 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 and you guys are wondering who I'm talking about. I'm talking about Royal Vendapar. 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 a boondoo blank screen, you know I've got a couple of search results here for Royal Vendapar 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 Xmonad and when I do a search for Xmonad, most of the videos that come up in the search results on YouTube are actually my videos because Xmonad's not a popular topic right now. A lot of people talk about it but I've done a bunch of videos on Xmonad so most of the top videos are gonna be mine. But when you filter the search results for recent videos and that's what you should do because Mr. Vendapar's videos, they're never going to come up as being the most relevant search results. That's always gonna be channels with real subscribers with real views right and obviously this automated generated spam videos that he's doing. Nobody's really interested in that so you're not gonna 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 gonna see some of his most recent videos appear in the search results. Here's some stuff in Xmonad. As a matter of fact I scrolled down a little bit but you see I got this block of four videos. Three of them are Mr. Vendapar's. I did a search for Emacs. Here's a video by Mr. Vendapar. I don't even know if he knows anything about Xmonad or Emacs. You know 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. Vendapar again. Let's take a look at his social blade numbers. Mr. Vendapar now has 1.9 million uploads. 1.9 million uploads. Now he first appeared on my radar about two years ago. I noticed this guy kept coming up in the search results all the time and you know when I looked up his numbers on social blade two years ago he had about 100,000 uploads and there is no way a human being can upload you know make and edit and all you know 100,000 videos make the thumbnails. You can't do that right. So 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 a over 100,000 uploads you know a couple 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 like what is going on with this guy and now he's going to pass you know two 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 uploads 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 and 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 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 some something ridiculous but he's ramped it up. He's probably he's probably got some servers and some vpses some cheap vpses he rants 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 vpses working for him he can just spit these things out right? These cheap vpses 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's going to watch one of his videos if they get tricked into it and how do you get tricked into it? Well you upload two 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 two million of them or this man's mr. Vandepar. That's crazy he's guaranteed 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. Vandepar to spam youtube? It probably is he probably makes a little money doing this probably not life changing money but he had one million views in the last 30 days what does one million views on youtube translate to well nobody can really tell you because here's the thing views and ad sense 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 and you know 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 paid different amounts of money you know different kinds of ads paid 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 one million views I would say on the low end he probably made a couple of thousand dollars in ad sense revenue on the higher end it wouldn't shock me if he made six or seven thousand dollars in ad sense 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 you know uploading two million videos and he is 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 uh there've been a few of these kinds of channels that I guess youtube is eventually kicked I noticed that when mr vandepar passed one 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 so another you know playstation 3 call of duty modern warfare 3's I'm assuming what that stands for one million uploads I guess when it got past one million uploads they deleted that channel too because no channel header if I try to play the video yes just another error so I'm assuming what happens is there's some kind of trigger when these spammy channels cross the one million upload mark right like 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 till 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 vandepar the fact that there's maybe 800 million videos posted on youtube and two million are from this one guy he dominates youtube's search algorithms and once people realize how easy he has gained 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 know 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 a pronunciations they go and pull down probably creative comments pronunciations from Wixionary 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 and I've seen other things quote bots and you know things like that facts you know channels that are designed to basically spit out quick facts 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 you know ffmpeg generates a quick video and a thumbnail automatically generated thumbnail and you just go with it and I've complained that youtube is really under attack by comment bots you know the bots that are doing like all the the sex bots that are posting on my channel right every time I upload a video you know the first hundred comments 50 of them are these sex bots these escort services just spamming the hill not just in on my channel the entire platform and I know youtube has the means to stop this they don't or the crypto bots 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 their 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 you know 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 but 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 gave james maxim at michael michael paul scott west alan armored dragon chuck command ring read i yokai doing george lee linux ninja michael yon alexander peace arching for door politic reella teats for let's rid prophet steven willy these guys they're my has 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 i have to put in work to make my videos and if you guys want to support my work subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right 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