletters with big red flags, accompanied by messages that warned that my email “could be a scam,” and Google had taken it upon themselves to disable all of the links, in all of my newsletters that I sent. This was a direct attack on my only source of income.
The Horror. It was like being hit with a ton of bricks, when I realized just how much of my life was enmeshed with Google:
1) My entire financial survival depended on allowing Google Ads to display on my 4,200+ webpages.
2) The format of ForbiddenKnowledgeTV consisted in my selection of interesting or high-quality video clips, as the centerpiece of an article and a stimulus for reflection and discussion: 99.99% of those videos were sourced from Google-owned YouTube.
3) On top of that, my phone was an Android, which automatically availed itself of every email address from which I’d ever sent or received communication, which was over 70,000 contacts.
I wasn’t being a bonehead. Advertising has been the go-to way to subsidize the majority of publications for well over a century. I was very well-paid for five years. In the earlier years, I drew fascinating advertisers, mostly entrepreneurial businesses whose viewpoints were likely similar to those expressed on my pages. Later, virtually all my pages were plagued with repugnant ads for skin remedies, with close-ups of large age spots. Another was a cartoon of what looked like a mentally-ill homeless guy, with a headline that shrieked: “Grocery Stores Hate this Guy!”
My mass-emailing service, the actual location where the links to my pages are clicked, was consistently reporting more than double those reported to me than by Google. My email service had no reason to lie. Google did, if they wanted to steal my legitimate earnings.
It became more than clear that I desperately needed to de-Google-ize my life! You don’t see any Google Ads on this page, anymore, do you?
I tried other advertising services, but they paid only a small fraction of what Google did.
I was rejected by one the high-end advertising service because of the “nature” of my content. In other words, that particular company was ALSO following Google’s new policy. The other service rejected me because my operation wasn’t (yet) big enough, failing to garner a minimum of 500,000 *unique* page views per month. I had 1.2 million page views per month – but these were from around 180,000 individuals per month, which was well below the required minimum.
Friends told me to stop being so paranoid; that the page view discrepancies were probably due to many people’s increasing use of ad-blocking software. Then, I was shown an article about a “glut” in the online advertising business, which had even even hurt the bottom line of a massive company, Google’s nemesis, Facebook.
So THAT was it! I announced it in a newsletter on August 7th – but now, I’m retracting those statements, due to the discovery made in this video by Aaron Hawkins, the creator of the fantastic StormCloudGathering YouTube channel and whose videos I’ve been broadcasting since they consisted of him walking with his infant child strapped to his chest.
This video, which he released last week now confirms that my initial fears were correct.
Hawkins discovered a new clause was recently added to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that is Google’s Terms of Service, which would signal the Queen of Hearts to shout, “Off with her head!”
YouTube considers the following content to be inappropriate for advertising, which “includes but is not limited to” the usual suspects, like p0rnographic content, foul language, violence, etc. – and now, the final one, listed beneath the “Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items,” there appears a new category:
CONTROVERSIAL OR SENSITIVE SUBJECTS AND EVENTS, INCLUDING SUBJECTS RELATED TO WAR, POLITICAL CONFLICTS, NATURAL DISASTERS AND TRAGEDIES, EVEN IF GRAPHIC IMAGERY IS NOT SHOWN.
Hmmm! That’s what I call putting Alt Media out of business! The inclusion of “natural disasters and tragedies” is particularly interesting (translation: “weather warfare” and “false flags”!)
At least, I wasn’t alone. Luke Rudkowski made a video with a similar announcement to Hawkins’ about three months ago, about having his videos demonetized and his page views reduced. He’s since been flogging his Change University school of guerrilla YouTube filmmaking, which teaches students his methods for crashing high-profile events and the strategies for placing equipment and of getting up in the faces of people like Henry Kissinger, to confront them about their genocidal actions.
My situation was slightly different, in that I didn’t use Google Ads for a YouTube channel but instead used them on my own website.
After 6 months of banging my head against the wall, I knew that I had to change my business model, if I were to continue to publish. After a couple of brainstorms, I decided that would switch to an eCommerce platform, all the better to fly under the radar of ad blocking software and then to reach into my community of talented subscribers and offer them a place to sell their wares to like-minded individuals.
The hope was that the vendors’ payment of a commission (of their own choosing), for the direct sales made from my soon-to-be re-launched website would subsidize the publication of the newly-dubbed FKTV.IS.
Too bad, I didn’t realize that having an Icelandic domain put my site on the Dark Web – a perfect venue for selling heroin and the services of international hitmen. So out-of-they way from the search engines that you could operate a criminal enterprise and not be caught. Unfortunately, that isn’t the business I’m in. Further, the eCommerce platform is has the most turgid and cumbersome code out there, making it illegible by Google, causing me to lose 90% of my daily visitors, who came from organic search.
The November 2015 launch was delayed by a couple of weeks, because the new site was sabotaged and deleted last week by the Ukrainian techs, to which the LA-based Namecheap (AVOID!) hosting service had off-shored their customer service. Thye apparently didn’t like my numerous articles on MH-17, which were counter to the narrative of their US-backed, Nazi government.
If Scottsdale, Arizona-based GoDaddy does that to me, then we’ll know we’re in big trouble on our little planet! (But at least, the new site will be backed-up on 4 continents!)
Anyway, my eCommerce experiment bombed and I’ve been back to the drawing board, struggling with developers who go AWOL for weeks at a time – pop in for a minute, the disappear again. The eCommerce platform I use is highly noisome. I can hardly blame them!
Chin up. I do have upcoming announcements about an exciting new direction for FKTV and the unveiling of a beautiful new website that doesn’t look like a Polish wedding cake! Stay tuned!
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