 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review your source for everything One Piece except for today because we need to discuss some serious real-world business. First and foremost if you're just here for some fun One Piece commentary and aren't interested in this video then I completely understand but I recommend that you take some time to watch it anyway because there are some massive changes coming to YouTube that are going to affect the platform forever and it may very well impact this channel in a big way. So I thought that all of you members of the Grand Fleet have a right to know exactly where it seems we stand and don't worry because I'll be putting up lots of fun One Piece images along the way so there will be something to enjoy amongst all of this you know very potentially bad news. So COPPA is an acronym for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act a federal law of the United States and as of September this year YouTube as a platform had a complaint filed against it in which they were alleged to be in breach of this act because it was collecting information on children in order to serve children's content with targeted advertising which under this law is blatantly illegal and so the Federal Trade Commission fined YouTube $170 million in their settlement. Now that sounds like a lot of money but really compared to the absurd amount of currency YouTube has made of children's content it's nothing bank breaking for them at all. The bigger issue is that as part of their settlement YouTube has had to agree to a wide array of changes that are going to affect a lot of your favorite YouTube channels as well as just flat out kill many of them. Before I go any further though I just want to address the fact that a lot of people are blaming the COPPA legislation and the FTC for this move however I have to say that this is almost entirely YouTube's fault. COPPA is nothing new it was enacted in 1998 and between then and now YouTube and essentially every other internet giant has blatantly ignored it and proceeded to collect data on children for purely profit-driven motives and yes I suppose you can say that perhaps YouTube has been technically COPPA compliant because their terms and services say that a user needs to be 13 years or older to make an account but Shakora children are somehow capable of lying about their age because they just want to jump on board and watch their favorite YouTubers do some sort of Minecrafty Robloxie Fortnighty whatever business children do en masse. But here's the thing YouTube is well aware of that and it can scarily accurately identify which individuals are most likely children and then proceed to collect information on them and allow advertisers to target ads to the under-13 market. It is 100% YouTube's fault that they cultivated a massive portion of their business model on an illegal activity. Regardless of your personal opinion on COPPA and to be clear I personally believe that it is far too heavy-handed and put together by legislators that can't even begin to comprehend the complexities of online interaction but with that said YouTube's practices were still illegal and they just proceeded to do it anyway showing a reckless disregard for their actions as well as for the creators on their platform. Now getting back to the settlement the primary outcome of this is that YouTube is actually being forced to comply with the law and not collect data on individuals under the age of 13 and that sounds fine in theory but the way in which this being enacted is simply ridiculous. So part of this compliance has been installing a feature whereby creators now have to mark whether or not their videos are made for kids and to be clear if a creator marks their video as yes this is made for kids then that is essentially a death sentence for the video because these videos disable both comments and notifications amongst many many other features but these two I find are the most important because no notifications means that people won't be informed of your video and the lack of comments hurts interaction with the algorithm so basically your subscribers won't see your video and YouTube won't be pushing the video to non-subscribers. Plus the biggest hit is that targeted ads will not be able to run on content made for kids and this is devastating because targeted ads make up something ridiculous like 80 to 90 percent of video's income and given that nobody is watching your video anyway due to the aforementioned changes you can kiss the other 10 to 20 percent goodbye as well. Essentially killing not only your videos but also potentially your entire channel if your content falls under the made for kids definition and here are some of the factors that can contribute to that definition. Subject matter of the video educational content for preschoolers whether children are your intended or actual audience for the video whether the video includes child actors or models whether the video includes characters celebrities or toys that appeal to children including animated characters or cartoon figures hmm whether the language in your video is intended for children to understand and by that I assume they mean whether or not you're speaking slowly and using simple language for children to get whether the video includes activities that appeal to children such as play acting simple songs or games or early education whether the video includes songs stories or poems for children any other information you may have to help determine your video's audience like empirical evidence of the video's audience. Now for the most part this does not affect this channel in theory I think it's blatantly clear that videos on the Grand Line review and my second channel New World Review are not made for kids and my primary demographics being 18 to 24 years old and 25 to 34 years old conclusively prove that however there is one part of this that makes me very nervous which is a section about whether or not your video includes animated characters which you know I suppose 100% of my videos across both channels do so the problem becomes yes it's easy enough to mark my content as not for kids which it most certainly isn't but what if YouTube somehow determines that it is because the thing about this platform is that there is something like 300 hours worth of video uploaded to the platform every minute and nobody has the manpower to go through all of that so of course YouTube is going to be implementing its wonderful machine learning to flag videos that it believes are made for kids and were not marked as such in order for people to continue gaining revenue and this scares me because what if the YouTube machine sees a thumbnail like this with a smiling loofy bright vibrant colors and goes well that's clearly made for kids and the channel owner lied and sadly I think that's entirely possible especially with One Piece because it began its life in the western world as a four kids production that was aimed at children so if One Piece gets considered as children's content by whoever or whatever gets to make that arbitrary decision well then the ground line of view would be effectively killed so what am I supposed to do about this well I guess one option would be to structure thumbnails so that they are clearly not intended for kids you know like putting a bloodied Zora or loofy up there instead of a smiley one but even then that can cause issues in the long term because the other big problem on YouTube is that content needs to be advertiser friendly anything too adult gets flagged is not advertiser friendly and less targeted ads also play on it as a result so essentially a user isn't allowed to structure their content for kids but they also aren't allowed to structure their content to adults so there's an incredibly fine line of play here now the good news at least for this channel is that despite the fact that these changes don't go into effect until January of 2020 users have begun to be informed on whether or not their videos would be flagged as made for kids and right now no video on Grand Line Review or New World Review has been flagged as such so that is good news for us at least but it doesn't take away the fear that when the system goes into full swing these videos are going to be very vulnerable to mistakes in machine learning so I'm giving you this warning now because if something does happen to this channel I want you to be prepared and to know why but here's the thing even if my channels are completely 100 safe which I'm not convinced they are but even if they are this new system is quite literally going to destroy the careers of an extraordinary amount of other content creators who are doing absolutely nothing to appeal to children but their channels might be based on things like Lego or toy unboxings that are typically seen as a product for children a big one actually would be any pokemon channels out there those guys are probably screwed because despite the fact that pokemon has a massive adult fan base myself included it is designed for children and a video with a bright fun Pikachu on the thumbnail is almost certainly going to be considered made for kids in fact you know what here's a little behind the scenes of my life because for a while now I've been planning to build a third channel which would have been focused entirely on applying the one piece 101 model to pokemon and the goal of the channel was simply to be to go through the entire pokedex and analyze in detail the history of every single pokemon in existence and I think that would have been fun but there is absolutely no way that I'm going to try and do that now I'll have to come up with another idea for a third channel if I still want to make one because pokemon is going to turn from solar gold to youtube poison and I feel incredibly bad for all the creators and viewers of these channels who are going to be essentially shut down it's not at all fair on them that youtube acted illegally and are now scrambling because they never developed an infrastructure to actually comply with the law and as a result it's the creators who are going to suffer the most by far and I haven't even begun to discuss the effects that it may have on gaming content my god I mean just about anything could be affected like I mentioned before roblox minecraft fortnite even super mario 64 speedruns in fact anything nintendo period and you know what just everything to do with gaming is at heavy heavy risk now I will have a link in the description below for you to leave a public comment to the fdc regarding copper and I'd highly encourage you to do so although to be clear I don't think it will actually help public comments are very much legal requirement and are almost never taken into consideration just like the whole issue with net neutrality if it didn't work then it's probably not going to work now however that doesn't mean we shouldn't try now at this point I should also bring up that the fdc is also going to be keeping an eye on videos on the platform and if they don't believe that said videos are compliant with copper regulations then the channel creator or creators can be fined a maximum of around 40 000 american dollars and you know that's like over 60 000 australian dollars which is three quarters of the average australian's yearly income so you know it's a bit of money and I have no doubt that the fdc will be looking where it can to issue at least a couple of these finds to make an example however in regards to these finds I should say that that is a maximum number and the large majority of finds that will be issued aren't going to be anywhere near that so that's not something that really concerns me especially because that isn't going to affect anything I do because I feel like this channel is safe from miscategorization by a human it really is more of the algorithmic identification process that has me worried because if one of my videos does get classified as made for kids even when it clearly isn't there is currently no mechanism to appeal that decision you'd have to go through youtube support and that can be a long nightmarish process so in essence I think that the grand line review will be okay but next year is going to be pretty turbulent for youtube like an ad apocalypse 2.0 or perhaps even more devastating a lot of time is going to be needed not only for youtube but also as creators and advertisers to adjust to the changes and create a new status quo which I have no doubt there will be but there are going to be a lot of innocent victims along the way and personally even if I'm not one of them it really annoys me that american domestic policy has the ability to threaten my personal business practice run from Australia it's a really bizarre situation where I have even less power to do anything about this than an american viewer at least you guys can petition the fdc but I'm on the other side of the world and your policymakers don't care what I think nor should they in theory and just to be fair to them for a second action was required because youtube in addition to its questionable business practices has also been used as a forum for unsavory individuals to do things like use the comment section of kids videos to post timestamps of minors in suggestive poses and all sorts of disturbing crap like that that is not youtube's fault that is not the fdc's fault and something definitely needed to be done to stop stuff like that I just don't think that this was the most effective solution it's too broad and too vague there's no room for exceptions there's no mechanism to challenge rulings and it's an incredible hindrance to the creative process as a whole like when I'm making a thumbnail I don't want to be thinking about whether or not it's friendly to a 12 year old I just want a good thumbnail and a good video but from now on this is always going to be on my mind and I guess we'll just have to brace for impact with whatever 2020 throws our way for that pretty much does it for this very necessary discussion of copper and youtube if you enjoyed this video and the content this channel produced in general then please do consider donating to the grand line review patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible and if you'd like to see more videos like this but apply to other anime and manga series then please do check out my second channel new world review for all of your wider needs and if you'd like to join the fun at any time then please do head over to my discord server where a wide array of shenanigan retakes place on a daily basis and finally please do comment with your thoughts on copper and youtube this has been the ground line review and i'll see you next time