Some assholes are suing YouTube to end sponsorships, and they will ruin everything

by ersatz_cats

Howdy everyone. I wasn’t expecting to write this bonus update as we await a certain judge ruling in another case, especially when I have an existing writing backlog which I am very diligently procrastinating on so I can play Final Fantasy 5 lol. But I saw some ridiculous nonsense show up on my Twitter feed recently, and I just had to say something right away.

As the passage of time teaches all of us, assholes have a tendency to ruin everything. Remember when you used to be able to use a public restroom without tracking down a clerk for the door code? Assholes ruined that. Or when everything didn’t come in impenetrable tamper-evident packaging? Assholes ruined that too. A long time ago, guys were free to sport a small Charlie Chaplin moustache. Some asshole definitely ruined that. Scalpers, cheaters, landlords, people who get free shit and then lodge formal complaints. Everything from electric cars to Harry Potter is just one asshole away from being ruined for everyone. Hell, not even your name is guaranteed to be safe from one of these twats.

Unfortunately, some assholes are now out to ruin something else. As I found reported by Dexerto, a bunch of unmitigated losers have decided to sue YouTube over the fact many content creators include paid sponsorships in their videos. The premise of the lawsuit is, these plaintiffs paid for YouTube Premium, an upgraded service which they argue guarantees an “ad-free” experience “free from interruption”. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say this is about the shittiest idea anyone has ever had, and will literally ruin YouTube for everyone, including the bottom-feeders participating in this lawsuit, to the extent they actually care about the YouTube experience they allegedly pay for.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of what this all entails, I want to be crystal clear: These people are fucking assholes. (While I have read the relevant body text of the complaint, I am deliberately not linking the complaint nor looking up or discussing the identities of any specific plaintiffs. I don’t even want to know who these fucks are.) Now, when I say these people are assholes, I do so regardless of whatever motivation they may think or claim they have for doing this. If you urinate into the community drinking well, you are an asshole, regardless of why you did it. It doesn’t matter whether you were drunk, or were too lazy to go somewhere else, or if you deliberately did it to own the libs or whatever. You’re just an asshole. And anyone participating in this lawsuit is just an asshole.

But today, we will discuss motivations, and expected outcomes. I speak only for myself on this. I have discussed this lawsuit with exactly zero content creators, though I can easily guess how they feel about it. I am not representing anyone’s interests but my own, as someone who enjoys watching free content on YouTube. And this is certainly not a case of “Woe is the poor billion dollar media company.” I’m also not going to waste any time opining on the strict legal merits of the case, because I’m not qualified to do so, and because that’s really beside the point I wish to make. (If I absolutely had to guess, I would assume Alphabet Inc. has accounted for everything in their user agreements, and in the United States, the fine print is king.) Instead, calling back to the prolific history of assholes ruining things for everyone, I hope to illustrate why this lawsuit, even if it’s not “successful”, can and will be a disaster for fucking everyone, including me and you.

WHAT IS THIS LAWSUIT ABOUT?

Let’s get one thing out of the way early. What these people want is money. That’s what their lawsuit is asking for. To plagiarize one of my favorite content creators: The answer is always the same. Why did this dumb thing happen? Oh yeah, money.

I’m going to be 100% real with you on this point. If “litigants sue a big company because they want money” were the extent of it, I honestly wouldn’t care much. Grifters gonna grift. I’m truly sorry if any of you are offended by me saying this (lololol), but people stealing from the rich is not a problem I expend energy on. There are so many more important things to worry about in this world. For instance, I choose not to get worked up over homeless shoplifters ripping off big corporations. The infringed parties are perfectly capable of fending for themselves. (Since someone will no doubt argue this point, let me say I’m not particularly convinced of the popular maxim that shoplifting increases everyone else’s prices as opposed to lowering them, at least when it comes to major retailers. You can at least see the inflation that’s tied to things like the increased price of gas. Somehow, the way wage theft reduces your buying power never gets talked about the same way.)

However, when we’re talking about a lawsuit like this one, there are tangible downstream consequences for everybody. This is more comparable to that guy who goes and does something stupid, gets his own ass injured, sees dollar signs in his eyes, goes to court and says “Why didn’t the city install guard rails to prevent me from doing that stupid thing?”, and now all the reasonable people have to deal with these big annoying guard rails everywhere, so the next dumbass won’t accidentally injure themself on purpose.

With that said, this YouTube lawsuit is 36 pages, and it is at least nominally presenting as having a grievance beyond “You, rich company, give me money.” And lawsuits, even meritless settlement-fishing ones against rich faceless megacorporations, can have real consequences for everyone. And so from here on, I will set aside the obvious cash grab motivation, and reckon with the legal complaint on the terms it expresses.

It doesn’t take long to reach the crux of the author’s argument:

Wait, “marketing for local attorneys”? I’m immediately confused. Isn’t this supposed to describe the YouTube Premium experience? You know, without those platform-level ads that target you by location and interest? How are you still getting ads for “local attorneys”? Local to where, exactly? Don’t tell me they clicked on a video from some law channel, and the host said “Link share and subscribe, or if you’re in the Waukegan area and need a personal injury lawyer, call me at 555-HELP!” And now they’re suing YouTube because the thing they knowingly clicked on “advertised” to them?

So yes, the plaintiffs are upset that YouTube Premium is advertised (har har) as “ad-free” and having “no interruptions”, when the videos they choose to watch may innately contain advertising outside of YouTube’s direct control. As you can see above, the example they show is of a podcast with a mid-roll sponsorship segment.

Right away, it is not lost on me that the uploader of the given example helpfully isolated their own sponsor segment as a distinct chapter titled “Ads”, as if to help you identify which portion of the video the typical viewer would not have interest in, enabling people to better skip to their preferred content if they wish. And yet, this considerate choice is now being levied against the platform as proof of the presence of paid advertising. So I guess the lesson here is, don’t help people? I can imagine these plaintiffs tearfully begging some eatery at closing time, “Please, do you have any spare food, my family is very hungry,” only to swiftly cast aside the burlap sack, “A-ha! You just violated city code, buddy! I’ll see your ass in court!”

And here’s where the author expresses the lawsuit’s intention: Yes, they want money, but they also want to, in their words, “put a stop to YouTube’s misrepresentations and/or omissions”:

7. Thus, YouTube Premium fails to provide the service that its members bargained for—an ad-free experience with no interruptions.
8. Plaintiffs are YouTube Premium members who relied on YouTube’s representations that Premium was “ad-free” and that it would provide video content with no interruptions. Through this suit, Plaintiffs seek to put a stop to YouTube’s misrepresentations and/or omissions and to remedy the loss of their benefit of the bargain.

Don’t get hung up on their use of the word “misrepresentations”. These assholes don’t give a shit about the exact words YouTube used to promote their service, except to the extent such words can be weaponized. Loathe as I am to compare these jokers to the heroes at Stop Killing Games, a selective analogy here would be instructive. SKG doesn’t want game publishers to more openly announce that games are purchased strictly as a license, or to better identify when game service will be permanently ended. They want the industry to stop killing games. That’s the mission.

Similarly, the clowns backing this lawsuit don’t want YouTube to better identify that YouTube Premium will only shield viewers from YouTube’s own inserted ads, and that the service does not affect any advertising inherent to the content viewers choose to watch on their platform. They want to end in-video sponsorships, or at least, force YouTube to identify each and every one of them and exclude or auto-skip them for “Premium” subscribers.

If you don’t believe me yet, the complaint’s focus on and hostility toward what we typically call “sponsorships” is unmistakable. Note that the filing doesn’t actually use the word “sponsorship” except once when quoting state law, choosing instead to refer to these as “advertisements”, a rather broad label that is likely to have even more ramifications.

I’m sure some nonzero number of people reading this are thinking “Well, I don’t like sponsorship segments. What’s so bad about that?” Ah, my naive young friend – allow me to introduce you to the hell you would so easily embrace.

WHAT IS AN ADVERTISEMENT?

The complaint continues by listing several examples of YouTube touting the Premium service as “ad-free” and having “no interruptions”, as compared to the site’s cheaper “Premium Lite” service which represents as mostly free of advertising. They then list examples of in-content advertisements from major creators including Markiplier and Kallmekris, selling VPNs and soda and whatnot. Of course, the plaintiffs are scoundrels, so they make no effort to identify these spots being published by video producers as distinct from the ads YouTube has direct control over.

Now, I can only rely on this complaint text, as well as my renown mind-reading super-powers, but I think I can confidently say this about the plaintiffs: They know the difference between an actual YouTube ad and a creator sponsorship, but they’re pretending not to, in the hope of befuddling some Wendy Chang judge who has no idea what’s going on. (But yeah, I’m sure they’re super-concerned about YouTube’s “miSrEpReSenTaTiOnS”.)

The dishonesty also comes through when the complaint discusses the concept of “interruption”. YouTube isn’t “interrupting” anything; they’re allowing you to watch whatever bit of content you chose, even if the content you chose is “True crime podcast with the occasional paid advert mixed in.” As before, they know the difference. And once again, content creators attempt to mitigate the disruption of these ads, and those attempts are used against them:

111. Some videos include a loading bar at the bottom of the interruption that moves from the left portion of the screen to the right portion of the screen, serving as a visual cue to show viewers when the regular and expected programming will resume.
112. Some videos even label these distinct and interrupting segments of their videos, recognizing that they are interruptions.
113. At all relevant times that YouTube marketed and sold the YouTube Premium service, YouTube knew or should have known about YouTube Premium contained interruptions—irrespective of whether such interruptions are coined an “ad” or a Promotion.

“Big mistake including that helpful loading bar! Don’t you wish you had made your sponsorships more annoying and unskippable?”

Again, they’re suing YouTube, because (even by a charitable interpretation) someone else “interrupted” their content. I mean, if someone knocks on their door, and they have to pause their video to answer it, will YouTube get sued for that as well? “Bwaaaaah, You told me there would be no interruptions!” What are those guard rails gonna look like?

And how the fuck is YouTube supposed to know what portion of your chosen content is the part you want to see, and which portion is the “interruption”? You clicked on it, motherfucker!

I guess all creators would now have to label their ads “The most important segment of this video”, so as not to be considered an “interruption”? Or actively try to trick viewers into thinking their spots are part of the content? Thanks for that, shitheads.

What if you’re watching like a cut-up of concert performances, and you like five of the six bands, but you just aren’t into Creed or whoever? Is that YouTube’s fault as well? “They’re interrupting what I want to see, and it’s an ad because they’re trying to sell a new album!”

And that brings us to an important question: What exactly is an “advertisement”? In other words, what precisely are the plaintiffs asking YouTube to curtail?

It’s easy to focus in on sponsor segments. You know, where it’s like “Hey friends, before we continue with the video, I’m super-excited to tell you about this laundry detergent or fuck whatever.” Those are more-or-less easy to identify. Content creator gets paid a fee, they promote a product. Advertising.

But what if they’re not paid money? What if they’re given free product? Is that still “advertising”? I would assume so.

What if it’s less of a direct product pitch, but more of a tech review, where the reviewed material was provided free-of-charge? Is that more “advertising”? Hell, are tech reviews in general in trouble, even if the reviewer paid retail price? Is that not “advertising” one way or another? Even if you click on it?

What if there’s a commercial pitch with no compensation at all? What if it’s their brother’s business, and they just want to help him by giving him a shout-out? Would that still run afoul of the “ad-free” experience? Can they even mention in passing the fact that their sibling owns a business of any kind?

What if your brother’s “business” is not actually a “business”? What if it’s a non-profit charity? Does that change things?

What if there’s no self- or family-interest of any kind? Someone’s just doing their podcast, and tells a story of how there’s a heat wave and they couldn’t wait to get home and drink their Gatorade with a Nutella sandwich. Oops, will YouTube get sued for that now? Because it promoted a product?

We can go on and on. Do you like watching sports highlights?

Maybe you still will after everything gets blurred out.

Do you like watching Games Done Quick on YouTube?

Not anymore, you don’t!

What about literal advertisements? I’m talking historical adverts of particular academic or entertainment interest. Mean Joe Greene, early Hamburglar, old jingles, smoking Flintstones, that guy who couldn’t say “Aaron Burr”. Is YouTube going to have to crack down on these to conform to an “ad-free” experience? Or what if, God forbid, you see some bizarre new Old Spice commercial on TV and you want to look up what the fuck you just saw? Because remember, the notion of “You’re the dumbass who clicked on the content with the advertising” apparently doesn’t factor into the equation.

“Oh, come on ersatz. The lawsuit’s talking about advertisements that interrupt content. You’re being unfair.”

Am I, though?

Are the lawyers really going to interpret this through the lens of your common sense?

The complaint proactively attempts to address a distinction made on a YouTube Help page between “ads” and things like “promotions”. Here’s a portion of that YouTube Help text:

You may still see branding or promotions embedded in the content by the creator, as well as promotional links, shelves and features in and around the content that are added or enabled by the creator.

Again, that’s YouTube trying to explain the obvious. Continuing with the lawsuit complaint, the author then provides what I would call a suspiciously detailed list of examples of such “branding” or “promotions”. One shows some guy asking viewers to subscribe to his channel. (Is that another “advertising” “interruption”? Can you not do that anymore?) Another example is of Logan Paul, placing a box of his Lunchable horseshit on a table in frame. Then there are those links you see in video descriptions, as well as promotions for available merchandise:

Oh, you can add that to the list as well. Content creators will literally not be able to stop and tell you about their merch stores, because that would be interrupting the content to advertise something.

A careful reading of the complaint would suggest these examples are included to show the difference between the “branding or promotions” YouTube describes, and the sort of standalone sponsorship segments people get worked up over. However, that framing is a bit subtle, and people – yes, including judges – are not always that careful when reading. I called the list “suspiciously detailed” because it reads as though it wants the viewer to walk away thinking “Wow, for an ad-free experience, YouTube sure has a lot of ads everywhere!”

But what I find hilarious – and this is why I don’t think I’m being unfair – is that the complaint author can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge “Okay, those aren’t the ads we have a grievance over.” Instead, they try to pull an “arguendo”:

In other words, “Assuming, for the sake of argument, that these promotions don’t qualify as ads…”

Kiss my ass.

As I said before, this is not a marketing issue. They’re not doing this to push for YouTube to pitch Premium more clearly as “Free of ads placed by YouTube directly, though of course there could be ads or promotions as creator segments or in the background of videos, and no, obviously we’re not going to actively police the content you choose to watch to make sure they don’t advertise you anything, you dumbass cretin.” As asinine as the plaintiff’s expectations may be, they do make them quite clear:

104. YouTube could prevent its Premium members from being forced to sit through ads placed by its content creators, yet YouTube has failed or refused to take steps to eliminate such ads from the viewing experience of its Premium members.

And as a last “Fuck you”, the plaintiffs claim that the assurance of an ad-free experience was “a substantial factor in their decision to subscribe to YouTube Premium”, and that they “would not have purchased or subscribed to those services” otherwise. Right. They really want you to believe they bought YouTube Premium, and continue to do so, under the belief that doing so would scrub creator sponsorships and other incidental advertising altogether. Sadly, some sucker judge or jury may fall for this. I do not.

HOW WOULD THIS EVEN WORK?

Now, you might be rightly thinking that advertising is not a new thing, and thus perhaps issues like this have been reckoned with before. There do exist laws that attempt to define advertising. You see people with fake cigarettes on television routinely, but cigarette commercials in the U.S. have been banned on TV and radio for several decades. In some countries, advertising to children is highly regulated, and has been for a long time. So surely, one may think, some guidelines can be enacted, so creators can do their sponsorships for us poor plebs to watch, and the paid Premium members can have these segments auto-skipped… right?

The first problem with this proposition is one of scale. The FCC (or whatever you have in your given country) deals with a few television and radio networks, and each party has their team of attorneys. The affected entities can work directly together, and come to an understanding. YouTube simply cannot have that interaction with hundreds of millions of YouTube channels, the vast majority of which don’t have legal teams on retainer. Currently, there’s literally nothing stopping me, a non-monetized creator with a casual channel, from uploading a video with a pitch for this very blog site (which I have done), or even one with a sponsorship from some business desperate enough to pay me money.

The complaint’s own author inadvertently illustrates how impossible it would be for YouTube to actively police its content in an attempt to enforce sponsorship guidelines:

33. According to YouTube, over 20 million videos are uploaded to the platform per day. Approximately 500 hours of video are uploaded on the platform every minute.

I’m sure some people who aren’t merely assholes fishing for money could have it in their mind that some rigorous system could be implemented, wherein easily-defined “advertising” segments are identified and auto-skipped for Premium users, as if this would work as well in practice as they imagine. Note that there already exists the next best thing. As someone who does not pay for Premium I did not know this, but YouTube actually tracks which video segments are most often skipped by viewers, and proactively offers Premium users the option to jump past those same portions, per a single touch of the screen. The fact that YouTube makes this skip optional and not mandatory makes sense, as nothing about the skip necessarily says “This is a paid sponsorship”. A podcaster could have said “I’m about to spoil the new James Bond movie, please skip ahead exactly sixty seconds if you don’t want to hear it.” Also, believe it or not, many people are fine with content creators doing sponsorships, and aren’t interested in skipping anything, even with the most convenient of options. And why should their experience be any less valid? Speaking for myself, Karl Jobst once did a topical joke in a sponsorship segment, and now as the diligent researcher that I am, I review his ad breaks every time just in case he does it again. So yes, YouTube does the good thing, and offers the most reasonable solution to make as many people as happy as possible. And they’re still getting sued for it anyway, because that’s apparently not enough.

There are numerous obvious problems with the proposition that YouTube could rigorously identify each interruptive advertisement and force mandatory-skips for whichever class of users want that option. But the issue is not really that some sort of reasonable line could not hypothetically be drawn in an ideal world. The problem is that YouTube will not bother with that. If this becomes a tangible legal liability, YouTube will overreach and play it safe. And they’re not wrong to, either! Losing litigation isn’t a suggestion, or a slap on the wrist. Even in the most ideal implementation, it will result in content creators being required to identify all their own timestamps for “advertisements” and “interruptions”, as broadly defined as possible.

Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

As an easy example, if you so much as briefly mention your merch store, you would have to identify the ten or so seconds where this “advertising” “interruption” begins and ends. You can’t just say, “Oh come on, everyone who clicks on my vids knows I’m going to pitch my merch.” Because the lawsuit is arguing the opposite. “We’re too dumb to know that YouTube isn’t responsible for any incidental advertising I choose to click on, so we want them to install protective fencing everywhere, because I can’t be responsible for managing my own YouTube experience.”

You just know, with certainty, that there are some people who welcomed the news of this lawsuit, who want to never hear about anyone’s merch store, and who anticipate the prospect of no longer having to manually skip sponsorships, who have also spent their lives complaining “It’s so stoopid there’s all these rules now about what you can’t do or say.”

So will literally every YouTube video now begin with the message “This video may contain advertising”? Would that not become the thing everyone is annoyed by? And would that even preclude this nonsense? “It doesn’t matter, YouTube still promised me no interruptions.”

And then you have the question of enforcement. What happens when a popular creator says the words “my sister’s restaurant”, and gets unexpectedly dinged? What will YouTube do about repeat offenders?

In this brave new world where this lawsuit is successful, and YouTube has to enforce an “ad-free” experience – which again, aside from the money, is what the plaintiffs are actually seeking – we’re talking about reliance on two mechanisms of enforcement: Self-regulation, and automation.

It just so happens, we don’t need to wonder what such a system would look like. We already have a crystal clear example in practice right now, and literally everyone fucking hates it:

That’s right, we’re talking about the potential creation of a new, second “copyright claim” system, except it would issue shit like “advertising violation” strikes.

This is what I mean when I say YouTube will play it safe and overshoot everything. Because again, this is now a legal liability. Fun fact: It’s already a legal liability, without the lawsuit even having progressed. YouTube is literally being sued because they didn’t clamp down on supposedly infringing activity by its users. It doesn’t matter that neither those users nor YouTube itself have done anything wrong, just like it doesn’t matter that your upload should legally constitute “fair use”. YouTube isn’t going to adjudicate this in your favor, not when they’re the ones being sued for your conduct. They’ll make you check a box saying “I agree that my upload conforms to YouTube’s new Advertising Identification Policy”, and they’ll whack you when the algorithm decides your meme reference to Wheaties or whatever violates your agreement.

Imagine a YouTube ecosystem where, if someone doesn’t like something you uploaded, they can get it scrubbed by narcing on you. At least currently, to abuse YouTube’s copyright policy, you have to claim to be the owner of the infringing uploaded material – which obviously doesn’t stop some liars. But this “advertising strike” system wouldn’t even have that restriction. “Excuse me, I pay for Premium, and that’s an interruption of the content I intended to watch.” How inundated is that inbox going to get? You don’t actually believe real people at YouTube are going to sit and read these claims and fairly weigh the commercial and/or interruptive value of each disputed segment, do you?

When Hbomberguy discussed plagiarism on YouTube, there’s a reason he was especially adamant that expecting YouTube to fix the problem for us was not a viable solution. He knows what that system would look like. So do we.

And Sweet Jiminy Jesus Fuckballs, what about the backlog of existing videos with “advertising”? Almost 15 billion-with-a-“B” videos that currently have no sponsorship/advertising identification (at least none that sufficiently conforms to a new mandatory rubric). Is YouTube expected to just start over!? Are they gonna have Google Gemini run through and take down all the old videos you love because they trigger some flag as potentially advertisey-interruptish?

Remember, the plaintiffs are refusing to concede that non-interruptive ads are not a concern. They are demanding a universally “ad-free” experience.

You might go the other extreme and say “Well, maybe YouTube can stop peddling their not-really-ad-free service, and forego that revenue.” While that would not affect me personally, that still falls squarely within the realm of “Assholes ruined it for everyone”. Lots of people pay for Premium, and are just fine with content creators getting their bag. They aren’t confused about what they’re purchasing. There already exists an understanding that YouTube can’t actually eliminate all “ads” and “interruptions”. As I’ve opined, the plaintiffs here are just pretending to not know the difference between “YouTube interrupts my chosen videos to show me their ads” and “The content I choose to watch innately contains sponsored segments that are distinct from the parts I’d prefer to watch.” They’re not dummies. They’re assholes.

The same principle applies even if you try to soften this proposition. You might be tempted to think “Okay, YouTube can still offer a premium service, but they can’t call it ‘ad-free’, they have to label it ‘mostly ad-free’ and make their qualifiers on what ads users will still see more apparent.” (As if that would satiate litigious greed.) But again, it’s not actually an issue of proper messaging. The universe where everyone (at least everyone with more than a single brain cell) knows that YouTube Premium isn’t literally universally free of incidental “advertising” or “interruptions” of any kind – that universe already exists, and YouTube is getting sued anyway, by people pretending to be confused why YouTube doesn’t actively police content creators’ sponsorships. The complaint goes to great lengths to demonstrate not only the existence of creator advertisements, but also the supposedly voluminous nature of them, something a change in rhetoric will not ameliorate. Watering down the guarantees may make a lawsuit like this less likely to prevail, but it will still come down to a judgment call on what qualifies as “excessive”, and it will not stop assholes from pissing in the well. At the risk of repeating myself, in my opinion, the plaintiffs are not doing this in the hopes of pushing YouTube to better inform them of the service terms; they’re doing this to change the nature of the service. (And for money. Always the money.)

If could go on one of my typical tangents about how complicated everything is, I’m sure some dumbass will accuse me of white-knighting for the big corporation – probably someone who didn’t bother reading the thoughts I expressed on shoplifting a moment ago lmao. I’ve been accused of everything at this point, and I struggle to care. This reminds me of a similar refrain, back circa 2010, after the passage of the so-called “Affordable Care Act”. Obamacare required all employers in the United States to provide health insurance to all “full-time” employees, defined as working 32 or more hours each week. So what do you think happened after its passage? Astonishingly, all these employers immediately cut everyone’s hours down to no more than 30 a week. Gosh, who could’ve seen that coming!? Where was Nostradamus when we needed him? And like clockwork, out came the defenders of incremental reform, ready to lay the blame at the feet of major retailers and such for doing the most predictable thing of all time. And when I tried to point out how ill-conceived all of this was from the start, I was shocked to find myself being called a “corporate stooge”.

They couldn’t understand that their favorite politician’s pet legislation directly incentivized the exact outcome they were bemoaning. It’s one thing when a CEO wakes up and says “Mwahaha, today I will be evil.” I agree, fuck CEOs. But it’s a different thing when you construct the dilemma, “You are required to shoot yourself in the foot, unless you choose to do this much easier albeit evil thing.”

And yes, like everything, it’s complicated. (Drink!) Continuing with my political rant, these capitalist enterprises will resist reforms we desperately need as a society, and there will come a point at which that resistance must be opposed in kind. But that’s for important stuff. In the case of Obamacare, I’d have been willing to stick up for the attempt, if we were talking about the actual wholesale health care reform that we desperately need in the United States – universal health care, with no “insurance”, free at the point of service, and not tied to one’s employer – rather than a bullshit half-measure band-aid (pun always intended) authored by the insurance industry specifically in the hopes of quelling the groundswell of demand for health care reform. (And even then, it wouldn’t hurt to craft the legislation to force the compliance you seek.)

Similarly, I’d be willing to back an attempt to force difficult change on YouTube if it was a reform that we needed. But this ain’t it. We’re not talking about an important cause, like combatting hate speech. Neither the sponsorship status quo nor the Premium service need to change. This is short-sighted, destructive nonsense, perpetuated by greedy plaintiffs, and supported by a few sponsorship-whiners who fundamentally just need to grow the fuck up.

GROWING THE FUCK UP

As I perused social media, I saw I was not the only one who immediately recognized what a disaster this unfolding lawsuit will be:

But as I’ve hinted, this isn’t just about the plaintiffs of this particular case, and the fact that they’re identifiable assholes. On social media, I saw a few randos expressing approval of this legal action, apparently eager at the prospect (implausible and/or ill-advised as it may be) of no longer encountering paid sponsorships in the YouTube content they watch.

These people are weird.

To be clear, I have met normal, reasonable folks who don’t like paid sponsorships and would, as an isolated matter, prefer not to see them. But like me, they understand why this stuff exists, and they tolerate it. That’s fine. If this describes you, please don’t feel as though what I’m about to say applies in your case.

However, I consistently find that the people who are really vocal about the topic, who are especially hostile to content creators doing little things to guarantee their income… they always turn out to be a couple sandwiches short of a full picnic. All you have to do is press them a bit, and you can see that not all the gears are turning.

Let’s start with an example – a true Internet scholar who goes by the name Empress Popplatine. Unfortunately for her highness, she made the rookie mistake of replying to me on social media:

Ah, so now I’m the twat. She paid YouTube to not see “the ads”, and so goshdangitall, she’d better not see any “the ads” anywhere, from anyone. As we’ve so thoroughly discussed here, this doesn’t work the way she seems to think. And I did try to explain this as best I could in Twitter’s restrictive character limit. But her eminence had other ideas:

“I’m not paying for them to police content, I’m paying them to… ensure… the content… on their platform… does not… contain…”

This is the level of intellectual rigor we’re dealing with, folks. One day, you will look for real grown-up scissors, only to discover every last pair has been replaced by those little kiddie scissors that struggle to cut melting butter. And it will be because of people like the Empress here.

It doesn’t take a lot of work to find or draw out these people’s other phony arguments:

“Content creators should get their revenue through things like Patreon instead.”

Okay, but if they can’t advertise anything, then how the fuck are they gonna tell anyone about their Patreon?

“YouTube should be paying content creators enough to not need sponsorships.”

I won’t claim any inside knowledge on YouTube monetization structures. Obviously, there would be many factors at play here, including upload frequency and viewer/follower count. Theoretically, one would be inclined to tolerate more sponsorships from someone who uploads high quality content very infrequently than they would someone who publishes low-effort clickbait every other day. But we can really set all that aside. This is a phony argument here because this lawsuit isn’t trying to solve that. It’s just pushing YouTube to curtail creators’ ability to make money independent from direct YouTube monetization. Attacking sponsorships does not help solve the issue being proposed. This is just bad faith rhetoric.

“YouTube should end sponsorships because some creators push sponsors that are just scams.”

Okay? Call those out. The specific scams, and the creators who push them. Don’t punish the creators doing the right thing. The answer is not more guard rails everywhere. I happen to know that there are creators who refuse to accept sponsorships from any entity with a cryptic business model, because it could be a scam. Good! And again, even if you want to entertain the given line of thought, this litigation is not seeking to remedy this question. The people behind this aren’t trying to solve the problems you’re invoking.

“If I was a content creator, I would never do any sponsorships of any kind.”

Yes, you would. In a snap, without any doubt. How do I know? You can’t even be inconvenienced enough to keep your yap shut about a thirty-second ad you’re free to skip over. You aren’t even able to clear that minimal hurdle. And then someone comes along and offers you thousands of dollars to plug some snake oil? You’re not fooling me, Jack. I can already see you’re not built of better principles than the rest of us. If the option were to become a reality for you, you would have exactly zero ethical quandaries about taking the money and letting it be someone else’s problem.

To spin yet another “I rarely discuss politics” tangent, the way these people’s lack of self- and institutional-awareness dovetails reminds me of something from early Gamergate. You may recall, that was a phony movement to promote “ethics in gaming journalism”, which in practice was expressed exclusively through wild, unchecked misogyny and harassment. Some naive people did take the “ethics in journalism” bait, though. An Onion-affiliated site posted a hilariously ironic takedown of the “movement”, sarcastically highlighting the disconnect between Gamergate’s actions and their expressed goals, insofar as those goals could even be defined. The best part was, the irony went swiftly over some of these suckers’ heads, as they openly and sincerely celebrated this Onion post, like “Finally, someone gets it! Yes, thank you! That’s right, we’re just good ethics enthusiasts who want you to report whatever we want, and then change it whenever we don’t like it, and then never say anything critical, because that’s how journalism ethics is supposed to work.”

That’s what I hear when I see these phony arguments over YouTube sponsorships, at least when presented in the context of something like this lawsuit. “I’m a gullible fool who doesn’t know how anything works and who is easily suckered by the worst people imaginable into carrying their water.” Any one of them would happily drive their car onto the Metal Detectors Everywhere Turnpike, follow the signs to Metal Detectors Everywhere City, then find metal detectors at the entrance of every store, and go “This sucks, how’d I end up here?”

Speaking of ethical quandaries, while I’ve been happy to make fun of tools who genuinely believe a lawsuit like this one will solve anything for them, thus far I’ve spoken of these marks as if they operate on at least a modicum of sincerity and good intentions. But I would be failing you if I didn’t make clear that there also exists a whole ‘nother class of asshole, who just enjoy making things shitty for other people. For these deranged souls, even if they enjoy watching the videos these content creators produce, the hardships of those artists are not a bug, but a feature of their entertainment:

Obviously, I did not make that meme. That’s how they think. Before the Internet, these types may have felt like cartoonish caricatures. No real person is actually that much of a steaming dipshit. However, steady interaction with our fellow humans has proven us wrong about many things, has it not? These sons of failed mothers never took the time or effort to get talented at anything worthy of the praise they apparently hunger for, and instead they built their entire personalities around how much of an asshole they can be. I suppose they spend their days indignant that no one acknowledges their true genius, while wondering why their “friends” are all losers and why they never get invited to the cool parties.

And of course, there’s nothing stopping this type of douchebag from hopping on social media and saying insane shit like “As a progressive woman of color who supports content creators, I welcome this lawsuit, because I think it will helpfully encourage YouTube to develop a more egalitarian system of content creator remuneration, which ideally would be whatever does not even minimally inconvenience me in any way whatsoever.”

These types are also who want to ruin things for everyone. But as I said in the introduction, it ultimately doesn’t matter why someone chooses to piss in everyone’s well. Doing so makes one an asshole either way.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but I am a firm, unwavering believer in the “Asshole Tax”. At times, it is the only true justice in this world. I know, I know, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” I’m glad you were paying attention in Sunday School, but here in the real world, there are so many liars and scoundrels, many of whom are well-practiced at manipulating people to absolve their unrepentantly poor behavior. They don’t play by the rules, which means if they’re out of line, you can’t expect the rules to save you. Listen, I can only push this point so far when talking about any specific litigious assholes. For instance, I absolutely could not and would not encourage you to sneak up behind some problematic pissant as they lay on a couch, to drop your buttcheeks right on their face, and inject a heavily marinated fart directly into their nostrils. I’m merely giving that as an example of something I would not suggest you doing. I mean, you could get in serious trouble, if they can catch you.

Okay, jokes aside, deadass serious this time. This situation does not call for outrageous personal measures. Obviously, nobody deserves to get like maimed over any of this YouTube bullshit. It genuinely is not that serious. But it is serious enough to warrant organized opposition. At absolute minimum, the people who do this shit should not be given a pass or treated as welcome. Greedy assholes who try to ruin things for everyone should not enjoy the perks of good faith society.

WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

“Okay ersatz, you’ve outlined all the wrong ways to tackle sponsorships. But what do you propose we should do about them?”

How about nothing?

As in literally nothing?

You don’t have to “solve” a “problem” some assholes concocted in the first place.

What, are you gonna “solve” rain? By building a roof over your city?

Are you going to “solve” crime by installing cameras literally everywhere?

Look, I’ll readily admit, I just don’t care about sponsor segments. I see some folks get so worked up over them, and I am simply not on that wavelength. Maybe it’s a generational thing? I turn 48 later this year. I grew up on American broadcast television, saturated with ads. Somehow, being exposed to all those commercials, I didn’t end up with a house full of cat litter and all-in-one detergent and thrice-insured luxury cars. I just tune that shit out. “Blahblahblahblahblah.” That’s what it sounds like to me. Commercials are the time for you to take a piss, or get something to eat, or check the other channels. It’s not that hard.

I’m not trying to go to bat for ubiquity of advertising, but I understand economics. The money to pay for the stuff I watch has to come from somewhere. I don’t like it, but having some ads is a better system than feeding dollar bills into my television to keep it running. It would be nice to live in a society where everyone’s basic needs are met, where the money we’re currently pissing away on bloated military budgets and trillionaire tax incentives is instead spent ensuring all living humans enjoy a basic standard of living, and where creative folks could invest heavily in artistic endeavors without it also being their livelihoods. But needless to say, that’s not the world these plaintiffs are pushing for, and attacking YouTube sponsorships specifically would not be the way to go about it.

Creators who I routinely watch who have used sponsorship segments include Secret Base, Hbomberguy, Summoning Salt, Veritas, gaming creators like Kosmic, Pat the NES Punk, Abyssoft, and Lady Decade, “interesting stuff” channels like BobbyBroccoli and Defunctland, sports guys like Five Points Vids, Brandon Perna, and Jomboy, and last but not least, obviously Karl Jobst. (That list deliberately excludes outstanding creators I don’t recall ever doing sponsorships, like Shaun, Angela Collier, and music channel Electric Wendigo.) Of course, your own personal list of favorite creators will vary. But you obviously value their work. That’s the reason why you choose to watch someone from your list over someone you’ve never heard of.

I did not discuss this lawsuit with any of them prior to writing this – I’ve actually never shared even a single word with most of them – and I certainly do not speak for anyone but myself. But it’s not hard to put myself in their shoes. They don’t want to be pausing their fun content to pitch fucking War Thunder or whatever. It’s a job. You all have worked jobs, right?

I work a job! A real one. Everyone says or does shit at their job they’d rather not be saying or doing; that’s why it’s called work. Hell, if I’m not mistaken, Five Points loathes sponsorships so much he literally goes back and clips them out of his old videos as soon as the required contract window expires. But he still records them. Like LunchMoney Lewis, he’s got bills he’s gotta pay.

And it’s not like the artist’s struggle is anything new. Bob Dylan and George Carlin were famous for not doing advertisements, and then one day they did ’em. You never saw Willie Nelson in a commercial until the IRS busted his balls, and suddenly there he was singing for Taco Bell.

Even assuming, arguendo, that YouTube content creators wouldn’t be literally insolvent without these sponsorships, they’d rather be able to ply their talented craft without having to live in a shack maintaining a ramen diet while they do it. And I want better things for them as well. Sure, I’m not hoping for them to make society-disrupting amounts of money, but I want them to have nice stuff for the awesome work they do. Why wouldn’t I? Am I supposed to be at war with them? Whose dumbass idea is that?

Any push to end things like creator sponsorships is ultimately inextricable from the notion that artistic content shouldn’t be made by the people who are the most talented or the most passionate about it, but should instead be the purview of the independently wealthy. Imagine if all your sports highlights and speedrun history videos were done by some rich douchebag like Elon Musk, whose only “passion” is to show off how cool he thinks he is. Or almost as nightmarish, what if they pawn off all the work onto AI? Nothing but AI-generated slop as far as the eye can see.

And so, as with broadcast commercials in the days of yore, I just tolerate the thing I don’t particularly care for, because I understand why it exists. And yet, somehow, once again, waiting through sponsorships as I do, my house isn’t full of mystic cereal and boob deodorant and scrotum toner. I’ve never even considered trying to play Raid Shadow Legends, whatever the fuck that is. I’m still happily using my old leather wallet. I’m still getting my TV dinners from the grocery store and not through the mail. Everything. Is. Fine.

“But ersatz! Some of us literally would prefer to feed dollar bills into our televisions to keep them running.”

Oh I know. You are after all the ones choosing to give YouTube your money for shit you could watch for free. And honestly, that is your choice. You do you. To tell the truth, I would be happily subscribing to creators’ Patreons and stuff if I wasn’t a perpetual broke-ass who thus has to miss out on those sweet exclusive perks. But expecting that Premium function to apply against the free speech of the content creators you choose to watch does not work in practice, and even if it did, all you do is push for an ecosystem where everything is shittier. And at some point you need to put on your big kid pants and accept it.

I say “you” as if I’m actually speaking to the people who need to hear this, but let’s face it; there’s no point in preaching to the unconverted here. If these people can’t be assed to skip or ignore a 30-second ad spot, they certainly aren’t sitting down to read all this.

At this moment, I don’t intend to keep up on this case as it unfolds. YouTube has enough money to fight it. And I would prefer they do so rather than settle and reward these clowns with anything. My fear is that it’s already too late, that simply facing this legal battle will be enough to spook the megacorp into some stupid overreaction. I couldn’t find an example of a similar prior lawsuit on these same terms, so I can’t say for certain whether this bridge has been crossed before. Ultimately, my real self-interest is, I just want to be able to watch good videos on the Internet without everything getting incrementally crappier every year. If this does ever go to a jury, hopefully they don’t get fooled by the plaintiffs’ deliberate misrepresentations. And if we’re really lucky, maybe a couple of them also believe in the Asshole Tax.

Thank you all for reading! I’ll see most of you back here again for other matters, probably very soon.