I wrote a piece a while back on the mobile/web application BeCandid, which was purported to be a place where free speech was the soup du jour and shitposting was not only allowed, but highly encouraged. Having re-read my take a few times since that point and since new information on the application has come out, I still stand by the vast majority of what I said. To save everyone reading this a bit of time, here are the main takeaways from that entry:

• The YouTubers and people advertising for Candid are, by definition, shills, and likely did not read the contract or look into the application at all before signing the contract, thus also making them morons to some degree
• Watchers should be wary of what these advertisers say, but should not entirely discredit them or their message(s) based on a single/handful of negative events
• If you are so upset that you need to unsubscribe from these people or make threats/demands about them regarding their choice, then you should kindly fuck off and likely get yourself checked out because it is unhealthy to lose your head over something that is ‘peanuts’
• The application was likely initially pitched as I’ve described above and was an accurate representation in very early versions, then was later altered to be what it is now very stealthily until folks caught on to the behavior of the app and the hidden bot behavior it was employing
• Despite my loose assumptive justifications for all these YouTubers hocking this, I do not advocate anyone use the app as it is actively detrimental in regards to keeping your personal information personal, is not as advertised, is full of garbage code and is a general dumpster fire that everyone should stay away from

Where I don’t hold the same opinion is on the timeline. I paid no attention to the actual timeline of events involving the shilling YouTubers who did their best shyster impressions and all the information that Harmful Opinions collected. Part of this was because my focus was to call out the people being overly reactionary over something that was, as already said, ‘peanuts’ and the other part was because I figured the information Harmful put out would be more than enough to keep people away despite both social justice crusaders and ‘skeptics’ advertising the application, thus leading to its inevitable demise. I had labeled CEO Bindu Reddy simply as a moron, which is still accurate, but had zero idea she was as shady as she actually was. I fucked up, and apologize for not covering the topic as properly as I should have.

Hashtag meirlrn

‘So what did you learn that caused you to change your opinion, Sahltines?’ There’s a handful of developments that pushed me to reconsider some of my stance on BeCandid, and most of them are outlined in Harmful Opinion’s recent videos under his account, Cyber Violence. Definitely watch the videos for more detailed information, but the succinct version is the underhanded paid spying, paid counter-advertising bordering and , in some cases, crossing into the territory of outright lying and the contacting of Harmful’s family with the intent to intimidate him into silence were the driving factors in my decision. However, what also played a huge part was the recent deletion of Harmful’s material on his main account, coupled with some of the statements made by the ‘skeptic’ community in regards to Candid and advertising products now and in the future by them; Sargon of Akkad’s ‘The Skeptic Community’ video being the origin.

I don’t personally consider myself a skeptic despite me fitting the bill for nearly two decades now. The reason is not because I don’t believe I am a skeptic, but because I cannot stand humanity’s drive to need to constantly label and section off other people to better compartmentalize and/or understand them. This is why Sargon’s video struck a chord with me; while he is not incorrect that receiving sponsorship money is a great way to give these folks the means to grow their platform, which is combating a great intellectual evil at the moment, the implication that it’s okay for people to ‘sell out’ along with the notion that we should not push back is a tad ridiculous. Taking advertising revenue is enough to give any audience pause on whether or not the messages they’ll be getting are untainted; taking cash from an underhanded company  with a CEO that is shady and kind of a dipshit is a situation damn well worth some viewership scrutiny, if not outright pushback. Again, these people are free to advertise, just like I’m free to say they’re morons for advertising for a shitty company and for people to be wary that they’ll be able to continue giving as unbiased opinions as they possibly can.

What also doesn’t jive with me is this push towards making a ‘community’ when it didn’t seem to even exist until this point. Perhaps it’s a bit of paranoia on my part, but these YouTubers come under a bit of heavy fire and now they want to ‘posse up’. Again, maybe it’s nothing, but it screams of people who paraded as having egos that were made of steel which are now cracking and showing they might not be as bulletproof as once believed.

The last bit that I want to touch on here is the whole idea of these YouTubers needing advertising money to sustain themselves, and for this, we’re going to dive into SocialBlade. ‘Sahltines, SocialBlade isn’t accurate, it doesn’t account for personal sponsorships, lost revenue due to AdBlock, blah blah blah!’ I’ve heard this espoused by plenty of people online and in videos; in fact, YouTuber Rags has stated the inaccuracy of SocialBlade and that he makes zero or close to zero dollars from his channel so far. While I don’t doubt this is accurate for a large portion of YouTube revenue, what I do doubt is that Google and advertising companies haven’t set up the contract to ensure money regardless of AdBlock by tying in CPM to not just people viewing ads, but people watching certain lengths of a video or to how many people watch the entire video. Essentially, I doubt that once a person reaches a certain subscriber threshold, purported to be around one-hundred thousand from video footage provided via GradeAUnderA in some of his videos regarding reaction channels, they don’t earn some amount of money. Whether or not that money is substantial to live on is another question.

Regardless of personal accounts from actual YouTubers, despite the fact not one single person has ever backed these up with near anonymous banking/PayPal information to prove their claims of being ‘subscriber rich yet still dirt poor’, we’re still going to use SocialBlade because, as already indicated, it’s the only available data. From SocialBlade’s FAQ page, we can see that it uses an absurdly low CPM value of $.25 and a very high value of $4.00. It still doesn’t account for lost revenue due to ad-block users, and while I honestly don’t believe those numbers are as large as the Internet seems to believe, in my calculations I will include the untouched CPM values along with altered values assuming up to fifty percent of the viewers are actively using ad-block during viewing.  Lastly, if Patreon data is available, we will account for that.

Now that everything has been laid out, let’s pick on Shoe0nHead. Using her data, we can see that just from Patreon alone, if nothing were to change, she would make nearly $23,000. Including the lowest CPM altered by fifty percent of her watchers using adblock, which assumes she also does not make any sort of revenue from total views count and only makes revenue from advertisements on videos, she would net a yearly total of $24,590.82. Here’s the spreadsheet that goes into all the actual calculations, and included is a separate workbook I did which details my final year of college from 2014 to 2015. The reason I included my own fiscal information is because it should better highlight two things:

1. If you are semi-competent at YouTube, you aren’t a ‘starving artist’ like is commonly believed.
2. The average human, who is a United States citizen and a decent bit overweight (read: me), does not need as much money as is believed to survive on a yearly basis.

The extremely big take-away that I want to highlight is the data involving my various hypothetical salaries and time spent living at home versus near my university’s campus. Even earning what was my starting salary, I would have easily been able to save around seventy to eight percent of my part-time pay. It is worthy to note that I finished my bachelor’s at a university where I had family working and, as such, benefited from having to pay severely reduced tuition rates, and that is obviously not the case everywhere. However, had I not been in that fortunate scenario, I would have easily qualified for financial aid which would’ve absolutely covered my tuition, which is why I didn’t consider that potential variable when analyzing my personal data.

Regardless, the point I want to make is that Shoe makes approximately twenty-five thousand a year. Most would not consider that good money, but context is highly important here, namely the fact she makes excellent money for time spent working and this is compounded by the fact that she lives at home and thus does not have to pay for rent or food and possibly even bills. Even if she did, she would still be able to save a decent amount yearly living frugally as I did, and even within my frugal means I was able to have plenty of fun while saving money. All this analysis also assumes that her channel never grows from this point onwards, which is ridiculous considering she’s essentially amassed two-hundred thousand subscribers per year and millions of views, and that number is trending upwards every day; it also assumes the worst-case scenario, and she’s a marketable and popular YouTube personality and the worst-case scenario likely doesn’t apply in reality.

To come full circle, I said earlier that the reason I wanted to go through all these hoops is because of this idea that Sargon and others are purporting that the ‘skeptic’ community needs these advertising bucks, but I never said why I wanted to. The impetus is essentially two-fold:

1. I find the idea that these YouTubers are ‘hard up for cash’, enough to the point where they need to take in outside third-party advertisement-centered sponsorship despite having monetized videos, multiple donation links and accounts on a popular crowd-funding site that pull in decent numbers, to be fallacious and disingenuous. While we will never know each exact case, the information that exists and my provided rudimentary math indicate that, especially considering the personal circumstances of these folks, they are by all accounts ‘fine’and are conflating a ‘want’ with a ‘need’ and conveying this poorly to their audience.
2. The lack of back-up/contingency plans that this small conglomerate appears to sport is astounding, enlightening and questionable. I understand the point of being a YouTube personality is to devote your time into the medium so that it becomes your means of employment in lieu of the standard fare, but just diving in without having some kind of apparent plan B or nest egg to ensure that, should this fail, you aren’t absolutely fucked is not something I can or have been able to fully wrap my head around.

Point two is the more important of the two because it magnifies every gripe I’ve had about the selling out, the behavior, the seeming dishonesty, the push to have a single communal identity and implied set of rules and actions, point one just above and most of what I’ve gone on about in this entire bit. If my work is completely incorrect and this is based in a need, then what this says is that these YouTubers went into this assuming everything would work out and that’s a naive and frankly stupid way to make life-changing decisions. If my work is correct, then these are all based in desire and that these people are not above selling out the integrity they displayed to their audience, putting everything in the future, in the present and the in the past into question.

No matter which way this is sliced, the bare minimum that’s occurred is a bunch of unnecessary confusion rooted in what seems to be a near complete lack of transparency and a domino chain of idiocy. Hopefully this is just a speed bump that needs to be properly sorted out. I’d offer some suggestions, but since the ‘community standard’ seems to be to not do anything, I might as well just say ‘whatever, fuck it’. Oh well.