Transcription

So I'm sitting at my office here on a Sunday afternoon, I was drinking a cup of coffee, and I was looking at YouTube, and I started searching through YouTube's search engine, and I started typing in various search terms for topics that I may or may not be interested in. And I kept seeing the same guy coming up in the search results. And I've been following along with what this guy has been doing for a while, and I really think this particular individual is going to be the big catalyst that eventually brings YouTube down. This man will single-handedly collapse the entire infrastructure of YouTube. You guys are wondering who I'm talking about. I'm talking about Roel Vandepaar. You guys, if you hang out on YouTube, and you often do searches on YouTube, it doesn't matter what you search for YouTube, tech-related, Linux-related, programming-related, if it's the kind of question that can be asked on Stack Overflow, then you have probably seen this man's videos come up in various search results. For example, when I search for Ubuntu Blank Screen, you know, I've got a couple of search results here for Roel Vandepaar, and he's got a video here. The videos, if I hover over it, all start with the same intro. He's got almost two million videos now uploaded to YouTube. Yes, I said that right. Two million videos. They all start with him, with his busted-up lip. He's got a bloody lip for some reason. And then, after that is plain text. It's asking a question. Somebody asks a question on Stack Overflow, and I guess he takes the top-rated answer. He adds a little music to the video, but there's no real video editing. There's no work involved. This is all automatically generated videos, and he is able to upload at a rate these days of nearly one video per second. I did a search for Exmonad, and when I do a search for Exmonad, most of the videos that come up in the search results on YouTube are actually my videos, because Exmonad's not a popular topic right now. A lot of people talk about it, but I've done a bunch of videos on Exmonad, so most of the top videos are going to be mine. But when you filter the search results for recent videos, and that's what you should do, because Mr. Vandepaar's videos, they're never going to come up as being the most relevant search results. That's always going to be channels with real subscribers, with real views, and obviously this automated, generated spam videos that he's doing, nobody's really interested in that. So you're not going to see his videos usually come up in the relevant search results, but if you filter by upload date, then obviously he's uploading videos practically every second. It doesn't matter what tech-related topic you search for, if you search by upload date, then chances are you're going to see some of his most recent videos appear in the search results. Here's some stuff in Exmonad. As a matter of fact, I scrolled down a little bit, but you see I've got this block of four videos. Three of them are Mr. Vandepaar's. I did a search for Emacs. Here's a video by Mr. Vandepaar. I don't even know if he knows anything about Exmonad or Emacs, because this is all just scraped search results from Stack Overflow that he then probably has a Bash script or a Python script that automatically makes a video for him, you know, using the same standard template. I did a search result for Bash scripting, right? Search for Bash scripting on YouTube. There's Mr. Vandepaar again. Let's take a look at his SocialBlade numbers. Mr. Vandepaar now has 1.9 million uploads, 1.9 million uploads. He first appeared on my radar about two years ago. I noticed this guy kept coming up in the search results all the time. When I looked up his numbers on SocialBlade two years ago, he had about 100,000 uploads. There is no way a human being can upload, make and edit 100,000 videos, make the thumbnails. You can't do that, right? I already knew it was all automatically generated spam. 100,000 uploads, you know, he's basically flooding the YouTube search algorithm, right? He's guaranteed to come up when you post that many videos, even if nobody's really watching them. You know, if you spam the search algorithm enough, your videos will come up and you'll get some views. And of course, views translates to ads. And of course, that translates to some ad revenue. So he had over 100,000 uploads, you know, a couple of years ago. And then I noticed just a few months back, he passed 1 million uploads because it was kind of a big deal. People were looking at these numbers and it's like, what is going on with this guy? And now he's going to pass, you know, 2 million uploads here pretty soon. If I upload this page or refresh this page, will it automatically update? No. But let's go to YouTube because I've had this page loaded for a while. You see software engineering tooling and support. Let's refresh this page. Let me do an F5 on the computer. And that video that was software engineering and tooling, where the hell did it go? It's all the way. So it's 12 videos back here in his upload. So since I had this page loaded just a couple of minutes ago, you know, he's already uploaded like 12 more videos. So that's crazy. The pacing that this guy is doing, I mentioned his upload is just every few seconds. He's ramped it up to get this much output because whenever he was at the 1 million upload mark, I noticed, you know, he was uploading every few minutes, which is crazy, right? And then a couple of years ago, when I noticed he was over 100,000 uploads, he was uploading a new video. I don't know, like every 10, every 15 minutes, something ridiculous, but he's ramped it up. He's probably, he's probably got some servers and some VPSs, some cheap VPSs, you know, half a dozen servers. It wouldn't take much because these videos he's making, they're only like three minute videos because it's a question from Stack Overflow, it's plain text, not much going on. It'll only take a decent computer about a minute, maybe two minutes to render these automatically generated videos for him. So if he has half a dozen VPSs working for him, he can just spit these things out, right? These cheap VPSs cost nothing, just a few bucks a month. And I'm sure he's making a little bit off of this because he really gets no views on his video, right? Nobody is going to come across his channel in a legit sort of way, you know, and find his channel and look at his videos and say, oh, wow, this is good content, right? This is low tier content, this is zero effort content. It's the worst kind of content you'll possibly find, auto-generated spam, right? Nobody's going to subscribe and nobody's going to watch any of his videos. The only way somebody is going to watch one of his videos, if they get tricked into it. And how do you get tricked into it? Well, you upload 2 million videos because I don't know how many videos are on the YouTube platform, best guesstimate, because I did a Google search and people have guesstimated that there's about 800 million videos on YouTube, 800 million videos, 2 million of them are this man's, Mr. Vandipars. That's crazy. No matter what you search for on YouTube, he's almost guaranteed to occasionally come up in your search results and you will get tricked into clicking on his videos thinking they're legit videos when they're just this automated spam. Now the real question is, is it worth it for Mr. Vandipar to spam YouTube? It probably is. He probably makes a little money doing this. Probably not life changing money, but he had 1 million views in the last 30 days. What does 1 million views on YouTube translate to? Well, nobody can really tell you because here's the thing. Views and AdSense revenue on YouTube, it differs from channel to channel. Nothing is a one-to-one relationship. I could guess based on what I make, but it would just be a guess. No one really knows. Me and another channel could have the exact same views for that month, maybe even have the exact same number of ad impressions for that month, and our ad revenue can differ drastically. I'm talking about thousands of dollars difference. It's just the way it is. Different niches pay different amounts of money. Different kinds of ads pay different amounts of money. A lot of it has to do with the topic being discussed on the video and just the broader topic of your channel. But my guess based on 1 million views, I would say on the low end, he probably made a couple of thousand dollars in AdSense revenue. On the higher end, it wouldn't shock me if he made $6,000 or $7,000 in AdSense revenue on those videos. And that's crazy, right? Because again, zero effort, no effort, right? This guy, he's had these servers running just automatically creating these videos for him for a couple of years, uploading 2 million videos, and all he's got to do is just sit back and cash the checks. Now, does YouTube really care about these channels that are just automatically generating these spammy videos and just flooding the search results? I don't think they do. There have been a few of these kinds of channels that I guess YouTube has eventually kicked. I noticed that when Mr. Vandepar passed 1 million uploads a few months back, that was a big deal because at the time there were only two other channels that had more than a million uploads. One of them was this COD Black Ops PS channel, which is a gaming channel with more than a million uploads. I'm under the impression, I don't currently play Call of Duty, any of the games, but Call of Duty had a game mode where it recorded different points of view and things, so where you could have the same gameplay from multiple points of view and things like that, which gave this particular smammer, you know, a lot of content, right? Because he could just re-upload the same game basically from different viewpoints. And I don't think this channel exists anymore because on Social Blade, there's no channel header being pulled down from YouTube and you see his last video as an error message. So I think they probably, YouTube finally decided that this channel was a little too spammy and they got rid of him. And then I noticed a very, very similar channel, PS3 COD MW3, another, you know, PlayStation 3, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3, I'm assuming what that stands for, 1 million uploads. I guess when it got past 1 million uploads, they deleted that channel too because no channel header. If I try to play the video, yeah, it's just another error. So I'm assuming what happens is there's some kind of trigger when these spammy channels cross the 1 million upload mark, right? Somebody at YouTube finally says, hey, maybe I should check that out. Maybe that's automatically generated spam bots creating these videos if they have more than a million uploads. As if a million uploads is some crazy number, 10,000 videos being uploaded by somebody is a crazy number. Why do you wait until a million? It's crazy that Google who owns YouTube, this trillion dollar company, they're so susceptible to this automatically generated spam and they could shut it down if they wanted to. They don't realize that their YouTube search results now have become a joke. They are completely a joke, mainly because of one guy, Mr. Vandepore. The fact that there's maybe 800 million videos posted on YouTube and 2 million are from this one guy, he dominates YouTube's search algorithms. And once people realize how easy he has gamed the system, obviously more and more people are going to game the system. And I'm not going to search for any channels, but you guys have probably seen other channels like this. I've come across channels that have dictionary definitions of words. They just automatically generate these quick little videos, right? They have a script that automatically goes through a dictionary and finds every word for you and that becomes a video on YouTube. Or one of the ones is pronunciations. They go and pull down probably Creative Commons pronunciations from Wiktionary or somewhere and then they upload that to YouTube to tell you how to pronounce these words. I guess you don't already know how to pronounce. I've seen other things, quote bots and things like that, fax channels that are designed to basically spit out quick fax. No real video, it's just something that they automatically pull down from some resource on the internet. They create a quick one to two minute video, right? Run that thing through a script that FFmpeg generates a quick video and a thumbnail, automatically generated thumbnail, and you just go with it. I've complained that YouTube is really under attack by comment bots. The bots that are doing like all the sex bots that are posting on my channel, right? Every time I upload a video, the first hundred comments, 50 of them are these sex bots, these escort services just spamming the hell, not just on my channel, the entire platform. I know YouTube has the means to stop this. They don't. Because a lot of my videos have these crypto bots where this crypto bot message will appear with a discord room or a telegram number or whatever. Hey, come meet me. I'll tell you how to make a bajillion dollars with Bitcoin. And then there's replies. There are bot replies. There'll be like 20 bots that reply to the first button. They're all talking about how great this telegram group is and yeah, we'll all make a bunch of money because this guy's great. You know, it's funny because one of my favorite movies is the Terminator, the original Terminator from 1984, where they come back from the future, the future where the world's been destroyed by a nuclear war that was started by machines because AI had been created and AI basically wants to destroy mankind, right? And many people have this innate fear of artificial intelligence, right? Trust me, you don't have anything to fear because a trillion dollar corporation heavily invested in AI, that is Google, they can't stop these Romanian sex bots. They can't stop Mr. Vandepar, you know, we have nothing to worry about. No way will AI ever reach the point to where it can actually take over the world. Now, naturally people are going to wonder why I'm making today's video. Am I angry that my YouTube search results are flooded by Mr. Vandepar's videos? Well, in some ways, yes, because I think it cheapens the YouTube search results, especially for people actually looking for real information. But am I angry that Mr. Vandepar is playing the game? No, I'm not, because I think he needs to play this game. He needs to keep ramping it up. I want him to be uploading 10 videos per second. I want him to have a billion videos uploaded to YouTube at some point, because once somebody exploits something to the point where the company that they're exploiting and the person they're exploiting finally has to fight back, that's a good thing. I think in the long run, Mr. Vandepar is probably good for YouTube because eventually someone at YouTube that actually has some power, you know, Mr. Vandepar will finally be on their radar and maybe they'll do something about the problem that is spam on YouTube. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode, Devon, Gabe, James, Maxim, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, ArmoredDragon, Chuck, CommanderingRay, Dai, Yokai, Dylan, George Lee, LennoxNinja, Mike, Erjan, Alexander, PeaceArch, Invador, Polytech, Riala, Teets4Lets, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because, you know, I have to put in work to make my videos and if you guys want to support my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. I hope this guy has that bloody lip because he told somebody he wanted to spam YouTube and they punched him in the mouth.