 Hey everyone before we get into today's video we gotta have our comment of the day and we're gonna go to yesterday where I asked you guys are you excited for the Switch Pro what's your excitement level and a drink to the past had this to say I kind of want to switch pro but I'm not that big into it. If it comes I'll probably get one and I would like whatever features it would inevitably have but I'm very happy with my current switch and I don't see upgrading as a necessity. The only way it would become a necessity is to play games that are too big for the current model and that could run on the new one and I don't think that's what would happen with a pro except maybe a few games like the new 3DS depending on its actual release schedule I might just wait for next gen Nintendo console instead very interesting comment thank you so much for your response a drink to the past now and everyone else who responded as well again we'll feature one comment every day today's comment question of the day is are you dressing up for Halloween and we're gonna make this kind of a two-parter now only are you dressing up for Halloween but what are you dressing up as and why alright folks that's getting today's topic and we're talking about Kotaku because I don't know if you guys have heard Kotaku has been in the news over the last 24 to 48 hours because there's been some controversy and the controversy this time isn't about something they wrote it's not about a particular author like you know Jason Schreyer as an example is probably one of the best video game journalists in the world with his investigative journalism but he's also been wired in controversy at times especially for some of his political stances or stances against some YouTube content etc but today isn't actually about Stefan de Tilo Jason Schreyer or anyone else who actually writes for Kotaku and said it's about Kotaku's parent company so a while back Kotaku deadspin and all of the related entities to those under the same umbrella were bought by a company called G slash O media and this company has already ruffled some feathers at deadspin late last year telling them to just stick to sports coverage because deadspin kind of covered a wide variety of things if you've ever been deadspin you know they they like leaking things and talk about wide variety of things they often do come up in sports stories because they sports are a big part of the website but they do cover a wide variety of things and that's a similar thing to Kotaku Kotaku themselves is one of the premier gaming journalist sites out there and you can get you know some gaming news they're not all gaming news but you get a lot of investigative journalism into gaming there but you also get like snack toku and and a whole bunch of other types of stories under the Kotaku brand that help drive clicks to the website from various other areas of the internet that might not be necessarily related to video games and some people have been critical of when Kotaku went to this many years back but it's no doubt been a successful endeavor for Kotaku and is why they have continued to do it because clicks drive revenue and sometimes the very best of the gaming journalism pieces the very best investigative journalism pieces don't get the viewership that they deserve so these other pieces exist that kind of support the idea that Kotaku can continue to make those big investigative pieces that take many many months sometimes years to put together and it might not actually be paying for itself but the collective whole of Kotaku can afford it they recently sent out a private message from the CEO to all the writers at Kotaku telling them to stick to games very similar to what they tried to tell Dead Spin which is interesting because all of the writers at Dead Spin Kotaku and that whole umbrella of websites is actually part of a union and that union negotiated at the time that everything was sold that all of the writers would get to maintain their creative freedom which basically means they should be able to continue to write and do as is as they've been doing the entire time but the parent company who doesn't seem to understand these websites very much is trying to control them and tell them what to do in particular it seemed like G slash Omedia was upset with Kotaku for talking about the Hong Kong situation just the whole relations with China and all that that seemed to be something that ruffled their feathers even though this is perfectly within the realm of stuff that Kotaku has talked about in the past when it comes to politics now obviously we assume that G slash Omedia has some business dealings in China or something and maybe it ruffled some feathers on their board I don't really know but what's interesting is that now we have some big wigs from Kotaku coming out and kind of painting a bleak picture and this started really honestly and truly not even with them telling Kotaku to stick to games but starting with really horrible ads on Kotaku I have ablack on Kotaku because of these ads so I'm I don't even want to take it off the show you guys basically when you visit the Kotaku website there's really annoying autoplay audio ads playing and these are some of the most intrusive ads you can ever have imagine going to a website and you blasted with music or some sound or something that you weren't expecting or anticipating and you can't quickly find a way to shut it off this is why people gravitate to ablack so much because of these really intrusive ads I don't mind banner ads heck I don't even mind minor pop-ups or interstitials at times even though those can all be annoying but autoplay audio video ad things those are not okay in my book anyways it's one of the worst kinds of ads out there and it's led to a lot of backlash from fans and if you didn't know the writers the people who actually run Kotaku the actual writers the editor-in-chief have nothing to do with the ads on the website that is by the parent company g slash o media but there's been some controversy around it and the union that these guys are all part of the GMG union actually did a response to this so we're actually going to take a deeper look at this this article uh with the gather all this information is green gaming man from their newsroom so uh scrolling on here it says that Kotaku deadsmen other websites in the same network have recently come under fire from their owners after staging a protest against intrusive and atrocious sound on autoplay adverts the issue started with new adverts which were recently added to the website which autoplay with sound on they're objectively bad so as I said all of these people you know Kotaku just been jazzed well all these writers are actually part of the the GMG union and here is their statement on it it says the GMG union has been informed that posts across our websites asking for reader feedback on autoplay ad campaign were taken down by management we condemn this action in the strongest possible terms we're reposting the statement as a screenshot here as we gather more information we thank you our readers and supporters for standing with us through this process and then here's here's the letter it says we have received a great deal of feedback from you our readers about the sound on autoplay videos that have been inundating our websites we want you to know that we hear you that we take those complaints seriously and that we the writers editors and video producers of dead spin are as upset with the current state of our site's user experience as you are we think it is important to let you know that the editorial staff does not control the ad experience on the site and that we understand that dead spin is nothing without its readers so your complaints are our complaints editorial staffers at all levels of this company have made our concerns known in various conversations with members of the g slash o media's senior leadership team we think it would be good for them to hear from you as well so we invite you to submit feedback about our site's current user experience this email address goes to g slash o media's ceo editorial director as well as editors in chief of dead spin his model jayla pink josebel kotaku lifehacker please keep your comments respectful so one thing that's been pointed out that that was changed is that's when staffers had nothing to do with the change again this is from their their own writers union you can see where they were asked to cover just sports and you can see some different stories in here you know women firstly you know craps on floor of tim horton throws it at employees the adults in the room the night in the lights and because they wanted to just cover sports here's what happened after this is the world series and will be deserves the astros are not in apology basically they got rid of 90% of the stories on the site made it just sports um so the result of this is that an editor for denseman barry pecheski was fired for in his own words not sticking to sports or writing things that weren't about sports um even though that was negotiated in the contract that they should have that creative freedom they're just stripping it away which again this could leave the lawsuits and various things this is why you join a union to protect you but obviously uh that's something that can be dragged out over many years and might not have a resolution anytime soon and by the time it does the websites could just be unrecognizable and people might not be visiting them anymore um so jason schreyer put it out i don't know what's going to happen next this is after the ads came out and they were told just to just to stick to games uh but to everyone who has read and supported our workers out over the years thank you again jason schreyer one of the really the most well known one of the most well known journalists out there uh stuff in titillo who is actually the editor-in-chief says another tough day at the office i've steered kataku through some rough waters before thanks to my amazing team can i do it again we'll see we all love the site and the family of sites ran and we are extremely motivated to write by readers and viewers now if you actually go to jason schreyer's profile here he's got a few um other tweets on this if you look at it um up here he goes um here here's you know where i don't know what's going to happen next but to everyone who has supported our worker kataku over the years thank you so again you know not sounding great um but he does he does bounce back and say for because kataku is getting a lot of hate right um kataku has been uh has garnered a lot of hate over the years for some of their clickbait um some of the non gaming stories and even some of the gaming stories uh that they made political that maybe didn't need to be political um they've received a lot of just do criticism but um some people go pretty extreme with it and think some of the people should die that kataku is not valuable as a website anymore which is completely false they do some investigative journalism that literally no one else is doing but again he gets a little political here and goes got some bad news for the alt-right chuds spamming my twitter feed today kataku is still alive and fighting so they haven't given up on it and i already know how to code so i'm like oh man you're gonna have to code your own website or whatever i think is kind of the the running joke here oh man you're gonna have to go start up your own thing and actually learn how to code and not just be a writer uh but jason already knows how to code so i don't really know if that's just alt-right people say i have no idea i don't like to get political here um jason tryer has no problem going to the political realm oh man so let's just go to kataku and see what kataku looks like right now um with adblock on by the way because i haven't actually visited it today they have ads getting through my adblock look at that my adblock has blocked 10 ads but an ad still got through my adblock huh okay two ads got through my adblock interesting so companies have found a way to get through adblock apparently well good for them anyways um as you can see it certainly looks like everything is just gaming which for some people that's going to be a positive because you only go to kataku for gaming content but for other people that go to kataku for other things that's a bit of uh not not great i mean look i mean everything's gaming final fantasy modern warfare um an adorable themed role-playing game totally disrupted outer worlds um fake toys and figurines i'm surprised this story is actually up although then again these characters and these figurines are in video games as well so maybe that's why um you know a smartphone game you know the the sony past uh we and is now actually the number two selling console of all time with PlayStation 4 um so you see it's just all gaming which again for some people you're going to love that it's all gaming uh but for others it's going to be one of those situations where you're going to miss some of the additional features and kataku's editor in chief knows that uh without some of those clickbaity snack taku political whatever stories that that garner millions and millions of clicks every single month that potentially they can't afford to pay some of their best journalists to stick around and keep doing excellent journalistic pieces so ultimately this is the end of kataku i have no idea um g slash o media has owned them for i think almost a year now uh or a little over a year and they they've taken their some time to affect every single site but pushing these ads out there are just atrocious and um demanding that the journalists write what they what they want to write is i guess you could argue within the rights because they own it but also the union negotiated that that wouldn't be the case so you have a company going against the unionized agreement uh and then you have them forcing these horrible ads and now completely changing what these websites are and that is never a good sign for longevity uh it reminds me a lot actually about what i've done with this youtube channel over the years right a lot of people uh still message me to this day you know you have a lot of subscribers how come your viewership isn't higher well because i have butchered this channel um and i know that and i did that to myself no one forced me to do that now it's being forced on things like jezebel and dead spin and kataka they're being forced to kind of butcher their website uh not just with ads you know i i don't think i've done too bad with that but in in terms of content you know i this channel has gone from we talked about just nintendo stuff and then we started talking about other video game consoles which i guess still fits in the video game realm but may not fit with the the branding of the nintendo prime and then all of a sudden to go from that into um doing like a new show and then to go from that into doing gaming live streams they're doing q and a live streams they're then talking about my personal life with my kids and my fiance and my mental health um and through all of that it's just created drama that wasn't needed on a video game channel and it has totally killed off my viewership and i think that kataku and these other websites the writers forum are concerned that that's going to happen to them as well they're going to lose half or more of their viewership and that's going to make it unsustainable i mean i give you an idea right now i've been back doing youtube you know only for you know a couple weeks or so here but this is my lowest revenue month i've had in two plus years right i might even probably gonna make 150 bucks this month and ad revenue which is pathetic i've had one video um get more than 2000 views i used to regularly get a video per week getting 10k plus i used to have almost all my videos crossed in 2000 views and now i'm lucky just to break a thousand sometimes and that's my fault see kataku and dead spinner are being forced into this by new ownership uh and it could very well lead to the death of those places if it wasn't for the fact that i'm working other jobs i wouldn't be able to keep doing youtube because i you know it's just not financially viable but uh who knows maybe we'll bounce back and the algorithm will love us again and maybe um these these websites can survive the traffic loss even if they need to downsize and staff i have no idea what's coming all i know is that this sucks this is what happens when big greedy companies get involved in spaces that they don't fully understand um and i feel bad for the people who work at these websites obviously i'll probably enjoy kataku more because i only went there for gaming coverage anyways but if the gaming coverage goes away or the website goes away or they lose their best authors because they can't afford to pay them because the the traffic's down then we then we are in a dire state of mind granted people like jrsnchrider are always going to be able to find a job but there's other excellent writers there um riley mclee and some others that aren't well known and will have a much harder time getting recognized you know working at some website somewhere else uh you know you like the smaller site or um a big conglomerate like an ign where you can really get buried by the amount of writers they have so i don't know that's just my my take on things you guys let me know what you think about that um i want to thank you so much for tuning in i am denny robeljens from nintendo prime if you enjoyed this video drop a like subscribe let me know your thoughts on kataku down in the comments below uh share this video around with all your friends because without you guys i have no one at least no one watching my videos um also uh the podcast is coming back guys i am happy to report that we are actually recording an episode of the podcast tonight with the goal to release it on halloween which is tomorrow so um hopefully that happens if it doesn't uh i'm sorry but the goal is to release it on halloween um for our patrons and all that that that supports the patreon.com slash nintendo prime you won't be getting this episode early uh the goal right now is just to get the podcast going again and then once i get a regular schedule we will again do the you know patrons get you know audio version video version a little early like a day early than everyone else and stuff like that so well we'll continue to work towards that as we get back into the swing of things here at nintendo prime but i'm gonna thank you for tuning in i'm glad to be back on camera with all of you and i will catch you in the next video