Finally, the draconian yet vague Terms of Service (TOS) of Google-YouTube have been publicly revealed to the content creators – and the latter are rightfully freaked-out.
You used to have to dig through thousands of pages of legalese to understand what had been done to your business.
Google-YouTube were not forthcoming a year ago, when they defunded some of the best dissident websites around. All we saw was our incomes evaporate to less than 5% of our previous monthly earnings, without any warning or explanation – while Google-YouTube kept their ads up and running on our webpages, as if everything were OK.
I, for one am grateful that the cat is finally out of the bag. A year ago, thousands of alternative news publishers, like me were simply put out of business and many, like me are totally struggling to keep going. Now, video content creators will suffer the same fate.
Google-YouTube’s public excuse has been that they’re trying to make their content more “advertising friendly”. Personally, I observed my own website’s Google ads devolve from those coming from exciting independent businesses to ugly, hard-to-watch ads about a homeless guy who was “making grocery stores mad”. (The ads were so unattractive that I still have no idea what they were for).
In my opinion, this change of Google-YouTube’s TOS has nothing to do with being “Advertising Friendly.” It has a lot to do with censorship.
In the next day or two, you will finally see the new website for ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net!
I’m so proud of the technicians from around the world who’ve translated my 4,700+-page website across platform- and software-corruption jams. It’s been a herculean effort on the part of so many people. I can never thank each individual involved enough.
I feel lucky, in a way to have already walked through that scary Vale of Tears of having my business pulled out from under me – without any warning – to have survived the shock and to have that behind me.
I apologize for making you endure my ugly website since last November. (I learned a lot over the past year).
Your generosity and my business loans have kept me alive while I’ve earned virtually zero in advertising income since July 2015. The ads you’ve been seeing on the soon-to-be obsolete site were “placeholders” for prospective “real” advertisers who I never regained enough SEO to speak with – and who I now hope I never have to deal with. (We’ll see how that works out).
Get ready for the reboot!
