What’s up with You Tube??

Many lame issues have been growing problems for You Tube content providers over the past year. I see this as a direction change and the beginning of the demise of this power house – GOOGLE / You Tube and affiliates. It looks like they have become too big for there own britches. They appear to be working the cash flow and look to be pretty dishonest and evil as of late.

I had a You Tube channel that was doing really well for a few years. Things have changed. There have been many Copyright Infringement claims changed on my account over the past year and the residual fallout is very lame to say the least.

I was doing around 4,000 views a day before things went left. Then some non-existent organization called the Music Publishing Rights Society started flagging videos on my channel as Copyright Infringement matches. The beauty of this is – there is no organization. There is no website, no online presence, no one to contact, dispute claims with, no face at all to this “ORGANIZATION.”

I believe, as to thousands of other users on You Tube, that this is nothing more than a scam. When a content match is served, ads begin to be shown on your page, next to the video. Since these ads are generating income, the person or persons receiving this income are guilty of stolen Copyright. Wouldn’t matter if it is a scam artist or the big owner of You Tube scamming people with false claims, This is a scam.

If you search the term “Music Publishing Rights Society” you will see what I mean. All you will find is thousands of pissed youtube users screaming about there music and there video being falsely charged and advertisements added to create income for someone!

The process is broken and has to be illegal based on the laws of copyright in the USA. You can’t steal other peoples creations! This makes me angry!

Lets look at the ONLY presence of an online identity from Face Books page claiming to be the 'organization'.

Founded	2005
About	You get the pleasure of posting videos We get the pleasure of making money from your videos It's a win-win situation

NICE!?!?!!

Lets add insult to injury….

YouTube treats these as valid claims!! In a country where innocent until proven guilty is the claim, you are guilty and have to prove innocence. The process is easy enough but comes with further issues. YouTube has a dispute page that you can dispute these false claims. BUT  - The process seems to create a mark against you in the process.

I mentioned earlier that my video views are down from 4000 a day to 1500 a day. It would appear that YouTube begins to cap the view counts. For instance (and the motivation for todays post and rant) I am hovering very close to 1500 views a day right now so I decided to pump a video hard to push past this artificial count.

I was viewing views for 2 days ago and found my views for that clip halted at exactly 1300 views for that day. BUT, a quick look at views for the top 10 clips shows over 1500 views just adding the first 3 clips together. I have over 50 clips and all of them get views everyday! It was so obvious that they are not counting thousands of views in my total count everyday that I checked a few other days – more of the same.

 I don’t think there is any explanation other than marks being held against me for these false claims! Let me use the most recent as an example.

I got a Copyright Infringement claim on MY video of Silent Night. Obviously in the public domain forever. Every picture is mine, from my camera, taken by me. The recording is MY CD with MY record label producing the clip and I HAVE FULL OWNERSHIP of EVERYTHING USED IN THIS CLIP.

This being my 10^th Copyright Infringement claim, I was not very friendly on the Dispute form. Of couse the process takes the notice off my account as the check to see if that non-existent ‘organization’ will counter the dispute, but in the meantime I have another mark against me and wait to be vindicated for posting my own music and images – Guilty until reluctantly deemed innocent.

Do the views go back and the counter magically start being more accurate after the claim and dispute process – NO!

Another odd observation was made last year when I saw Copyright Infringement claims being made on videos other people had posted with my music. The claimant in those claims were another Smooth Jazz record label that owns nothing! They were taking down videos that they had NO Right to even make the claim in the first place.

I have no idea why and am not happy when I go to a video I linked to show off another video creators handwork, is gone from false claims. The realities are really sucking at YouTube right now.

Some of this is really just effecting the view count. As stated above, I know they are capping my views and that is their call. I don’t pay anything for this service and they can be as big a dicks as they want to if it is all there space and servers.

Unfortunately, some of this is costing views in the RELATED video placements. I used to do more views from RELATED VIDEOS on the right side of the page than I did from actual searches on YouTube. The value was amazing since people discovered my music from the RELATED suggestions on the right. 

This benefit is all but gone since few of my clips show in prominent space, high on the RELATED list. I know it costs me nothing to be on You Tube but the time and frustration. As the frustration mounts, the decision to leave You Tube becomes more of a reality.

Every major brand seems to forget there are want-to-be’s ready and waiting to take their glory and income base. Look at My Space – a household name that didn’t care about users and thought they owned the word SOCIAL. I have not been to any of my MySpace pages in forever. It is done. The same process is happening on Face Book. What many could not live a day without, many are checking every week or so and I have friends that have closed it down – no value perceived whatsoever.

I have watched this process too many times in every area of the business world. The only place to go from the top is down. You Tube is at a horrible stage of it’s life cycle. If things continue, we will see nothing but paid corporate clips and funny baby and cat videos – nothing in between. Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/  has become the cool, creative host for high quality content by the serious video content providers! There are other options too.

But the reality is this – You Tube is really pissing me off. The day will likely come when the pain of leaving is less than the pain of staying…. This day seems to be getting closer…

Will corporate America ever learn?!?!? They need us to make those billions of dollars! They actually need us…..

 SAXBOY ~ Greg Vail

2011 has been an interesting year with many amazing things that occurred!

The biggest is a personal change – I am in love and getting married in February of this new year!! I am sooooo blessed by an amazing woman and new children and grandchildren to love! Michele is my brides name! I can’t imagine doing life without her! She totally rocks my world!

My kids are doing great too. My son Ben, graduated from Northridge earlier this year and began a 2 year internship at USC with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, training to be a campus pastor! I could not be more proud. BenVail.com! My baby Vanessa is doing great! She is an awesome people lover and friend to sooooo many people! I bought her VanessaVail.com for Christmas and we will watch together as her path unfolds.

So – getting married and kids are blowing me away!

The business – been another hard year for work, income is lower again and opportunities are less overall – but I am working in what I love and surviving thus far – thank you Jesus!

I did my first big interview this year – the Saxophone Journal Jan/Feb 12 is coming out very soon (since today is New Years Eve!) I am excited about the interview and really blessed to be heading out to NAMM this year with a feature, cover article in a major magazine!

Online things have been busting! Greg Vail dotcom hit all new highs this year! December is always my big month yet I have never really beat the 25,000 page views ceiling – until 2011! The site is at 29,000 pages and I am excited! I know I had some help from Conan O’Brien when he listed my site as dead on his site. Traffic soared and the article served as a nice little review, pretty accurate and very good for visibility! Then there are 7 Christmas Sites online all pointing at the site, so traffic is a big thing every December.

Overall traffic for Greg Vail dotcom is up and I am encouraged. When Socials really started taking off, the old school static sites saw big drops in traffic. Now that Socials have settled down and people are not LIVING on Face Book, we are all seeing a move back to real sites for information and away from “Johnny said….” Internet research and information. There are lame static sites out there too but I do have to say they are a little more reliable than some high school dude mouthing off on a forum or social.

What do search stats say? Saxophone videos, pictures, sound clips (and Christmas music for about 6 weeks a year) are the big draw in my corner of the world.

A quick look thru search stats for my 25 sites online shows areas of interest have not changed much over the past few years. You Tube changed the world! I think Face Book, My Space and ‘fill in the blank’ have disrupted the world with minimal change other than bringing us together and pushing news to real time.

You Tube accounts for more than half of all the traffic on the internet today. The visibility from a viral video will actually change lives. I have spent a bunch of time and developed a site to promote my sax video clips – all of that is going GREAT!

In 2011 I have had over 875,000 video views!! I now have 63 video clips on my main channel – gvsaxboy. Please note that these views involved no naked women, animals or babies doing anything cute and NO ONE was injured in the making of these clips. This number only covers MY CHANNEL views. I have a B Channel and there are 140 videos online, posted by fans and friends that account for many more views!!

Pictures are on my sites all over the web and I have a dedicated picture site on FLICKr. The picture views are many, everyday! I have over 157,000 views to date and counting. I wish I had a glimpse of views for all the sites or for all videos or all pics. The traffic is great to these sites and I am always excited seeing people enjoy music, pics and vids.

2012 is looking very bright! I did receive my copy of Saxophone Journal today and it is awesome seeing my face on the cover. The article is really good but rambles a bit JUST LIKE ME.

I have to play for the Tournament of Roses New Years party tonight and must get running.

Happy New Years and many Blessings in the New Year!!

God bless y’all

gvSAXBOY – Greg Vail and Greg Vail Music