Posted by BLUNT Media Network on Oct 30th 2019
What's Your PScore? Exposing the Youtube Code
Google's up to something. We know it. We filed with the FTC against them and Facebook for unfair advertising and had audits subpoenaed, we've had billboards posted in times square posted by hempislegal.org. We've been working on an aggregator to skip big tech, opening advertising to our industry and ad revenue to demonetized creators and rising streamers and if there's anything we know, it's the big tech fight and how little their bias surprises us anymore.
However both businesses and creators keep getting blocked by "the man," who's actually a middle aged leftist woman named Susan, we've come to find out. While she's at Youtube, a Google company, it hemorrhages money and users, yet still having $25 million for Vox, the company that lead to one of the bigger advertiser bailouts (adpocolypse) to date. Google has gone from anything goes blocking it's services such as Social Blade or audit bots, manipulating algorithms to favor certain creators, blocking small businesses from advertising, prohibiting hemp lest you risk losing your channel, pandering to the lgbt community while also banning all lgbt creators from earning an income... the list goes on and on.
Many people have tried to come forward for a while about Google, but were written off as conspiracy theorists. Now, it would seem, creators and youtubers have begun to see the patterns are the ones exposing youtube and in a really big way.
It was late night show, Afterhours with AugieRFC ft Bowblax where we had first heard of Youtube's newest scandal. #Checkyourpscore went viral shortly before on twitter and coincidentally the original name of the episode in which we first heard about this issue. Afterhours, a livestream podcast regarding online news and banter, exposed the pscores Youtube had attempted to hide from creators. The news was kept quiet for 24 hours before they went public, however Youtube had the P-Scores hidden and patched by the time the show had ended. It took 2 hours.
Normally this isn't something of concern and some might argue that there's a possibly Youtube is just on top of it's game. We assure you it's not. Youtube has written an article patting itself on the back for ATTEMPTING customer service, something we all do for our businesses daily. We also wish to bring your attention back to TOONE, the creator whose account was hacked (another occurrence becoming more common at Youtube) causing the creator to lose his only source of income for the past 8 years. It two WEEKS for Youtube to respond. He had big name creators making videos and tweeting the company, however the company is notorious for having you DM them then muting you and never responding again. This is something Sinatra Says, creator and friend to our site and Afterhours, knows all too well. He's been tweeting youtube and emailing them every day for 2 months. They've taken his income as well, in the form of a full demonetization on his channel without explanation and not a single response.
This in mind, Youtube's jumping to silently fix the leaked pscore concern within 2 hours showed they had something to hide. Google has come under fire for politically swaying their search results on Google search as well as Youtube. This was mentioned on Afterhours as well as asking, What's your P-score?
P-scores, Bowblax explains, is the algorithm Youtube uses for videos to organize them into categories for advertisers. This was accompanied by a thorough document entitled YouTube’s P-Scores, Video Throttling, and More: A Comprehensive Guide By: Bowblax, Nicholars DeOrio, Optimus, Pescatore
We urge not only creators but those whom work with us for advertising to read it as we could never do as thorough a job as these four creators have, but we wanted to pick out some key parts we think needs a closer look.
P-Scores refer to an internal rating given by Google to channels to rate them based on five metrics according to a video that they released on April 10th, 2019. These metrics are all combined to, “surface among the most popular channels on YouTube.”
The five metrics are popularity, platform, passion, protection, production.
Popularity: Heavily driven by watch time. The more minutes that your videos are being watched, the better that this metric will influence your overall P-Score. Channels that put out longer videos will most likely have better ‘popularity rankings’ than channels that put out extremely short videos.
Passion: Leans more on engagement with an audience, so channels that have more devoted fanbases who engage content more with likes, comments, and in other methods likely will have better rankings in ‘passion.’
Protection: Based on how suitable content is for advertisers. Family friendly channels obviously will do great. Edgy content will not.
Platform: Beneficial to content that is frequently watched on larger screens, primarily TV screens. Seems to target growing audiences.
Production: Focuses on content that uses high-quality editing, camera footage, and more. The better the production value, most likely, the better the score.
Ideally, if you make the following type of content:
- 10+ minute videos with 45%+ viewer retention per video
- A highly driven fanbase that shares your content, likes your videos more than the average creator, and comments opinions a lot
- Is family friendly, little to no swearing, no sexual content, no violence, etc.
- Content that can be watched on all devices, platforms and in all markets with ease
- Content that focuses on high production values and good quality
This would make your P-Score higher than the average user.
Curious.
P-Scores appear to be more than just these five benchmarks being compared against your metrics, they appear to be more like overall scores of an account in general. When you look at a P-Score, it doesn’t give you insight on any strong suits for these five things. It only gives you the one unified number, which is your overall grade. The issue, however, is that creators have no way of determining or identifying the individual values for each of these benchmarks.
Creators who are doing great with popularity, platform and passion might never have the opportunity to fix their protection scores because they’d never know it’s an issue, for example. You can mix and match between these five to make problems for channels, but they could never fully reach their potential if they can’t identify an issue. Google knows that these are issues but does not alert creators or give them an opportunity to access this data without finding some sort of weird exploit to get to it.
Another major note for P-Scores is that they appear to be region-based. While obtaining scores for creators from the United States, we noticed that we were getting different scores for these same exact creators from Bowblax, a Canadian creator. He estimated that the average Canadian P-Score value for creators was ‘about 20 points less.’ To test our theory, we used a VPN from the United States to appear as a Canadian user, and we matched the numbers perfectly. P-Scores do appear to be region-based.
The document then goes in detail on how to locate a specific channels P-score, now invalid as it's been patched. They do however explain the guide to ratings that reminds us a lot of television, something we all know Youtube is attempting to become with their influx of comedy show clip channels hitting trending every day. They describe these ratings as Y, G, PG, Teen, Mature, and X. They explain these ratings in detail in the guide as well.
The team then brings to your attention throttling and what youtube has said and done to hide it from you. The team has an entire section on throttling code found as well. To throttle a function means to ensure that the function is called at most once in a specified time period (for instance, once every 10 seconds). This means throttling will prevent a function from running if it has run “recently”. Throttling also ensures a function is run regularly at a fixed rate.(bit.dev)
The team concludes; "At this point, we’re completely in the dark like usual with how YouTube has developed all of this and implemented this, and also on how they’ll react. We know that this information alone is extremely valuable to the YouTube community, and so figuring this out has been a potential revelation that can benefit creators for a long time to come.
YouTube will potentially fix these exploits to get your P-Score/other peoples’ P-Score very soon, possibly within hours or days. It’s best that you get your information now if you can in case there is no other way to get it. At this point, we’re unsure what this means specifically for the future. We just want this to help everyone else."
They were right. We were intrigued by the dedication these users put forth just to be patched two hours later. Still, the guide does hold some information within it that validates things we've said in the past as well as may help you as a creator or small business advertiser in the future. We highly suggest you read the full guide here.
For more details on their findings, they've included a spreadsheet of 200 channels they looked at while investigating P-scores including friends of ours or friends of Blunt Media such as Steven Crowder, Cognificent Thought, WillyMacShow, Lord Vega, Pewds, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, to Kavos, Vox, Drama Alert, TV Network channels and even Susan herself. You can view the collected data in a spreadsheet here.
We urge everyone to read this and see it as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems we face and are trying to expose and change in the future of big tech control over the internet, social media, free speech, and fair business and advertising. As you witnessed from The Blacklist, we can't do it alone. We could pull out all the secrets of Google to expose them but without you sharing the information, no one will know of it. We walk the line, while we're writing an article we're not journalists. While we run a business, were not the big corrupt business behind the corruption of America keeping this industry back (but not down!) We're activists for marijuana legality and law reform, but we're not social justice warriors. We work with the disabled but only help those who are willing to help themselves. We create but we're not creators, advertise but aren't THOSE advertisers, we're in chat but not just viewers and we sponsor people but won't allow Youtube their cut because we feel they don't keep up their end to deserve it. We don't pay for no security or guarantee and no matter how much more they mess up the platform it won't bring back the hordes of advertisers that left the second they threw Pewdiepie under the bus. They'll blame advertisers which causes creators to shit on advertisers which leads to less advertisers wanting to pay the ungrateful youtubers and streamers who most brand dealers actively are attempting to make family friendly... but no one really cares about that. The advertisers aren't leaving because you curse, or because you're gay. They left because the company threw you under the bus, then blamed advertisers. They didn't stand by anyone. Their foundation is weak and many creators ate it up, shitting on the few people left to be able to sign a paycheck when youtube demonetized them. This is another way Youtube let down the very thing that runs it's service, video creators and their content.If they are willing to throw the very thing that makes them under the bus who's to say they won't throw a specific advertiser under the bus next time the going gets tough or the mute button breaks?
Your enemy is not the advertisers, but they do watch. CEO's are people like you, often attempting to fill the void of silence with some form of human connection and thus turning towards playing podcasts and streams in the background to keep themselves tuned in. Often times sponsorships are granted by a company asking for a channel by name that they watch themselves.They don't care that you're edgy like late night, they don't care that you play ads, they don't care about any of that. In fact, in the beginning youtube would let you pick out keywords and channels to NOT advertise with. What happened to that simple system?
Now imagine you working your butt off in an effort to build something to help creators out of your own time, money and free will only to overhear creators wrongfully judging, attacking, and shitting on them. It won't bring them back for Youtube ads and it won't bring them back to sponsor your channel privately. On that note, ads are often chosen via automatic aggregation, and private sponsorships requiring adreads and commercial fare have begun to work together on aggregating their ads without Youtube and Google, through brand dealers like our BluntBrands and Famebit. They have their own rating system and ability to warn other businesses from a creator with bad practices; such as theft, slander, bad behavior, breaking contracts etc. Together with Youtube's new P-score, if your listed as hard to work with on a popular aggregator where businesses come to talk about changing the way we advertise online, you could have all the influence in the world and be completely un-marketable.
Many managers in the livestream communities have taken this as a call for censorship and family friendly content completely unaware that it will do nothing for them due to the actions and behaviors displayed by that channel. Knowing the type of social scoring Google seems to be going for on youtube, this seems like it will soon jump into the finances of more than just youtubers and content creators, but the privacy of all of it's users while it attempts to monopolize the internet, Google known to often steal script from smaller app developers that cannot afford to sue them. This puts an emphasis on BBB, who holds Facebook and Google in high regard DESPITE THEIR HORRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE SCORE and endless reports of them simply refusing to contact and ignoring correspondence. This is the biggest example of unfair business practice on the net. Money, threats, and size get you a better business score, even if your business is terrible. Business Yellow Pages app Yelp got in trouble for doing similar a few years back, however being a dedicated contact and advertising platform, they are subject to FTC limitations the BBB is not, like antitrust and fair competition law. Oftentimes BBB is used as an effort to threaten businesses during this age of cancel culture and I'm here to tell you, BBB has no control over anything. You go, you complain, you feel better, our junk email collects the report we'll never respond to. This is common and probably easier for the BBB which is why they don't send letters, make calls, even contact business emails rather than report emails. The goal isn't really to fix your concern. It's to be a standard that no one checks anymore.
Good news is, millennials are coming to professional positions in an effort to change. They're journalists, creators, small businesses and some becoming big businesses. They're learning what we've learned a while back and why most of our clients hire us in the first place. The power of the internet is truly in it's users. Your influence is due to your user engagement. Livestreams would not be entertaining without it's chat, it's users. Your fans, your end user, should be how your scored on Youtube. It was. It worked. Your channel would grow and become promoted or trending based on the website's end users. They'd watch, subscribe, like or dislike your videos which would bring those with positive interaction to the top and worse to the bottom per day, per video and it worked. Now you have a P-score.
Creator Bowblax went into detail on his video "What Youtube is Hiding From You"
The internet will find it if it exists and this can be both a good and bad thing, however we understand this power and would rather be on the site of the internet users, the people. You can confuse and gaslight but you cannot tell them what to think. They find truth and they share it. They judge openly. They will tell you if you ask. This is why we don't "cancel" sponsorships to creators due to witch hunts but listen to the complaints and only end contracts if the user is posing harm to their or our community. This is why we urge interaction between businesses and why we partner with so many of them willing to work together for fair ads to help the creators we grew up watching and we know and love. So next time you get that offer for a small business working with your channel, see if you can work together on a deal for advertising for tomorrow they could own one of the biggest businesses or aggregators in the world and it would be amazing if we all could grow together, bigger than the biggest tech.
However, crawlers and aggregators use code to find video and Google is aware of this, often times intentionally scripting or patching code to intentionally prevent devs and aggregation to its content creators. Even though youtube won't pay them, you can't either. Google has blocked us on multiple occasions which is why we had our data pulled for a 3rd party audit, why we're botting in your chats, and why BOT7 from the sbai app... a Youtube account with regular watch hours (its to imitate a moderate to active user) with no video uploads was banned for breaking upload terms of service. Youtube has muted us over a year ago, they refuse to respond to email as well and we aren't given the option to appeal. This is one of 8 audit bots proving Google is manipulating this P-score for planted creators and favorites, like Juicewrld, whom published a video earlier this year of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki allegedly promising him Artificial Growth covered below by our friend Memology101.
Without this video many may not have even begun to look into the artificial growth and manipulation Google is capable of and actively using, like the manual review process that we've come to find demonetizes all videos during prime views we suspect to not have to pay creators for the first few hours when they make the most on their videos. Under review, you won't get monetized until the views begin to slow down. Something we're also looking into but think should be known.
It's 2019 and big name tech has proven they cannot handle the great responsibility Google has taken upon itself.The same goes for those who witch hunt with some sense of power, businesses who want to control all the money flow, and pharma companies who put the lives and health of their customers second to their income. These, the main enemy in the battle of internet freedom and if you like your freedom of speech and don't believe in wrong think, MUST be exposed to the rest of the creators and the internet if we have any hope of stopping it for the future. We could lose it all to censorship without creators like these that go above and beyond to expose the truths on the internet.
Please show your support by giving these creators an organic follow on twitter: