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The Fine Bros back down after internet backlash, rescind all "React" trademarks
- Thread starter Skux
- Start date
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baddvision
Member
same never watching their videos again
MonorailCat
Member
Thats a different issue. The amount of money some people make on youtube with their plain stupid content is .. disturbing. And the FineBros are not even the worst. By far.
There is so much shit on youtube with an unreal amount of subscribers .. it makes me fear for humanity.
Or it makes me fear for myself .. because I am too different to "get" the genius of these channels.
Wait, the Fine Bros have 40 employees?
I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you. There are so few gems on YouTube now, YouTube is a landfill of trash.
And the gems have much better content than the big channels that anyone who thought that YouTube was a meritocracy would be proven wrong really fast.
WordAssassin
Member
They've actually now lost nearly 350,000 subscribers in like three days. That's fucking huge.
And it's been explained before but I'll do my best to summarize:
1) their sponsors are looking at this right now, and they are hemorrhaging subscribers. They are tainted now. They're close to half a million people lost and it hasn't even been a week. That does not look good to investors.
2) The people that are unsubscribing are active viewers, not bots or dead accounts. So that's 350,000 people that are no longer going to watch their videos or buy their merch or any of that shit now. If each of their videos gets 2-4 million views, and they've lost nearly half a million active viewers, that is some serious shit.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Do all 14 million subs engage the videos?
No.
Just a very small fraction who watch and a smaller fraction who share.
Likes, dislikes, minutes watched, unsubs = engagement
All of those people who unsubscribe are the front line of their engagement. Those are the people who are more likely to share their videos on Twitter, FB, etc - where people who have never seen them, will see them.
The reach just 330k ENGAGED viewers has is unreal since a portion will spin the web to friends and their friends to friends, etc. The views on their videos is who is engaging. A large portion aren't even subs. Now that the front lines of engagement are leaving, their overall engagement will go down.
You want higher engagement, subs or not.
They don't license the content they use in the videos, which makes their try to license the reaction to them all the more stupid. Fuckers made a fortune out of other people's content without paying, and somehow they felt entitled to making people having to pay them to make reaction vídeos.
All those people reacting might as well be employees.
SuicidalSteve
Member
Oh god I'm dying
entremet
Member
These big YouTube networks are corporations. YT ain't a garage band thing alone anymore.
They lose 350k people in a matter of days and instantly revert their decision and you don't think it was financially driven? Cmon son
ScientificPizza
Banned
how long do you think it will take them to make a kids react to react world so they can seem sympathetic as a bunch of cute kids defend them
Let's put it into something more relatable..
According to this page:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/index.php
NeoGAF has 166,205 members.
Presumably, that includes some accounts that haven't logged in since registration/etc.
In other words, that 14 million number represents something similar in that not all of those accounts watch those videos. They may have saw a video 5 years ago, hit subscribe and never watched another video again.
Now, let's take this parallel to the extreme..
Let's say their unsubscribe is equivalent to our banning system. If NeoGAF banned the same percentage of users (keeping with your 250k example), that would have resulted in almost 3000 users banned in roughly 2 days.
Which isn't so bad, because hey, we have 166k users, that's a drop in the bucket.
Furthermore, let's extrapolate.. if the rate of loss continues at it's current pace, we'd have 6000 users banned in 2 more days.
At what point do you say, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea?"
Keeping in mind, the longer things go on, the more press attention/word of mouth it gets, the longer it takes to change public perception.
Oh damn
I love this sort of stuff. People banding together across the internet for a common purpose. Sometimes it's misguided (find the Boston bombers), sometimes it's amazing (Xbox One DRM rebellion), but it's still fascinating to me.
The Fine Bros underestimated our power. They thought we'd be chomping at the bit to join React World and become their revenue slaves. They thought we'd bend over and take the copyright takedowns while blindly consuming their content. But we gave them the middle finger, tanked their subscriber base and told them we wouldn't stand for it.
The Fine Bros underestimated our power. They thought we'd be chomping at the bit to join React World and become their revenue slaves. They thought we'd bend over and take the copyright takedowns while blindly consuming their content. But we gave them the middle finger, tanked their subscriber base and told them we wouldn't stand for it.
And also, many of these active members are responsible for bringing in even more views because they share videos on social media getting non-subscribers to watch.
Heck, I posted a thread on gaf with a video. It only had like a 100 replies, but had 8000+ views. if even a quarter of the views resulted in clicking on the link to the videp, that's 2000 views that I (a single subscriber) was responsible for. 350k sharing the video with even 2-3 people on average = close to a million views.
alfredofroylan
Member
Late to the party, but here's a nice animation of the React World announcement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut-0meZV6rI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut-0meZV6rI
Profiting off of others work?
See above.
They weren't even allowing use of their logos, music themes, etc. if you joined React World.
At best. At worst it just meant a way to stretch their reach and close down anything resembling their "brand" by abusing youtube's broken ass takedown system.
Going into partnership with a 13million sub channel, and all attention that would bring to your channel could be a great thing for some Youtubers.I don't see how the "Profiting off others work" argument is any different than what all the other Youtube networks (Polaris etc) do.
The trademarking and takedowns are absolutely disgusting though
They also trademarked "React" and told people to avoid "their format" unless partnered with React World. Adding to that, they were almost intentionally vague concerning what they would consider to be infringing.
Well in that case f*ck React World!!
BladeoftheImmortal
Member
They got too greedy and got owned for it. Good. Not like what they do is special or anything.
lowhighkang_LHK
Member
I know right. They got rich recording other people's reaction to already created and copyrighted content. And you know what? That's fine. They got paid doing dumb shit, congratulations.
But the gall to prevent other people from making a little cash doing something similar? You guys also realize that on average it's about one dollar per 1,000 views. So when a react video gets 50,000 views, that's chump change. Mind you, the very fact that even though it's the same genre of content, the fact that it's two different people doing it ultimately means you get unique content, which is good for us - consumers on the user end watching this.
It's racketeering at it's best. Join us or fuck off. If you join us, "we'll help you." First off, wut? Like, teach me how to point a camera at a kid reacting to a Captain America trailer. Yeah, thanks for the franchisee help Burger King.
And in their apology video, they say - we would never send out needless copyright claims to people who do similar videos. But they have. But they did. On numerous occasions. These asshats were willing to go after Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen, of course they went after any little youtuber with the word react in their vid description. It's great to see them get exposed on their shit on reddit.
Maybe this will motivate them to spend more effort creating actual "UNIQUE" content, so that when they want to make it a franchise and license their brand out, people actually see it has a good value proposition that doesn't send out a generalized blanket fuck you to content creators on youtube.
lastplayed
Member
Isn't that basically what YT does?
I don't think so. The Fine Bros. likely won't be approached by YouTubers who wouldn't work with them on principle nor are they likely to choose YouTubers who are critical of them. This was mainly limited to social media and YouTubers criticizing their actions. No single YouTuber suggested that everyone unsubscribe from both the Fine Bros. and React channels. The YouTube subscribers seemed to have done that of their own accord after they understood how crappy the Fine Bros were being and had been.
Vincent Alexander
Member
I can't handle these....it's too much. Thank god for the Fine Bros.
Jacksinthe
Banned
You could just host a website yourself and build a branding around that. Pay for the necessary bandwidth to shuttle your new videos to thousands and millions of people per day. Host a community option where people have to sign up to comment and engage. Maintain backups on top of backups of all your material and website data multiple times per day. Have the necessary enterprise security protocols in place so when you get popular, you don't get DDOS'd or hacked out of business. Then just get a whole bunch of businesses to advertise on your site so you can make money.
Easy, right?
Messofanego
Banned
Brilliant dystopian subversion.
But here's the thing you're ignoring: they've gone after and attacked people in the past who have done literally nothing similar. Like Jimmy Kimmel's interview people on the streets series. Or a guy doing a Senior Reacts before they ever did Elder Reacts. They tried to essentially erase his channel from existence and as soon as they did, they uploaded their first Elders video. Or the fact they've literally attacked yt channels who haven't done anything similar at all and only had 10 views/8 subs. There is no room for defense for them here.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
Fuck how did I miss this, this is amazing.
This is also Amazing.
You know, the Fine Bros were right. This was the moment where the community stood together.
Androidsleeps
Member
Yep. There's this one guy who has almost 6 million subscribers, did a couple of skits/dumb short films way back but most of his channel is what he shits out literally every day of fucking vlogs of him basically walking around his house and around L.A. acting like an annoying over-the-top stereotypical gay character. That, or your pick of stupid, ridiculous, banal "challenge videos"..stuff like Trying weird chip flavors", "the easy bake oven challenge".
Doug Heffernan
Member
I know right? Take off the fucking snow hat, you're in a heated building.
Messofanego
Banned
Trojita
Rapid Response Threadmaker
The E3's after a recent account approval spree are the best.
Cabbagehead
Member
"died laughing" press F to revive....
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