 Time here for more systems. It is September 12th of 2023. And we're going to talk about invalid traffic. Normally, in the context of the content I produce, you would assume I'm talking about network traffic. But in a way, this is network traffic. It's just the label given to traffic that comes to YouTube that is allegedly invalid, usually bought by some type of link farm, people who buy views to rank a video higher. Now this is a constant cat and mouse game YouTube plays with creators who are trying to scam the system. And we'll just call them scammers, not really creators. That is not the type of content I produce or many of my friends. And this has been a problem that's been going on for a little while. That's why I mentioned a day to beginning. It's hit my channel, but it seems by going back a little bit, it's been hitting lots of small channels, but ramping up to bigger and bigger channels. Now I feel really bad because the small channels have had loss of revenue from this bug is much as 90% of the revenue. And my losses already are about 30% of my revenue has just disappeared. And there's no really way of getting that back or knowing which videos it is. But according to YouTube, and they have been as helpful as I think they can be with some limited knowledge. They give the answer that when you have the invalid traffic bug, there's going to be a video labeled invalid traffic because of, you know, the bugs they found. And you should stop doing that to the video. But I'm not finding it on a video. I'm just getting an error on my channel in general. And normally I can ignore the weird errors you get with YouTube. But this time I can't because it's taking away revenue. So I'm doing a video on it. Now there's going to be someone that already says YouTube's going downhill, et cetera, et cetera. Or I've seen people try to claim that YouTube just hates smaller creators. And they just don't care with people with less than a million subscribers, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that is true at all. Matter of fact, I would say to most all those people never attribute malice to that, which can be adequately explained by legacy code. The YouTube algorithm is a rather complicated system. I've not seen it firsthand, but you can probably assume the absolute insane number of videos being uploaded. You can't audit those all by hand. So there's obviously a lot of automation that goes into this. And sometimes they're going to get it wrong. We're all human. We all make mistakes. I don't think these mistakes are specifically malicious. And YouTube is still the best platform for discoverability. And the only way I can really, in a scalable way, get my videos out there, get them discovered and get them viewed by audiences. Therefore, I try to work within the system that is YouTube until a better platform shows up. And I can join that and people can discover my content over there. But for today, this is the platform we're dealing with. Now I have contacted Team YouTube and the YouTube liaison. They both replied within the context. I think they gave me adequate answers for what they know, but I think there's more to the story. Now this happened a few months back to some small creators, but there is a tipping point where it started to accelerate a whole lot. And that is the Spiff and Brit livestream. Could be coincidence, but I think it might be a little bit more. The Spiff and Brit, who I had never heard of, did something rather interesting about a month ago and then did a follow up video giving more details. But the too long didn't watch was he started a live stream. He figured out that if you open multiple windows and multiple tabs and start hitting refresh on these tabs and you as a single user logged into a single account can count as well as many tabs as you have open. So if you're able to sustain 10, 20 tabs open, now you're counting as 10 or 20 likes 10 or 20 views and 10 or 20 live stream viewers. So this force multiplier was pretty cool because I think this is fascinating that he took the time to really poke at it. But I think there's some problems that came from it where once you had this many people on there, the YouTube algorithm kind of grabbed this and said, Hey, look, this is a popular live stream. Let's keep showing it to more people. And more people probably joined in the fun, which caused this live stream to get very, very big. And then the follow up video, the Spiff and Brit made about all of that also pointed out the fact that the ads were different for a single user. So you're not seeing the same ad for each tab open, you're seeing different ones. And I think YouTube said, Oh, the advertisers are going to see that this is a problem. So YouTube is starting to scramble and fix it. And whatever they did to fix it somehow has the side effect of flagging the content that we do as well more and more invalid traffic. I don't know this to be absolutely true. I'm just hoping some YouTube engineers who have undoubtedly spent lots of time examining how this Biff and Brit did things also see some of the videos creators are making talking about, Hey, we're here. Hey, these are problems we're seeing. We aren't just buying views. I think the channels that I'm seeing and especially the ones I directly know, they are not people who would do this. I'm not someone who would do this. I don't try to buy my way to the top with any of the videos. And it's just a big annoyance. And of course, if you're a smaller YouTuber and you rely heavily on that ad revenue and to extent, all of us have some dependency on it, but this is also why we have other sponsors for videos. This is a problem. Now I'm hoping I'm hoping YouTube fixes this and this problem gets resolved, because the only other answer you're going to get from a lot of YouTubers is more inserted ad spots where the creator themselves works out a deal and you see more mattress and food things that people have to insert into their video to cover the production cost of videos because YouTube has just cut out that whole section of revenue or as many of the small creators have noticed have lost, as I said, as much as 90% of their revenue. Leave your thoughts and comments down below. Maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way, I want to add my voice to the choir of voices and creators that are talking about this just so we can raise some awareness and hopefully get this problem solved. All right, and thanks.