It is a cold blast today to realize just how much we rely on Google–and further we are now wondering if they are they worthy of such trust? Today the answer is no way.
Our entire Heritage Key channel on Youtube was just shutdown, suspended and terminated–without warning, without clear reason. And it seems impossible to reach anyone at Youtube to even have a conversation about it. Sadly, the US President Obama will not be visiting the Great Pyramid on Youtube any longer.
No chance to see Obama enter the Pyramid any longer?
In addition to losing access to all our content, we also immediately have lost the statistics and all the subsriber, friend, channel pick info. It just seems mad to blast the entire account. And isn’t that data ours? Shouldn’t we be able to retrieve it somehow?
And what about the impact of having the black screen of death presented to all the people that might see what was embedded on sites around the web now? Is that damaging to our brand?
But I really get stuck on how Youtube handles this situation. No warning, no info and no one to talk to. Is there a mistake? They should fix it. Is it our fault, we could fix it if we knew. But it really seems like Google just doesn’t want to deal with the public.
It has been part of our strategy to post and promote our videos on Youtube. We want to try to catch part of the wave of 1.2 billion streams per day. We have invested a lot of effort in organizing our content–which we commission, create or get approval to use–to meet the Youtube formats. We also have added captions to many of the videos. We were actually hoping to participate in their Content Partnership program, but we were advised that our traffic was not high enough yet.
But what is really inside that 1.2 billion number for our http://heritage-key.com site? In fact Youtube is so clogged with random content that I really wonder if we are getting above the noise. From our stats (mainly Google Analytics) we see most of the traffic on Youtube coming from our promotions–or SEO, mainly Google, but not natively inside Youtube.
There are many other ways to manage and distribute video across the web. Youtube is perhaps the biggest, but they way they treated us today, makes me wonder seriously if they are the best choice.
Alternatives to Youtube
Video Streaming Platforms: Hulu, Vimeo, Blip
Host your own using opensource viewer like Flowplayer
and iTunes (if you can figure out how to post something to iTunes)
also I am wondering if Microsoft is pushing a new competitive service?? Like Bing is attacking Google’s core Search?
Wake-Up Call for Relying on Google
But golly-gee, don’t we now have a lot of eggs in the Google basket? Google has a lot of great/impressive tools, but is their approach to supporting them the right one?
My tools: gmail, calendar, search, google reader
On our Sites: Youtube, analytics, adsense, google maps, kml content for maps
And there is a lot of news about Google supplying data tools to governments where they can pull personal information for things like your medical records.
If Google is Youtube is Google, then can they pull your access to all your services without notice. Yikes! Time to make check all the back-ups.
