UPDATE: With a little bit of help from Mike Acton, the original Blek trailer has been restored on Denis Mikan's YouTube account. That's great, of course, but what's not so great is that it took somebody who had a 'someone I know' to get it sorted at all.
As the video was restored, Denis received an email from YouTube that further explains as to why the video was taken down. The full message can be seen below, but the important bit is that the reasoning is due to cracking down on accounts deemed suspicious due to the number of accounts trusted to outside marketing firms, who increase view counts for a price. Read below:
'We've reviewed your appeal regarding your video(s) removal and considered the account history.
Upon further review, we've accepted your appeal and have reinstated your video(s).
YouTube takes the abuse of its system very seriously. Any user found gaming views, subscribers, meta-data or otherwise misleading users will have their account statistics wiped on the first offense, and on the second offense have their account permanently terminated.
Many users trust their account to outside marketers who claim to be able to increase views, etc. You are responsible for activity that happens on your account, and are responsible for knowing and abiding by our terms - this means understanding the nature of the traffic on your channel and making sure you are in compliance with our terms.
For more information on our Terms of Use, please visit: http://www.youtube.com/t/terms '
O n January 3rd, developer of Blek, Denis Mikan, reached out to ask me to change the video embedded in the article I had written about his game. Obviously, Denis wasn't just messing around. The game trailer that had previously been shared around by myself and plenty of other people had been taken down by YouTube.
At the time, Denis said that the video had been taken down for receiving too many hits at once and implied that it was hurting him more than having to ask various publications to change the embed code. He seemed to be saying that it might be having an effect on the game's rankings and sales. I had to find out if this was possible and, indeed, true.
'...YouTube took down the Blek trailer because it got over 20,000 views on one day'
My alarm bells went off because, as recently reported, YouTube's newly introduced technology has been causing a lot of trouble for YouTubers who create gameplay videos with or without commentary. There have been masses of videos taken down based on automated copyright claims, and/or the advertising revenue that these videos generate has been switched to the game company that owns the game the footage is taken from, rather than the YouTuber who created the video, even if that's not what the company want. That may sound fair, and in a sense it is, but game company's for the most part do not want the source of income for these YouTubers taken away because they help to spread the word about their games.
With Blek's trailer being taken down, I wondered if we were seeing a knock-on effect from these new systems being enforced on YouTube, which were now directly affecting game developers. The first thing to do was to check out the YouTube notification that explained why Blek's trailer was taken down. Here it is:
' This following video was found in Violation of TOU #4 Section H: Blek - Official Game Trailer - iOS iPad You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, 'robots,' 'spiders' or 'offline readers' that accesses the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional online web browser [...] Violation of the policy above has resulted in the removal and re-upload of your video(s). Additional account violations of Terms of Use #4 Section H will result in account suspension. Many users trust outside marketers who claim to increase views, subscribers, likes, etc., but each user is ultimately responsible for the activity on his or her account, as well as for knowing and abiding by YouTube's Terms of Use. This includes understanding the nature of the traffic on his or her channel and making sure any hired service providers comply with YouTube's Terms of Use. '
To clarify, the reason that Blek was taken down is, as Denis claimed, that the video received too many hits at one time. YouTube perceived this as being the work of exploitative bots that are created to give video more hits, which can lead to the video and/or the YouTube account making more revenue, either through direct advertising revenue or by being able to strike more deals with companies that offer money to accounts with high view counts.
'...being independent should mean that my operational risk depends only on my creativity and my work rate.'
Denis didn't use any bots or any exploitative methods of any kind to generate the views on that day. All that happened is Blek was written about on Kotaku and Der Standard on December 17th, and between the two online publications, over 20,000 more views were added to the trailer on that day.
Denis knows it's that which was responsible for trailer getting taken down because he has gone through the YouTube statistics and hasn't seen any other spikes in views, nor, indeed, have there been any obvious examples of any non-human generated views all of a sudden. It seems pretty clear that YouTube took down the Blek trailer because it got over 20,000 views on one day as a result of its being written about on two different large publications, which seems especially absurd because well-known YouTubers and viral videos can generate hundreds of thousands of views in the same time.
Although I'm not sure, my guess is that Denis's YouTube account was targeted because it's small and unknown, which leads me to believe the systems that automatic searches for bot-like views generation might be restricted to smaller accounts.
All that Denis is able to do is accept it as the video was already taken down by the time the notification reached him, but he did get an appeal form if he feels he is in the right, which he is, of course.
'I've filled in the appeal form and received another automated answer with similar text. I've replied again and received another email with generated text.'
It turns out that computers are stubborn and repeat messages, and contacting a human at YouTube isn't easy, either.
As a result, Denis is feeling pretty bitter towards YouTube right now, but is glad to be able to warn other developers of something similar happening to them. He proposes (and warns) that it's becoming obvious that we're relying on YouTube too much, as evidenced when it negatively affects creators for no good reason.
'We indie developers only have one or two options when it comes to publishing our trailers: YouTube and Vimeo. Yes, there are tons of other possibilities, but can you imagine sending something else to the writers and editors? We've constantly been told in talks and conferences that we must make it easy for the press, and that we should use things press people know about, so they can integrate and distribute our content in a second. Yes, we all do it now, but we must understand that this is the place where our operational risk is growing.
'As for me, being independent should mean that my operational risk depends only on my creativity and my work rate. But that's not the case. And all I can do about that is try to reduce influence of unwelcome external events. So, if I know that giving my content to somebody, i.e. YouTube, who doesn't care about it and increases the risk of failure, maybe I can find another solution. Or at least I can be aware of the problem and be ready for those sort of unwanted events.'
As you can imagine, Denis isn't best pleased about his trailer being taken down, but I had a feeling that wasn't the end of the story. What are the other consequences of this trailer being taken down for Denis and Blek, if there are any?
My question to Denis was whether he saw any correlation between the views that the YouTube trailer was getting and the sales figures of Blek.
'We just started out, and very few people know about us. Additionally, Blek seems to be pretty impossible to describe with words or to show with screens. So the trailer is more or less our only way of showing the game to people. After we released the game, the selling numbers always correlated with the trailer views: approximately 1:4, so after 40k views, we had 10k sold copies.'
That convenient correlation is hardly evidence that the trailer's views actually do directly affect sales that much, obviously. But the point is that the trailer is instrumental in helping to pitch the game to prospective customers, so, for Denis, it's vital that the trailer is available and easy to find.
'...the new trailer isn't even listed, which seems to be affecting organic growth.'
Denis also brought up another important point that I know could potentially affect the effectiveness of his marketing for Blek in the future. It's true that people are impressed by big numbers, and this is why those bots that Denis was presumed to be using exist, because people see a big number and assume they're missing out on something. Here's what Denis says, and he isn't wrong for thinking it:
'It turns out that Blek is a game not only appreciated by gamers, but also by a really broad audience. Because of that, we plan to approach the broader non-gaming specific media after the release of the iPhone version. And we do not know much about marketing and PR, but it seems very likely to us that sending out a video with many thousands of views and many likes, compared to sending a video without views, will have a strong impact on the decisions of mass-media journalists as to whether they will feature the game or not in, let's say, a 'Culture and Art' section of a newspaper.'
As of right now, the new Blek trailer is getting about 50% fewer views than the previous one was at the same time after it was uploaded to YouTube. Denis tells me that the press that have already covered the game were kind enough to change the trailer around in their articles, so people are able to still discover the game on those publications as they were before. However, one thing that Denis did notice is that when you search for 'blek' on YouTube, his game trailer is no longer the top result, whereas it was before. He says that, in fact, the new trailer isn't even listed, which seems to be affecting organic growth.
What's further increasing his worries is that Unity 3D is looking to upload the trailer for Blek to their official YouTube channel, but they're having problems with it.
'Maybe I'm just getting paranoid,' Denis last said to me, I hope it's nothing more then that.'
Hopefully, his trailer hasn't been smeared as a result of the false accusation.
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