Our Woes With Youtube

Submitted by Eric Smith on

Some of you may remember the regular Wontek video reviews that we used to produce for various products and services, also our special coverage of CES 2013. Well late last year we encountered a technical error where we were having trouble getting our share of income from videos that were produced and uploaded on to Youtube. So we suspened producing video, and canceled CES 2014 After contacting Youtube with our concerns of what had happened, we heard nothing… literally nothing… we have persisted trying to get hold of someone, and our last ditch attempt was to get help in Youtube support forums, but nothing was ever resolved, in fact we were not even acknowledge by Youtube. Here is the bitter twist…the advertising was still displaying on all our videos… so somebody was getting money from our videos! However it wasn’t us… it was Google so now after 7 months we have come to the conclusion that we are simply not going to get our owed income or technical issues addressed.

"Google was still getting money from our productions"

It really is that simple, there is simply no such thing as Youtube support, just an automated help system, and a forum full of people with similar issues that sometimes get a fix and many other like us not.

"How can I contact YouTube customer support, you can't... it doesn't exist."

Will Wontek do videos again? probably not because the company lost enough momentum that people don’t need or want them anymore, and if there is no money coming in it is hard to justify the production costs as much as we want to for the remaining fans. We took down our videos as Youtube continued to make money from them, and that is not fair. We held of saying these things because we thought we would give it sometime in case a miracle happened and we got a call or an email from Youtube. Now after 7 months it’s time to face reality that it is not going to be fixed, there have been other articles out there from other small companies that have encountered the same issues, and have released similar statement.
Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the videos, and thank you to the presenters that have done videos for Wontek in the past.

Details of the error:
Some sort of internal loop on the youtube servers are creating the look of monetization working, however it isn’t on other configuration pages. Screenshots below.
 

You disabled monetization on your account in your monetization settings. Re-enable monetization

and

Congratulations! Your account is now enabled for monetization. Start monetizing your videos.