toasters rocks

This article was originally published on Tumblr, reposting it here for completeness.

Well, I usually don’t give a damn about this, but after seeing my good friend Minty Root allegedly being butthurt over this and seeing a GIF of his work being (re)posted on Facebook without credit, it stroke me, and I figured I had a good argument about this.

For this post, I’ll use Minty as an example here, because I know how he’s set up on YouTube, but it works for most, if not all content creators out there. If you don’t know, Minty has monetization enabled on his YouTube channel, and his network, Channel Frederator, is giving him a good unspecified wad of money for his work depending of the views on his monetization-enabled videos. (If you wanna know, I’m not sure he’s allowed to tell, so I’m not saying anything, but I do know it’s definitely helping him pay his bills.) So if you repost his videos on your Facebook page like many do (including full GIFs, although a GIF of only one scene can be debatable), for each view the video gets on your page, I don’t know the exact rate but it’s probably one less cent in his pockets. So if your video has a lot of views, we’re talking about quite a lot of money here. Personally, I wouldn’t care if there isn’t any money at stake (like the creator hasn’t monetized the video, it’s blocked in your country and/or it’s a big company such as Hasbro, in that case a credit would still be appreciated, if known), but in this case I think it’s probably what you can call piracy and/or stealing from a small content creator.

So here’s a few best practices I can suggest you if you’re the owner of one such page:

• Don’t download the video off YouTube (or anything) and repost on your page. Instead, link it directly from the source. In many cases, such as Facebook and Twitter, the video will still embed directly in your post when you click on it. In YouTube’s case, it have a lot of ways to put the video on your profile without outright reposting it, such as playlists.
• At least credit the work you post with a link to the creator’s page, if you’re not already link to their work. If people liked that work, people will click on that link because they want to see more of that artist. You should always link to their site anyway.
• Don’t follow advices to get more views on your page. It’s probably a conspiracy to make you steal videos as I explained, or at least a side effect of big companies’ marketing plans. It’s well-established Facebook wants to compete with YouTube and Twitter wants to do just like Facebook, so don’t let them.
• Subscribe to your favourite creator’s Patreon or donate to them, if you like their work. It will make their day. Seriously. Or just support them in any way they let you. As I stated, it might help them pay their rent.
• Disable AdBlock on your favourite websites or creators. It will also help them and give them some ad money, if they set up these ads. Beware, in some cases, it’s just the creator’s platform’s ads and it’s not actually going to them.

It’s a pretty long post, but I bolded the tl;dr parts for better reading. I don’t want to go in a crusade against those pages, I still love you, but we all do want a better world without all this bullshit. If I missed anything, please tell! I hope my point is understood and more people will follow those advices, so reblog this post wildly! (Of course, if you’re gonna reshare it on other sites than Tumblr, credit me with a link, I probably spent at least a full hour to write this…)