Youtube Losing Big Accounts to Competitors Due to Lack of Oversight

Want to get a youtube user shut down because you don't like their message? It doesn't seem very difficult these days. The mega-popular Christian and political outreach channel "PPSIMMONS" (our namesake) found that out the hard way earlier this week when, quite unexpectedly, their channel was "terminated".

The reason given by youtube, available to see when you actually try to visit the channel home page, is:

This account has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines and/or claims of copyright infringement.

In an interview with moderator and spokesman Mike Shoesmith, author of two of the PPSIMMONS resource books and frequent contributor to the channel content said in an interview that they are trying to reach youtube to have a dialogue on the matter. He also said they are moving operations to their popular facebook page.


"We are shocked by this - truly shocked" Mr. Shoesmith said. "We were placed on notice by youtube and put on six month probation for a Trayvon Martin video but we appealed it and youtube said they were wrong and placed our account back in good standing. A week later they shut us down completely without any warning".

Mr Shoesmith also said they have a popular facebook page and have been slowly moving video content over there. "Our facebook fans are the best and we appreciate their support. We have streaming news coverage and live interaction with members. It's a really great venue" Shoesmith said. "If youtube doesn't honor our requests for reinstatement then facebook will be a solid alternative".

Additionally PPSIMMONS is now, as of today, up and running on Dailymotion; a popular video sharing website used by many big names. They began uploading content to that site and is available for anyone to access. Dailymotion has many of the same features as youtube - embedding, commenting, sharing to social networking sites etc.

PPSIMMONS representative Mike Shoesmith told us it felt good to "break free from the youtube chains and have the flexibility to branch out knowing that our video content is not in any violation of copyright laws and that we can post to other sites and have access to our videos to use on blogs and social networking to promote our message".

PPSIMMONS had nearly twenty two thousand subscribers on their channel with tens of millions of views. Many of their videos had third party content which youtube permits as long as the user agrees to allow advertising on the video to promote the creator of the third party content. This allowed youtube to make a great deal of money off of the PPSIMMONS uploads without any money actually going to the people at PPSIMMONS. They were ok with that since it was a not-for-profit outreach anyway. The financial loss is strictly youtube's.

With all of the options out there youtube is certainly the most popular. But the question remains - for how long? As more alternative sites become better known when groups like PPSIMMONS promote them by moving their material and then linking from social networking websites, youtube would do well to heed the chatter out there; a warning that rough seas are ahead if they don't start investigating the flagging of content. Many other websites had PPSIMMONS videos embedded in their pages and when youtube pulled the plug on the entire account a great many other websites went dark as well - news sites, blogs, etc. How does that look when a video supposedly from youtube won't even play. Dailymotion is very facebook friendly and even allows facebook users to install an app on their pages which plays dailymotion videos. In many ways it is better than youtube.

There are campaigns which take place on youtube called "flagging campaigns" designed by groups to get individual channels shut down. For example, the PPSIMMONS channel had material which was hard-hitting toward the atheist and evolutionist community. It wasn't slanderous or mean. It simply pointed out all of the reasons people should avoid the pitfalls of jettisoning their beliefs and why the liberal, naturalistic worldview is indefensible. It was classy content and difficult to refute. And so, since PPSIMMONS had never been in direct violation of any policies, a flagging campaign triggered the closure of the channel.

This actually can lead to the channel being reinstated should youtube investigate further but much damage has been done by this and PPSIMMONS has already begun the process of moving on.

Should youtube be afraid of this? In fact they should. Youtube has been very comfortable for people because it is familiar and a household name. But don't forget - Lucky Strike and Pan Am were also once household names and look what happened there.