 Hey everyone. Long time no see. Making a video like this is always interesting because there's a lot of unsuredness. Is that even a word? Where you don't really know what's going to happen and a lot of things are out of your control. Obviously, if you know me, Nathaniel Rumpeljantz, the guy, the man, the voice, the spirit behind this Nintendo Prime YouTube channel, you know that there's been a lot of ups and downs of the channel pretty much from the get go. Things did go smooth for a little while, but at least this year in 2019, you started with me losing the job that gave me the income to support me even being able to do this and then got things a little bit on track heading into E3 and then E3 went almost according to plan. There's still videos from E3 that I don't have done that at this point are just redundant to even put out there and then obviously we had my accident and everything in between and if you don't know all the details on that, that's fine. It's more personal related. It doesn't really have to do with you guys, but the heart attack as well. There's a public video on that up talking about the heart attack situation. So there's just been a lot that has happened in 2019. 2019 has been, for lack of a better word, kind of a shit show here at Nintendo Prime. We had all this amazing momentum heading into this year and then I literally pissed it away over the course of this year. Even at the beginning of the year, when I lost my job and we had this big surge of support on Patreon, I failed to deliver on promises on Patreon. I failed to deliver on content promises. I failed to deliver on giveaway promises. I have failed not only our patrons who I feel they're just the absolute worst for, especially over the last few months. I have failed you guys, the viewers. I've not given you consistent daily content like I planned. I have not kept other ambitions and plans going and I've been weighing a lot over the last few months, you know, in wake of my health situation everything and I'm improving. I'm losing weight. Everything's going fine. Hopefully I'll be where I want to be here a year from now in terms of health and happiness and my family and everything. Hopefully everything all works out. But the thing is while I'm sitting here kind of reshuffling my channel a bit and trying to figure out what I really want to do with this place, YouTube decides to come out and throw a wrench into everything. I'm sure by now it's almost impossible for you not to have noticed because so many different YouTubers have made videos on it. Arlo is one that I know is related to this community that you guys might have seen. Basically, YouTube lost a lawsuit to Kappa. It's weird because YouTube is technically Kappa compliant, but publicly said a lot of really stupid things. So to even be on YouTube, to even make a YouTube account, to comment on a YouTube video, to have ads serve to you on YouTube, you have to be 13 years older. That is a requirement on YouTube that actually makes them Kappa compliant because children are considered anything under the age of 13. So technically YouTube has been Kappa compliant this whole time, but then they decided to create a YouTube Kids app and then they also decided to go ahead and talk about publicly in many different ways are YouTube is the number one platform for kids. It's got all the best content for kids. It's competing with the best of the kids cable, you know, channels like Disney and Nickelodeon, PBS and in doing that, they inevitably drew the attention of, well, the FTC because the FTC had not been really regulating anything on YouTube. And obviously the FTC's goal is to try to protect children. Now, I think there's obviously a fine line between protecting children and allowing parents to be parents. And I definitely think a lot of the problems on YouTube, a lot of the problems that some children have with YouTube watching inappropriate stuff, or whatever the case might be is strictly on the parents and I'm not paying attention to what media their children are consuming. That has been a parent problem. Going back to the 90s when we used to blame actually it still happens that they blame video games for violent behavior. Just parents don't keep up on stuff and don't pay attention to what's happening and the generation groups below them. So like if a parent isn't interested in video games, they don't understand what's going on in the video game realm. Hence they don't really monitor their kids very well if they aren't people that use their phones a lot of them watch a lot of YouTube or Netflix or whatever. Kids can be consuming a lot of different things and the parents will be blissfully unaware of what's actually influencing their child. So I do put a lot of blame at the feed of parents here but basically YouTube was serving targeted ads and they were advertising the fact that they knowingly had a lot of children on their platform even though their terms of service say you need to be 13 years or older but YouTube was acknowledging that there was millions upon millions of people under the age of 13 on their platform. So basically YouTube knew there were a bunch of kids either on their parents' accounts or straight up making YouTube accounts and lying about their age. YouTube knew about it and did nothing. Instead YouTube allowed targeted ads to happen which is where they are collecting information on minors under the age of 13 which is against the law and this is what led to the whole FTC COPPA lawsuit with YouTube that they lost and had to pay like $176 million or whatever whatever it is they had to pay and it's not like oh my gosh that's the end of YouTube because YouTube is owned by Google and Google is like one of the biggest companies in the world so that's like a drop in the bucket for them but YouTube as a platform is an interesting place because YouTube on its own is basically an entity that barely breaks even every year. It's not really a massive for-profit venture for Google. I don't know if you guys are well aware of this. YouTube is more valuable for its user base than it is for the money it generates. So YouTube does generate a bunch of revenue for a whole bunch of us. I make money off YouTube and a bunch of other YouTubers do as well but YouTube has to fit all the bills. They have to pay for the servers. They have to pay for the developers and the customer support which we all know isn't that great anyways to still have to pay for what they do have and when you get to the end of it YouTube itself isn't really a big for-profit venture. It never has been and I don't think any proper video hosting platform ever really can be a massive for-profit venture. It's just almost impossible because just because the cost of bandwidth alone and keeping servers up and uptime and the hundreds of thousands of millions of people using it it's going to be impossible for it to be for-profit but the thing is what happened in wake of this is YouTube is basically scared. They are washing their hands of their responsibilities moving forward and they put it all on us. Now that's not you know the end of the world. I mean we should try to be FTC and Kappa compliant as a content creator. I should I should know the laws and I know I don't I don't have a lawyer at my disposal all the time to go over those laws with me to figure out what I can and can do but YouTube is basically putting it at our feet and they're doing this in a number of ways. One, I had to recently select if my channel is intended to be targeted to children. Now intent and what they consider to be targeted to children are two different things. My channel is not intended for kids. If you are someone under the age of 13 watching my content I'm not making this video for you. I'm not making any of my videos for you. I realize 6% of my audience are under the age of 13 and are watching this content and I can't control that but 94% of my audience is over the age of 13. It's it's something crazy like 87% of my audience is over the age of 18. So my channel is very much targeted towards adults talking about what people might consider children's games that adults happen to enjoy, the Mario's, the Zelda's and all that stuff of the world, Animal Crossing, Pokemon etc. And so you would figure I'm safe because I don't target content to kids. I also don't swear excessively most of the time especially off live streams and so I should be an advertiser friendly face when it comes to the generalness of the content not maybe the drama but the generalness of the content that I talk about be it news opinions you know whatever whatever I happen to be doing. Here's the thing though they're gonna have a bot going around and if YouTube's bot thinks that your content is improperly marked like if I if I take a video on Pokemon Sword and Shield and I say this isn't intended for children this is intended for adults and they say no it's intended for children. I am up to liable to basically I can be fine by the FTC up to this doesn't mean they're going to do it but up to $42,000 per video that I mark as not for kids that is deemed as for kids. Now it needs to be deemed as for kids with the FTC so even if YouTube's algorithm bot says it's for kids it doesn't mean the FTC is going to agree with them but the general rules on what content is for kids is very very broad it's so broad that nobody knows how this is going to be approached I could just be broad because they aren't sure which content they want to go after in the future obviously they're going to be going after some of that creeper content that that does exist on YouTube they're going after for sure toy unboxings and stuff like that there's a bunch of you know blippy stuff like that where you would think like like something like blippy that my kids watch which should be considered safe and fine for my children and I think it is as a parent but you know it's got to come under the rules and regulations and YouTube has basically made it so kids content if you do make kids content you can continue to make kids content but YouTube might randomly delete channels that aren't making any money kids content can't make money anymore or I should say it can't make any money it can't have targeted ads which when you look at the back end that makes up 80 to 90 percent of your revenue off ads is targeted ads so that basically kills children's content if children's content only source of revenue is ads and this is in addition to the fact that you can't do a bell notification anymore the subscribe button is going to vanish on the videos although you can still click on the channel and do it you are not going to be having notifications sent out you're not going to be having your video show been recommended anymore etc obviously the YouTube kids app is probably going to have to get nuked and this all goes into effect on January 1st 2020 so it's coming up quick and you might think well Nate what do you have to worry about because you don't you don't talk about you know you don't do children's toys unboxings I mean I mean our amiibo consider that I've done that before so what's a what's a children's toy anything intended that a children might play you could argue Nintendo switch is a children's toy even though adults play it you could argue that Pokemon Sword and Shield and Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing and pretty much any game Nintendo makes as rated e could be considered targeting children the the broad definitions they're using are basically anything that a child might enjoy and this includes if you make thumbnails or titles that might entice people to click now they're not saying clickbait per se but what they are saying is things like if you're if your thumbnails have bright colors in them which of course they do not all my thumbnails this one my thumbnails are more darker colors with a with a lighter text on it or something but if you have a brighter thumbnail which is eye catching that could be considered like you're targeting kids even though adults click on that stuff too do you kind of see the conundrum are running into here it's that a lot of the content that us adults enjoy kids enjoy too and this leaves youtube as the only safe content being the edgy content and the edgy content is the exact stuff youtube told everyone you can't make money on anymore just a year ago so we're left in this situation where we don't know where the future youtube is going and we don't know if channels like mine or even even spawnwave and others are low in particular because he's an actual puppet even though a majority of his audience is adults it doesn't matter they could deem you're a puppet you clearly target children even though he doesn't um we're not sure what's going to happen we don't know how hard the fdc is going to come down now i think channels like mine will probably be okay because i'm not very big at least i'll be okay for a while i say this because um i don't do prime family videos anymore i can't have my children appear on camera anymore or any of that that's fine i can comply with that that's not a huge deal they weren't a big part of my channel anyways but um what i have to be mindful of is that um the fdc could decide at any point that my content is that but the fdc is not very well funded this is not something that's been talked about in enough videos uh there's been a lot of scare tactics going out there this that this that all you know they're gonna nuke half of youtube on january 1st reality is the fdc as much as they might want to run around finding everyone they don't have the people or the backing financially uh to be scouring millions of youtube channels and billions of videos and going after each individual video they just don't they just don't have the funding and the backing to do it they can go after like a big entity such as youtube you know such as google and all that but like going after individual users has always been a problem this is why even though it's illegal to download music you know off of youtube or you know off the internet in general unless you purchase it if you just illegally download it technically you can be held individually viable or liable for that download up to a really massive fine for each song that you downloaded individuals are not often gone after they go after the websites that are providing the um ability to get this stuff illegally right because that's easier to go after because the fdc does not really have the manpower to go after everyone individually now if you are a huge channel you know if you if you're approaching you know a million if you're a million subscriber let's say you like beat them up or something if you're like a million plus i think channels like that game explains of the world um have a much greater chance of running into problems because they are bigger easier to find easier to target whereas someone like me you could still find me and recommended and this and that on some of these videos but in general uh i i mean i'm going to fly under the radar i think for a while and i think the game explainer others might fly under the radar as well too and it might turn out that our content is fine and perfectly okay and that we can keep doing it we don't know how they're going to target video game content particular video games are listed as something that on their thing that you know appeals to children but you know are they just talking about minecraft and roblox or are they talking about all video games in general and even then is that fair to minecraft channels who have might have a majority 13 plus audience uh is that fair to them like what's going to happen to pewdie pie i mean he's been doing a lot of minecraft you obviously know what his nine-year-old army what's going to happen there they're going to go after him um there's a lot of unknowns uh in what's going to happen here because we don't know what the ftc's goal is here other than to try to get rid of targeted ads on children's content we don't know what the ftc is going to rule as children's content on an individual level so a lot of this is just an unknown territory we don't know what's going to happen either channels like mine can continue to thrive and flourish and pewdie pine everyone else out there can continue to flourish and do what we want or the ftc's going to come in and basically destroy youtube as we know it um and that's going to leave content creators like me either looking for another platform or just be done creating content altogether and that's what makes it hard right now when i'm in the middle of a transition at my channel uh to making maybe less content than i originally wanted to but i'm creating more focused content on what i i really want to make i have you know some top tens in the work i have a potential game with a year thing i want to get in the works for to launch ironically on january first um i have uh some reworking reshuffling i'm trying to do with the nintendo prime podcast to get that back especially for you patrons i know i owe you a billion episodes of that at this point i am working on getting that back on track regular guests all that i want to make it an amazing show i want to make it the best possible show it can be when it comes back so i'm working on that and i'm working on a just a lot of individual videos and obviously i've talked about even you know possibly bring my prime news on sundays that is something i'm still seriously in contemplation over but i'm worried about starting all this up and then i get going in this good flow all the way through december then i get to january and my videos are just hit hit hit hit and then i get fined and if i get even one fine of forty two thousand dollars i'm done my family's ruined not just this channel my literal family is ruined and that's a pretty big risk um for me to take i'm not knowing if my content is going to be deemed as for children or not and i'm not going to start cussing at the beginning of my videos to try to get the algorithm to run away from my video because i swore on it i'm not going to change who i am to suit them so i don't know you guys let me know what you think about this whole situation i have more content planned and i'm sorry this is the first video that you're getting this week but i needed to address this and get it off my mind so i can kind of clear the air before i were moving on to other things anyways i'm sure you can hear my kids a little bit in the background they're they're getting kind of antsy so i gotta go i think you guys for tuning in i am Nathaniel roblejans from the tunnel prime i love you guys and i'll catch you in the next video