Apologies. Unboxing and Flip-through videos are all gone and any links to them are broken. I know these were helpful and I apologize for any inconvenience.
The trigger seems to be a flip-through of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which YouTube blocked almost immediately, despite it being behind an adult content filter, and I didn’t appeal the ruling, despite Ballad being a classic photobook that is well worth looking through, discussing, and trying to understand.
Less than a week later, they removed my entire channel. I filed an appeal and a bot denied it within minutes and closed my entire account.
I’m working to get the videos back from YouTube, and I may attempt to find another place to store them, but I haven’t really decided yet.
Going forward, I’ll still use the unboxing header image for continuity sake, and I may swap the video for some images of spreads or something. Again, it’s very early days and I’m not sure what I’m going to do just yet.
If you have any ideas or thoughts, please share them, and apologies again for any inconvenience.
Frankly I think this is diabolical, but as someone who’s never watched a YouTube video in my life I just want to say that I would keep reading anything you write and appreciate being pointed towards great photo books as you have been for me for a while. You’ve also saved me a fortune in helping me avoid some books I was considering…
All the best whichever way you go, Mark
I just found your site and read this post and my heart goes out to you. I know what it’s like to work so long and hard on something just to get rug pulled. Our business was bot closed on eBay and Amazon (years and years ago) and Etsy, all different reasons all completely out of our control and no way to get back in… and now we have built a decent YouTube channel and the same thing still concerns me.
But, I would encourage you to continue to create content and make use of the content you have been able to recover, but do it on your own terms, not under the thumb and whim of a platform that owns and controls everything. WordPress, to me, feels like the best middle ground where I am not at a super high risk of being dumped and also don’t have to figure out how to totally self-host everything.
Upload your videos to WP and embed them into your posts. It’s a painstaking process, but it would be worth it in the end. Your WP site has some great rankings in the search engines, your videos will do well on their own without YT.
Just my $.02 from someone who just found your site 5 minutes ago but also empathizes with your situation. Now, I’m going to go read through your last 10 years of blog posts, I’m thrilled to find a blog that is still current and has active content being published.
Thank you so much, Scott!
I thought some about uploading the videos here, but I only have about 20gb left in my hosting plan, and the videos run about 1.2TB. It would cost me quite a bit to store everything, on top of the $350/year I spend to host this site, and I really can’t justify it.
I have an idea to start a new video series, and if I’m careful (or do some blurring out of questionable pictures) and do some actual talking about the books, I should be fine. I just don’t yet have the interest or will to get started on it. (Plus, after many years of planning, I’m having bookshelves built in my office/studio/playroom/soon-to-be library and everything is in disarray… there may be a blog post and video on that one day soonish.)
Totally understand, yeah I’m paying the same $350/yr and with just high-res images I’m using a good chunk of my storage, it’s hard to think about paying for more storage. WordPress (or self hosted WP) fights pretty hard for free speech content compared to some sites, but people don’t realize it still costs money to keep a site active.
I’ve found it hard to find a balance with the big platforms, I don’t want to use them, but that’s where all the people are, and the “free” part is them using all the data we create and provide while getting rid of us for any reason any time. There are no easy answers for sure.
You’ve got great unique and niche content so don’t give up on it, keep on keepin on, so to speak. I’m still in the mindset that content is still king and wins out in the end. Good content created by real people will always have value!
So sorry this happened. Your channel was a valuable archive. I assumed it was a copyright claim and I was upset about it, as you have sold me more books than the publishers’ newsletters ever could.
Just curious… Did Google delete your whole account, including Gmail, Docs, everything? Do you have access to your data anymore?
I hope you can find a new home for your videos.
It was actually regarding the handful of images of naked people in a handful of books I’ve unboxed over the years… I’ve never had a copyright claim and never could, as far as I understand, and no publisher ever said one word in the nearly 10 years I made those videos.
I lost everything for a brief period, but Gmail, Docs, etc. remain functional. I was also able to use Google Takeout to retrieve most all of the videos. They lost or couldn’t find about 50 of the 800 or more (I don’t know the exact number yet). I’m trying to decide if I want to rebuild a new YouTube channel and be very careful with what I show, or to just let it die. I’m really on the fence about it.
If you don’t want to self-host, there will always be some degree of censorship, but I still think your archive is valuable and should be preserved, even partially. I’m not sure what robotic Google would do if you re-upload content from a channel that was banned, though. It would be great if you could reach a human and have them reinstate your channel.
Ya… If I want to rebuild the channel, I think I’ll have to reshoot most everything, even my music-making nonsense and whatnot. I could maybe stick everything on Archive.org or something, and I’ll see what self-hosting will cost me, though I’m more interested in providing the public service than uploading whatever I want. There might be a way to reach a human at YouTube, but I have no idea how to go about it. There are layers and layers of bots and ai to get through, and I’m small potatoes.
If I let it die, though, I may as well shut down the blog too. As it stands now, I’ll have to at least edit nearly every post, as the vast majority have a YouTube video inserted that now shows “unavailable because it was on a channel that has been terminated.”
I can’t even begin to express how traumatic this is for me, and I hate to be dramatic. It’s nearly 10 years of work gone. It’s a portion of my identity and feeling of worth as a human gone, wiped out in seconds. I can’t think about it too much or I break down.
I can imagine… Good luck, whatever you decide. I’ll keep following your blog RSS while it’s there.