Why you need to support Rumble!

Lessons from the YouTube trenches

For the past two years I have operated a video channel on both YouTube and Rumble called “Old Men in Chairs.” For the first six months, I recorded videos with my friend and former reporter at my weekly Clarion newspaper, Howard Appell. Unfortunately, Howard had to discontinue his involvement due to health issues, so since August 2022 I have been mainly going solo, with the occasional guest "Old Man*."

In the beginning Howard and I did mostly political commentary on Rumble. An early experiment with cross-posting that content over to YouTube earned us a lot of censorship and banned videos. Later we started to get into music reaction videos and started a new YouTube channel, where we tried to keep the political comments to a minimum. (Not easy for me!)

Our viewership on YouTube slowly grew to almost 1,500 subscribers and last month we met the final metric to have the channel “monetized.” For those who do music reactions that is a term of art, mostly fiction! There are many pitfalls to actually earning money on YouTube, and in the first month of being monetized I have earned a grand total of .50 cents. Good thing I am not in it for the money!

A lot of the music videos we react to have the royalties claimed by the copyright holder, which means we get nothing. Some artists will release the copyright, but you have to go through an appeals process to get that done. Even for content that is not claimed, YouTube has a second hurdle, that the content must be “advertising friendly.”

Since a lot of the music I react to has conservative political content, a lot of it gets banned from monetization. As near as I can tell, any music that mentions the name Trump is automatically “not suitable.” Among others, that eliminates every song by “Trump Latinos” as well some great AI-produced Trump raps by Hi-Rez and others, and the songs “Trump won” by Natasha Owens and “81 million votes, my ass!” featuring Kari Lake. You get the idea.

Of course, any mention of the stolen 2020 Election or the not so “safe and effective” Covid Vax is also verboten on YouTube, so we have had a number of our videos removed for violations of “community standards.” Pretty much the same government-ordered BS that has been happening on Facebook and other social media for the last 4 years.

As AI powers have increased, YouTube has also perfected the art of “Shadow Banning” content they don’t like. This is a more subtle process than outright banning that can be hard to detect, but by comparing YouTube and Rumble statistics on similar content, it can be deduced.

Recently, I did some research on the relative size of YouTube and Rumble. As of Jan. 2024, YouTube is the 2nd largest web site in the world (after sister site Google) with 33 billion monthly views. Rumble has 133 million monthly views. That means that YouTube is about 250 Xs bigger than Rumble!

This morning I took a closer look at my own pattern of views on both channels. I am somewhat inconsistent in posting to Rumble, but of the 50 or more videos I have posted there, the Rumble views are averaging about 6.5% of the views that we get on YouTube for the same video. 

That's not bad when you consider that Rumble's traffic is a much tinier fraction of YouTube’s. I think we can safely assume that the average Rumble viewer is probably more conservative, more politically aware and probably more likely to be American than the average YouTuber with its global spread, and in fact, the more political content does much better on Rumble than your garden variety non-political song.

In some cases, the political content has actually done better than YouTube in total views. How is that possible if YouTube is so much bigger? The answer lies in the shadow-banning that YouTube uses to depress the reach of content it doesn’t like.

YouTube has a very effective algorithm for boosting content when they want to . I have had numerous videos receive thousands of views as a result of receiving tens of thousands of impressions. You know those little suggested videos that show up on the side of the screen or below the video you just watched? They add up!

On the other hand, when they don’t like the content, they just don’t suggest it to too many people and even go so far as to exclude it from the search results! Take my most recent reaction to “Now I ain’t saying she’s a vote rigger,” a AI Trump-rapped parody about Atlanta DA Fani Willis with some of my commentary on her very questionable testimony last week.

As of this writing, that video has only received about 60 views in the first two days that can be traced to YouTube’s 1,500 impressions. Meanwhile over on Rumble the video has 88 views. Alright, it’s not setting the world on fire on either platform, but to get almost 50% more views on Rumble which has less than 1/2 of 1 % of the reach of YouTube is quite odd, and I maintain no accident.

I could give many other examples, but the principle remains the same. When YouTube detects that your video is against the current narrative, as Sen. Schumer said in another context, “They have 6 ways from Sunday of getting even with you.”

Although all this may not be apparent to the average viewer, it is very obvious to the video creators who have access to the analytics and can see the damage being done to viewership and monetization. Most people who are in it for (or dependent on) the money get the message: “Stay on the reservation if you want to maintain the cash flow.”

This soft censorship can be very effective in gently pushing the overall content on the platform away from controversial subjects. I have seen many reactors shy away from reacting to more outspoken political rappers such as Tom MacDonald, Hi-Rez, Chris Webby and others.

Eventually this repression can bleed down to the artists themselves. Now they have a decision to make. Are they willing to sacrifice views and revenue on YouTube to keep telling the truth? Many are, by seeking alternative venues like Rumble and Twitter, but I see some artists starting to pull their punches and so the system is working for the wrong people!

Since YouTube’s AI can actually listen to every word you say in the video, experienced reactors learn to shy away from saying certain trigger words such as “Vaccination” or even “Suicide.” This inhibits any temptation to speak freely or tackle controversial subjects in a number of ways. First, reactors fear the video may be declared “unsuitable for advertisers.” Second, they know through bitter experience that their reaction to certain artists, and even the underlying video, will be shadow-banned so that, even if monetization is allowed, the views (and money) will be suppressed. Finally, lurking in the background is the possibility of having the video flagged and removed for violating community standards or saying the wrong word.

If that happens more than 3 times, the whole channel will be taken down and all the blood, sweat and tears that go into creating a successful channel goes up in smoke. To add insult to injury, YouTube has even been known to confiscate any earnings the creator has on account when they take down the channel. I guess YouTube never got the “Do no evil” instructions.

Lately I have come to believe that YouTube is suppressing my channel even on non-political songs just because they don’t like my freedom message. I noticed that my tribute to the late Toby Keith did pretty poorly and again somehow was mysteriously missing from search results. For all these reasons, I think my future on YouTube is increasingly perilous, especially in this election year.

For the sake of the survival of free speech, it is important to support a company that actually believes in it. Please give Rumble a chance. It may not have all the whistles and bells of YouTube, but they try harder to do the right thing. Why don’t you start right now by viewing my latest video on Rumble?

(And while you are there, please hit the subscribe button! And if you are feeling especially generous, please consider becoming a paid subscriber of this substack. I can’t live on .50 cents a month!)

https://rumble.com/v4e0ov8-old-man-reacts-to-now-i-aint-sayin-shes-a-vote-rigger...-by-c3pmeme.-a-fani.html

* By the way, the original Old Man in a Chair is British Doctor Vernon Coleman, who’s anti-vax rants got him banned from YouTube. Our name is a homage to him.

P.S. After writing this column the YouTube algorithm suddenly kicked in and began promoting this video. After 3 more days, the number of impressions more than tripled from 1,500 to almost 4,800 and the number of organic YouTube views jumped from 60 to over 350! Do you think they read this column?
In any case, I am not taking any chances on the possibility of YouTube deleting my channel and losing all the videos I have created over the last two years. Therefore I have created a second Rumble channel and have begun backing up my music reactions on the “Old Men on Chairs Music” channel. Most of my more political videos were already on my old Rumble channel which has now been renamed the “Old Men in Chairs Political” channel.