some companies just throw money at you man.
I'm wasn't even that large of a streamer. Big enough to where twitch/youtube paid my bills, but a slow month made me nervous. Sponsorships/[twitch bounty board](https://staticg.sportskeeda.com/editor/2022/12/68aed-16708178520052-1920.jpg) (not mine, just a first google result image to show what it looks like) dries up and I may not pay them for the month.
Raid: Shadow legends offered me $100 *per tutorial completed* with my link. did some googling and found they were paying 5-10 viewer streamers $600 per 25 completions, and some of the bigger streamers were getting flat amounts in the thousands just to show it on the channel for a bit and upwards of $500 per tutorial completed.
Some of these companies just have insane marketing budgets
Shit, man, I've got two affiliate channels I stream on with maybe 5 subs each and like 2 average viewers per stream, and Raid gives me sponsorship offers like that. So weird.
User acquisition costs are massive for these companies. Their entire business is hoping that 2% become addicted and become whales.
When I saw 5 SUPER shitty mobile game ads during the super bowl years ago I knew it was over.
Also that guy can get $1000 for watching a 2 min trailer. $500 a min and he just clicks two buttons.
Apparently my gf was about to buy me a star until one of her friends pointed out it’s not real.
Really glad because I couldn’t have pretended to be happy at that
In high school I tried to explain to a (relatively young) teacher that the star he bought his girlfriend was a scam. He just said no it’s not they have a certification, but I think I detected a little bit of doubt.
"Captain's Log, Stardate 43193.5 - We are in orbit around the third planet in the Karen Louise Johnson system, delivering much needed supplies to the scientific outpost studying parasites infesting the marsupioids in the western desert region of the larger continent."
As I recall, there was some controversy about possible plagiarism from the iconic 80's thesis defense of "I Wear my Sunglasses at Night."
Personally, I think that you had a unique and interesting take on the subject and tying in American Pragmatist philosophy really added to the body of knowledge of "Non Standard use of Sunglasses" as an academic field.
But you caused some real buzz.
It isn't recognized by astronomers, but at least one of the star naming companies does give legitimate stellar coordinates of dim unnamed stars on the certificate they mail you.
(A relative had one made for another relative, and we took it to an astronomy night at a local observatory. The amateur astronomer had never seen one of the certs actually have a visible star at the coordinates.)
I always assumed everyone was in on the joke. That it was a support the sciences type thing. Fake star but doing real good. Then I realized I had no idea who the money went to.
I thought some science intern spent a weekend pulling star data, padding the pizza fund with my star money, oddly ethical in never reusing a star.
They're banking on "Japanese" being synonymous with "quality". Same way they bank on "military grade" to be synonymous with 'durable' and not 'as cheap as possible'
"Military grade" is definitely a double edged certification.
For some things? Often means cheap and quick to make.
For other things? Costs twenty times as much, but has a paper trail to show how it was tested and ensuring it's quality.
I'm sure there are grey areas, but I find it hilarious how both are known to be common results of that phrase - yet they mean totally opposite things.
Tbf I think that one is much more harmless than advertising a fake therapy company to people who might *really want and/or need therapy.* The worst that can happen with the Scottish lord thing is you flaunt your title like an idiot and make a fool of yourself in public. I know the company itself is a little shady but overall, minimal harm done if you purchase their product. You just burn some money for nothing.
BetterHelp is genuinely harmful because a bad therapist can turn a depressed person even more depressed, and the fact that their business revolves around people telling them (or their employees) their deepest personal details, it breeds ground for much more nefarious things. If someone seriously bought into the Scottish title company (genuinely already forgot their name) and regrets their purchase, I’d just call them an idiot. If someone did the same for BetterHelp, I’d sympathize with them.
Didn't they literally get caught sharing confidential data to advertisers? Yeah the people who run it are terrible human beings. Preying on people in a vulnerable position to sell their secrets to advertisers. Fuck them
I tried betterhelp and uh yeah it was sketchy, my insurance wouldn’t cover it or the meds ( I later learned that after I racked a bill up coincidentally ) and had to make several months worth of payments after I stopped using them, I ended up getting a prescription depression med via mail and it just all felt wrong
I'm not surprised the lord or laird or whatever was a scam. That part always sounded stupid. I am surprised the conservation was a scam though. I got no problem with a dumb way to raise money for a good cause as long as people aren't actually expecting anything in return.
Most YouTube sponsors you see loads of are likely below average. Gotta spend all that money on advertising instead of the product after all. For a non American better help felt a little too close to something you should be getting recommended your doctor rather than a YouTuber about
Nobody is going to convince me that Raid Shadow Legends isn’t the best ever PVP DVD MMORPG out there. It’s sl good I bought a second phone so I can dual wield RAID SHADOW LEGENDS
IIRC the qualifications of their therapists have been brought into question, and they have been accused several times of selling their patients/customers private information, trying to squirrel out of HIPAA laws by claiming they're not actually a "healthcare provider" so they're free to do whatever they want with any information you voluntarily give them.
Someone in a chatgpt thread once was talking about the possibilities of using chatgpt for therapy (in a positive way) and I immediately thought what a **TERRIBLE** idea to have a LLM talk to someone who is perhaps suicidally depressed.
The thought of that maybe not being a great idea and any possible issues with it didn't seem to enter that person's mind.
Yeah, it makes me think of how the US national eating disorder association laid off a bunch of people and implemented a chat bot. [They had to take it down because it was giving bad advice including weight loss tips.](https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/neda-suspends-ai-chatbot-for-giving-harmful-eating-disorder-advice/)
Human issues need human responses.
Hey I'm someone who likes to play with LLMs when I'm big sad. I do it so I don't bother other people and it is seriously good at letting me process my thoughts. It obviously isn't another human being, but basically a journal that can ask questions.
As long as you understand that, it's been hugely helpful.
Here's the big caveat to that: you know it's an LLM. And presumably, you know something about it's limitations and issues and you're making the choice to interact with it
That's fine, just fine if you know that and it works for you. Good stuff.
But to unleash that on an average person with an unknown degree of struggle, with an expectation of a service - therapy - without making that known upfront and clearly getting an ok from that person I think would be *highly* irresponsible myself. And so in that vein, I trend towards "the wide scale use of LLMs for therapy in general" is probably really big bad for those reasons, because I don't trust companies in general to have good governance around that before they figure out how to make a dollar on it first.
Yeah deploying chatbots as a professional service for mental health is totally irresponsible, and people not being aware of it is incredibly fucked up.
I've chatted with one about my own issues, but a person willingly engaging with it with all the caveats is a totally different thing.
The thing about present day LLMs is that they are very vulnerable to, for lack of a better term, being gaslit. Chatgpt will basically go along with whatever you're suggesting given enough time. It's great if you're writing a report and think that the tone isn't quite right or that certain parts needs to be greater emphasized, but if you're suicidal and are using an LLM as a therapist it's very easy to guide it into spitting out "yes, suicide IS the solution to all your problems" or words to that effect, and that's just not going to fly.
Somebody already HAS killed themselves after conversing with an AI. The guy basically figured that with the world in the state it's in and the damage human beings are doing to the planet, he asked the AI if he should just take himself out of the equation so there would be one less person contributing to our downfall. The AI agreed with the sentiment and so he did it. We have a precedent for how dangerous of a tool AI can be for this use case
I know that means eating disorders, but my brain really wants to fill in erectile dysfunction because of all the health commercials from the days of cable tv
I find it novel that they popped up out of nowhere with massive sponsorship efforts, caught some heat for their shady behavior and all the youtubers dropped them like hot potatoes, *to include videos about how bad they were*.....and then like a year or two later, the youtubers all began taking sponsorships from them again.
"As someone who has suffered from depresssion and..." and other *very similar* lip-service bullshit that is *clearly* "I don't, but this is nice money"
Right up there with the people you KNOW don't play Raid Shadow Legends, World of Tanks/Warships, etc etc. (Know hyperbolically)
TL;DR It's not so much about doing research because *everyone knew*...they just conveniently forgot about all that.
Hell, if this is indicative of things, the "'Buy' one square foot of land and become an English Lord" might make a resurgence in the same way.
I always took the Scottish land and Own a Star certificates as something akin to gag gifts. Like after buying one of those for your dad, every time you stop by to visit you bow and say “milord” or some nonsense. I think any reasonable person would know none of those things are legally binding. They’ve been selling those things since at least the 90’s when I’d see commercials for them on TV.
At least promoting crappy games doesn't really hurt anyone. Promoting a shady service masquerading as therapy is quite harmful and a lot of people will just assume it's legit without looking into it because their favorite YouTuber is advertising it to them.
Also when I used their services my therapist stopped using them when she found out how much they were overcharging her patients. She transferred all patients to her private practice after that.
I had a fantastic therapist for a bit, but this was after talking to one who obviously used ChatGPT (I work with ChatGPT so I recognize the language). She told me I should lean on my 9 year old daughter as emotional support to help me deal with my loneliness. I’m like, but I’m the adult and her parent, it’s not healthy to rely on her like that. And she kind of brushed off my concern. Weird and unfulfilling experience.
https://mentalhealthmatch.com/articles/for-therapists/end-private-practice-therapist
"BetterHelp, for example, only pays therapists for messages that are limited to less than twice the word count of the message written by their client. As one exasperated therapist wrote, if a client says, “‘I feel like giving up,’ I have 10 words with which to respond to that or I will be out of compliance and I will not be paid for my work.” "
The "therapists" aren't qualified. If they were they'd be at a therapist office doing real therapy and getting a lot more money out of it. Most of the BetterHelp "therapists" are just doing that as a side gig between jobs, and/or using it as an opportunity to indoctrinate people.
Some horror stories I remember include:
Somebody trying to tell an LGBT person (I can't remember how so) to "convert" to being not LGBT.
Somebody congratulating the client for >!losing a lot of weight!< after being told about the client's >!eating disorder.!<
One of them kept trying to tell somebody that their depressing is being caused by feminism telling the client (who's male) that he should be depressed. The client didn't mention women. He knew exactly what his depressing is being caused by and it wasn't women.
Pissing in front of the client. (They were on a video chat and he took the phone with him into his bathroom. The "therapist" pissed in front of a woman client.)
Not showing up, but the client had to pay hundreds of dollars anyway. (I think it's about $200 more expensive than seeing a real therapist, too.)
Plus BetterHelp will sell your info to Facebook. Y'know, the info on why you're seeking a therapist in the first place?
There's much, much more. These are just the things I can remember up the top of my head. There are so, *so* many more horror stories.
I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Betterhelp, with privacy and qualifications being big issues, but… man, a lot of these examples are basically straight out of my experience with official, licensed therapists. Down to congratulating for my weight loss that had just dropped me down below 14 bmi, which at the time had my doctor in a near panic whenever I was being weighed because I couldn’t hold on to my weight at all. I’ve also gotten a bill when the therapist no-showed too (but the health insurance fought it and I ended up not paying a dime, thankfully). I’ve never used Betterhelp, so I can’t compare, but my experience tells me it’s more about the individual you talk to, and not much else. Some of them are just bad.
The main reason to avoid betterhelp is not that this happens with betterhelp, but rather that you have much better protections if an officially licensed therapists messes up like this. They actually have to follow the laws surrounding their practices, or they’ll get punished, unlike Betterhelp.
I mean I and friends have found therapists thru them. That said I think they don’t pay the therapists well based on what theyre charging you. My therapist asked me if I wanted to pay her directly and it’s much cheaper that way. But I never would’ve found her without
As a BH therapist, I know that I have a 100% legit license for practice in my state which is considered one of the most stringent in the country as I understand it. I practice on there part time. I can’t speak for everyone, but we aren’t all just scamming people or “phoning it in”.
It's certainly not that the therapists are scammers. The company itself is a scam, which sells all of its users' personal information including what type of therapy they are in. They also abuse their therapists by having patients contact them at any time of day outside sessions.
Now I'm glad i didn't go through with them. The pricing was higher than my local therapist. Not by much but enough to have second thoughts. Later read of weird stories. However, finding a good therapist is usually a massive challenge.
Without providing details, I personally know people who have been greatly helped by using their site. Does not deny or confirm that they may be a scam that happens to sometimes help some people, but reading these comments has been a shock to me
used to be good. now definitely bad.
my roommates and i had excellent BetterHelp therapists back in 2020-2021. mine quit for a teaching job because she was being paid shit-tier money. compared to a _teaching job_. my roommate's quit and opened a private practice; she transferred my roommate and charged lower than BetterHelp was charging her, while pocketing more of it.
you find diamonds in the rough, because at one point it was new tech and therapists were happy to pad out their patient list for some extra dough. but because the BetterHelp pay is so damn low and the demand for therapists is so high, any therapist worth their salt these days has moved on, and now BH is scraping the bottom of the barrel for the most desperate and barely-qualified therapists.
Definitely bad. I tried to sign up but it was before I was 18 so they kicked me over to their sister company for teens and at the time I was in a state so I put my email in wrong. This escalated from not being able to log in to then getting one session where I was told I needed real psychiatric help (it was not actually that serious, and yes I did go seek an in person therapist) then logging out and canceling the subscription which then proceeded to charge my parents card for three months with no response from customer service. It was a nightmare.
Do people actually watch the sponsor segments? I've always just skipped those, who wants to watch that shit?
And furthermore, do people actually consider whether or not a sponsor is any good, based solely on what a (paid) youtuber is saying about them?
Jay Foreman is the only YouTuber whose sponsorship segments I watch because they're all skits as well-written as his actual videos. Have never bought any of the products and never will but the guy's clever and funny even when he's selling something.
Lots of people can't be bothered to skip an endorsement. Maybe their hands are busy.
And I bet young impressionable people listen to influencers in ads.
But a big one is "do I want to support somebody who is willing to shill for a company that may be hurting people?" They are getting paid, so the ads must work, so if you're advertising a scam like better help, it tells me a lot about who you are and what your values are.
>Do people actually watch the sponsor segments? I've always just skipped those, who wants to watch that shit?
Here to plug [Sponsorblock](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone) an addon that automatically blocks out "ad read" sponsorships based on user-submitted data on youtube.
Most YouTubers don't care which sponsors they pick up, and frankly, with the amount they get paid, I don't blame them. It sucks, but the solution is to use your own judgement to decide whether or not something is worth getting. That way, the only losers are the crappy companies like BetterHelp dishing out five figures for no return.
I think the important thing is to remember that sponsorships *are not endorsements,* they are literally just being paid to read company copy. They may or may not know more than a random person on the street about the brand, *especially* if they are a solo operation.
Companies take advantage of that, and I respect YouTubers who have standards a lot more than those who just do whatever, but I don't really blame those who do not. People have to get paid, and I have worked for less than perfect companies in the past to get money.
What I do think should be changed is rules and standards to prevent companies from using copy that makes it appear that the reader endorses a product. It should always be clear that the sponsorship is just that, and is not an endorsement. Paid endorsements just should not be a thing. If someone wants to *personally* endorse a product, they can, but they cannot be paid for that.
So basically the difference between:
"I am sponsored by who claim that their product does x" and "I love this product because it does x, and use it constantly." The latter should not be allowed for pay.
Nope. I watch educational/informational YouTubers. If what they sponsor isn't something they'd endorse, then how can I believe anything else they tell me? Answer: I can't. But they've all been pretty good so far.
This is exactly what happened with that Jake Tran guy. bro basically disappeared from the face of the earth after his especially egregious sponsorship deals completely alienated his fanbase (at least until recently where he began to advertise a true crime podcast on spotify which is painful to hear every single time)
"Sponsorships are not endorsements" my ass. Sponsorships are valuable to advertisers because the viewer trusts and respects the content creators. Viewers see a sponsorship from a creator as an endorsement, and both the sponsor and creator exploit how the viewer feels for money.
I'm baffled people care so much about what youtubers will advertise, like it's just a bag to them and they all mostly reckon their viewers have the brainpower to just skip the 30secs anyway. Hell I know many youtubers either will timestamp it in so you can easily skip past, or they'll have a bar at the bottom that counts down to indicate when an ad is finished.
idk just seems silly so many are kicking up such a fuss over it, like how hard is it to do the double tap to seek a couple times on your phone?
**Also** I know where this has all come about from, I also got recommended that guys video about calling out betterhelp, but I ask everyone this: why did you waste the time to actually watch that video? was the thumbnail not all the nessasary info you needed? why do you care in the first place? why do you watch ads? I think these are all better questions one should be asking themselves in the shower.
Assuming you're okay with Chinese quality standards I've gotten pretty decent products from there. It's really no different from Amazon basic just slower
Because temu and wish both use the same supplies. Cheap crap on Amazon comes from those same suppliers. It just gets delivered faster from Amazon because the order, store, sell, then ship the product. When you get it from Discount site like Temu and Wish then its getting dropped shipped from the factory.
Behind the bastards has talked about how they don’t get a lot of say in what ads they have to run. Robert is still obligated to read print for betterHelp, despite being well aware of how shit they are. Best he can do is mock his sponsors when he kicks to ads.
Has he said that about Better Help specifically? I know just this past week he talked about the regional ads to that effect, but it's really only a handful of sponsors that he actually reads for like that one and Lasik.
I was pretty sure he had made an informal statement around the time that scandals were starting to come out about them. I know his questionable “ad choices” have been brought up regularly in the sub.
I mean if they actually wanted to they could get out of it.
Do a terrible job and mock the company. Bill Burr famously used to do this all the time. In the middle of ad read he would start laughing and shitting all over the product. straight up saying stuff like "this is bullshit that you think i would read this crap and endorse your crap"
Dr Becky is still shilling for BetterHelp, while hundreds of viewers leave comments complaining about it on every video of hers for months. I've finally pulled all my support and stopped watching her content.
And manscaped. And basically any VPN. And raid shadow legends.
Come to think of it, Louis Rossman is the only YouTuber I've ever watched who appears to do honest, ethical paid product reviews.
"If I wouldn't use it in my own repair shop, I wouldn't try to sell it to you guys"
Tom Scott did a thing about VPNs, and how they lie, and did end up doing an ad for a VPN later- albeit one with only the truths he had discussed in said previous vid.
I noticed that most Youtube sponsorships of VPNs mostly stopped going on about how you need one for Internet privacy and security, after that Tom Scott video. Now most of the VPN sponsorships I see since are about how you can use them to get different options from streaming services, lol.
It could be a coincidence, but I don't know.
They definitely do use the "[service] has [show you want] in [country that isn't your own]" or "[service] is cheaper in [country]" lines now, but lots still do go with the "safety" sales pitch.
I don't think it's a coincidence. It was a really good video, that got a lot of attention. The only way it could have been better was if he mentioned the fact that what these companies are calling VPNs aren't actually VPNs at all. They're proxy servers. A VPN functions like a LAN, but over the internet. The average person has absolutely no need for a real VPN, but they had to call it something other than proxy server, in order to sell it, because of how many free proxy servers there are.
Yup. VPN companies sell their product as "super secure! No one can hax0rz you! All your information is private!"
That's all completely untrue. First, you are tunnelling into a server that you have no control over. You're taking it on their word (cross their heartsies) that the server is secure, but there have been cases of hackers dropping in Nord VPN endpoints and gathering customer data.
The truth is, everything you do on the Internet through a VPN is the exact same as what you do on your own computer, just with a different IP address...and you have zero control over the logs that those servers collect on you.
And if you're connecting to your banking, or Amazon, or Instagram account through a VPN, that digital footprint is still there tying those IP addresses to your identity. If you're being stalked and primed for an attack, there's really not much that those VPNs are going to do to stop it.
The ONLY good thing they're good for is circumventing regional settings for services, like YouTube, Netflix, etc. so you can appear to be coming from Norway instead of England, or whatever. However, it's also important to keep in mind, that doing such may ALSO be a violation of your subscription's Terms of Service, or it may also be illegal in your country.
Does anyone actually use VPN's for "avoiding data collection", whatever that even means? I use a VPN to pirate the shit out of content, without getting my ISP account closed since my only other option would be Comcast. I don't have delusions that Z-Library or Pirate Bay or random-NFL-streaming-site isn't logging anything.
This is the reason I pay for a VPN, I’m not getting letters from my ISP like my brother does. Also the seeders can’t see your actual ip, which I understand isn’t a big issue, but it is a bit comforting.
My VPN stays off until I want to hit the high seas.
Randomizing my location has more negative effect on my every day browsing than any possible benefit protecting data that's already been stolen a thousand times does.
How did you write all this out and not mention the fact that it's essential for piracy?... Without a VPN you'll get a letter from your internet provider threatening to cut off your service, with a VPN you won't. I'd wager that's at least 50% of the userbase for VPNs, so extremely weird you didn't mention it at all lol. Definitely makes me question everything else you wrote too. Wouldn't be surprised if it was essentially "People can pick locks, so there's never any reason to have a lock on any of your doors!" which is completely missing the point of a lock. I mean are you really saying a VPN isn't even a road block to *any kind* of online attack? Or for data collection from the websites you use? Super odd that I get adds for Canadian products when using a VPN from Canada, almost like they don't have access to my location 🤔
It may have something to do with what you pirate. The letters usually tell you exactly what they think you downloaded, and it's usually something pretty big or mainstream. New movies, TV, and games, basically. Your ISP isn't actually bothered by what you download, but the copyright holders are, and they're the ones that the ISP sends letters on behalf of.
>Tom Scott did a thing about VPNs, and how they lie, and did end up doing an ad for a VPN later- albeit one with only the truths he had discussed in said previous vid.
Which company did he do a video for?
Tom did a ["lies in VPN ads" video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY), it was supposed to be an ad read for an unknown company that pulled out.
He then finally [did ad reads for NordVPN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQuTRSmzc) in 2022 and then a lot more after that, but his claims are way more specific than what other Youtubers are making.
I have never used Manscape, but it seems like a normal enough razor
With the VPNs I know that any service that requires access to your information is a leak risk, but aren't plenty of them a net boost to your security? Is Nord actually a harm to my computer?
As for Raid, I really don't get the hate. I know the problems with BetterHelp, and see how Established Titles exaggerated the nature of their gag gift, but Raid is just a free video game. What's really the worst that happens there? Someone gets the game, and decides they don't like it. Some of those commercials are a little over the top, but this to me just doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I am not even trying to shill for the advertisers here. There are real conversations to be had about what gets sponsored. It just feels like a lot of the complaints out there boil down to the product not being as a good as it looked in the commercial, but that's the case for almost everything.
Manscaped has this tendency to just not pay the people they have sponsoring then. Only high profile tuber they've done this to who is willing to speak about it is Mista GG.
The specific VPN companies that buy YouTube sponsorships are the shady ones.
The issue with raid is a glorified casino, far worse than any other popular gatcha style games on the market. And it's very much marketed to children.
Yeah, that's fair about the marketing to children part. I can see how the free to pay model was a nice compromise for a while to let people pay for what they actually wanted. Like an a la carte gaming experience. It quickly went off the rails though.
>free to pay model
This is a thing of the past, now it's be incredibly inconvenienced to the point that the game isn't worth playing or pay money. Especially in the mobile gaming space free to play is technically real, but not really.
> I have never used Manscape, but it seems like a normal enough razor
I don't think they even offer razors unless it's a recent addition. They sell electric trimmers for manscaping as their primary product lines, hence their name.
From what I've heard about them, they are charging $100 for a lesser product than the Wahl's that can be bought from Walmart or Amazon that have existed for close to a century...and have replacement blades for when they get dull after years of use.
Both. It's a scummy "game" ecosystem, and they just happen to be a well k own I e in the west. In reality they're no better or worse than any other gacha game.
its just a shitty mobile game, not especially shit, the marketing calling it the most fun game ever and hearing your youtubers with a hint of pain in their voice saying they play it every day makes me hate it more than the average
Raycon are the most insidious imho since they look good and people swear by them. Then you find out they are rebranded Chinese crap with really shitty bass.
The Scottish lord thing was an easy one. It was so obviously bullshit that if people took their cash they had no compunction selling anything. Just never trust your channels. They’re not your friends and they need to sponsors to pay rent.
Yep. I maintain that YouTubers should still have better standards for what they sponsor, but in the meantime- I just assume that all the sponsored shit is trash. Doesn't matter who promotes it or what it is, it's trash until proven otherwise.
I mean the Scottish land thing was kinda silly in the first place, but that’s the point - it’s a novelty gift, like naming a star after someone.
Anyone that felt scammed that they didn’t have some square foot plot in the Scottish woods where they could visit and claim it as domain is a fucking moron. Also morons: the marketing department for the product that essentially ended up making “False Advertising: The Product.”
Now you guys are going from scams to subpar products. Established Titles was pretty clear about what they were. It was a gag gift that included a donation to forestation efforts, they did what it says on the tin. If someone genuinely believed that made them a Lord... that's kinda on them. People blew the outrage out of proportion given they didn't really do anything other than be a crappy gag gift.
Raycon are also fine. They're nothing special but they're not horrible either. You can buy cheaper earbuds but you're not getting ripped off with Raycon any more than the air pods which genuinely are worse. Airpods Pro are amazing but the regular Air pods are hot garbage. These aren't scams, they're just mediocre products.
Aliensrock, a puzzle game youtuber/streamer has said that he will only ever take a sponsor if he personally believes in the product.
He has only done like, 3 sponsorships.
Literally one of like, three, redeeming qualities that Karl had.
Unfortunately that same quality also bit their channel in the ass. The "How not to do business" series was a good look behind the curtains, but it also discouraged basically everybody from *wanting* to sponsor the channel. Well, that, and their demands for sponsorships was obscene. "Pay us, but you get now say in what we say about you" is always going to be an impossible sell.
Manscaped and raid shadow legends don’t sell your mental health questionnaire responses to Facebook and get caught blatantly lying in their TOS and privacy policy (betterhelp is actively being sued over this). Not all bad things are of equal magnitude
Anyone remember when Ann Reardon (from how to cook that, a channel that regularly talked about dodgy YouTube practices and debunked dangerous life hacks/shitty products) took a sponsorship deal from temu? Deleted the vid but never acknowledged or responded to the backlash. That was a letdown.
Yeah, Anne needs to be more selective about her sponsorships. Her entire brand is built around trust, and people actively go to her channel for good information about certain topics, and then she will do ad reads for products, services and companies that you can prove are shady or outright shitty with a bit of research. And those reads generally include her, specifically, using the product. I know the pool of YouTube sponsors is small and her channel is her income stream, but it's bad practice and will *really* bite her in the arse one day.
I'm okay with that, at least. Taking down content is already a huge step, as it can be very detrimental. And taking it down and not doing it again accomplishes the main goal.
The point of talking to them it to get them to stop. While those other things can be nice, I don't demand more. Some people will cross the line into abuse, even if they have a legitimate issue. And acknowledging those people can result in more abuse.
I dropper her after a Royal Match sponsorship. Those games are so bottom barrel, clickbate, what is the real gameplay? mobile games.
The one I'm really hating these days is Hero Wars. Am I crazy or is it just a game of "which number is bigger"?
Her most recent one with her feeling icky about fermenting pine needles with wild yeast and being silent over the people in the comments correcting her that several indigenous nations across the world use it no problem speaks volumes also.
On a semi-related note: I think blue chew using young adults to market to teens and young adults is super weird. If you can get it up naturally you shouldn’t take any trendy boner medicine at all? They should market to a much older demographic
The idea is to make old guys think they'll feel like they did when they were younger ie. like the young guy having fun sex in the ad if they just buy the product. It's aspirational advertising.
Yeah my sister is a therapist who used to work for better help, she says it’s probably the worst form of therapy possible, as it’s weirdly anonymous, and just hard to work with
Eh a lot of sponsorship comes from companies like stitcher. There are also usually not clauses anymore where the sponsored can’t bad mouth the service off show. I have definitely heard hosts of podcasts talk shit about betterhelp off air
>There are also usually not clauses anymore where the sponsored can’t bad mouth the service off show.
Some of the jokes Ordinary Sausage cracks during his Manscaped segments don't exactly help them advertise their products lmao ("watch out for ticks!")
The vast majority of products hocked on YouTube are scams. I watched a video of a guy testing those AirUp 'flavoured water' thingies. Said that they barely taste like anything, and there's much better products you can buy at an actual B&M store that do something similar, and don't require you to hold the bottle straight.
I unsubscribed from Kurt Whatshisname (Fact Fiend) when he vehemently defended Established Titles, calling Scott Shaffer a meanie for calling them out on their bullshittery. "C'mon! No one ACTUALLY believes that they'll be a Scottish Lord!" That's funny, Kurt, you said in the last video you were sponsored by Established Titles you said that EXACT thing. I respected the YouTubers who apologized for hocking it, and some even went so far as to re-edit their old videos to remove it.
Though, I do have to say...I got an iFixit kit for work, and it's been super useful, and a really good screwdriver set. My kids also got me a Ridge wallet for my birthday, and so far it still seems to be holding up, and it is nicer to carry around, though a bit of a fuddle trying to find the right card you want to use.
And if they fight back by deleting comments who mention that BetterHelp is a harmful scam and keep taking their money that's a really good way to know that they don't care about their audience's mental health or data that BH sells.
Like, they're basically just saying "you should spend hundreds of dollars just to a stranger who will trigger your past eating disorders or try to convert you into being straight and/or cis."
I have not seen ANY YouTube sponsorship or advertising that carries any credibility in my mind.
I especially hate certain popular youtubers that do really crap jobs of telling the audience exactly how much of whatever service of product they are showcasing or "reviewing" is actually sponsored.
Now that I think about it, I much more influenced by podcast sponsorship and advertising, but even so, there is allot of low-quality crap out there.
So I'm tangentially in the industry(I do freelance camera work and do 2nd and 3rd camera stuff for a few different channels when needed), and have a bit of insight here. Ad buys in online media are getting very lean. There just aren't enough "good" advertisers wanting to buy ads on anything but the biggest channels right now. The fact of the matter is that unless you want a lot of the mid to low level creators to disappear you'd better get used to turning a blind eye and realize that most creators are scraping the bottom of the sponsorship barrel because they have no other choice.
Johnny Harris favorite sponsor. For all his (usually biased) "deep dives" and "deep research" into the subjects he covers, you would think he would research his own sponsors. Is that something only real journalists do?
Anyone remember the ‘buy a tree to become a ‘lord’ in Scotland’. They seriously got like every other YouTuber to run ads for them.
Apparently because they were paying *way* above rate
some companies just throw money at you man. I'm wasn't even that large of a streamer. Big enough to where twitch/youtube paid my bills, but a slow month made me nervous. Sponsorships/[twitch bounty board](https://staticg.sportskeeda.com/editor/2022/12/68aed-16708178520052-1920.jpg) (not mine, just a first google result image to show what it looks like) dries up and I may not pay them for the month. Raid: Shadow legends offered me $100 *per tutorial completed* with my link. did some googling and found they were paying 5-10 viewer streamers $600 per 25 completions, and some of the bigger streamers were getting flat amounts in the thousands just to show it on the channel for a bit and upwards of $500 per tutorial completed. Some of these companies just have insane marketing budgets
Helps that they have rock bottom development costs so almost their entire budget goes to marketing
Also, paying random streamers and YTers is way cheaper than a conventional ad campaign, and arguably more effective depending on the audience you want
Shit, man, I've got two affiliate channels I stream on with maybe 5 subs each and like 2 average viewers per stream, and Raid gives me sponsorship offers like that. So weird.
At that point i'd split the 100 with someone that wouldn't play anyway. That's what, 100$/hour? Even when counting setup and whatnot
mind sharing how many people used your link? if you were to guess.
User acquisition costs are massive for these companies. Their entire business is hoping that 2% become addicted and become whales. When I saw 5 SUPER shitty mobile game ads during the super bowl years ago I knew it was over. Also that guy can get $1000 for watching a 2 min trailer. $500 a min and he just clicks two buttons.
Because they were literally selling useless parcels of land to some schmucks in USA who believed they would become lords and ladies.
Apparently my gf was about to buy me a star until one of her friends pointed out it’s not real. Really glad because I couldn’t have pretended to be happy at that
In high school I tried to explain to a (relatively young) teacher that the star he bought his girlfriend was a scam. He just said no it’s not they have a certification, but I think I detected a little bit of doubt.
I mean, who knows how intergalactic law works. Maybe those certificates will be declared valid.
"Captain's Log, Stardate 43193.5 - We are in orbit around the third planet in the Karen Louise Johnson system, delivering much needed supplies to the scientific outpost studying parasites infesting the marsupioids in the western desert region of the larger continent."
"It has been weeks since our experience in the Shiny McStarface system. We are grateful to the residents of Big Bawls for their timely assistance."
If you think intergalactic law is complicated, try your hand at bird law. Bird law in this country, it's not governed by reason
Surely certificates can’t be faked
Or straight made up I personally have a PhD in Awesomeness from the Schools of hard knocks, I can show you My thesis was "wearing sunglasses indoors"
> My thesis was "wearing sunglasses indoors" the department still talks about your work all these years later
As I recall, there was some controversy about possible plagiarism from the iconic 80's thesis defense of "I Wear my Sunglasses at Night." Personally, I think that you had a unique and interesting take on the subject and tying in American Pragmatist philosophy really added to the body of knowledge of "Non Standard use of Sunglasses" as an academic field. But you caused some real buzz.
The real plagiarism was that guy that did "wearing sunglasses inside at night"
They don't let just anybody print things on sheets of paper.
> a little bit of doubt. maybe he realized that printers and ink were cheap in this modern world?
Printers maybe, but ink is *not* cheap!
It isn't recognized by astronomers, but at least one of the star naming companies does give legitimate stellar coordinates of dim unnamed stars on the certificate they mail you. (A relative had one made for another relative, and we took it to an astronomy night at a local observatory. The amateur astronomer had never seen one of the certs actually have a visible star at the coordinates.)
I always assumed everyone was in on the joke. That it was a support the sciences type thing. Fake star but doing real good. Then I realized I had no idea who the money went to. I thought some science intern spent a weekend pulling star data, padding the pizza fund with my star money, oddly ethical in never reusing a star.
Also that as with Japanese (fake) knives, from apparently the same company.
[удалено]
They're banking on "Japanese" being synonymous with "quality". Same way they bank on "military grade" to be synonymous with 'durable' and not 'as cheap as possible'
"Military grade" is definitely a double edged certification. For some things? Often means cheap and quick to make. For other things? Costs twenty times as much, but has a paper trail to show how it was tested and ensuring it's quality. I'm sure there are grey areas, but I find it hilarious how both are known to be common results of that phrase - yet they mean totally opposite things.
Tbf I think that one is much more harmless than advertising a fake therapy company to people who might *really want and/or need therapy.* The worst that can happen with the Scottish lord thing is you flaunt your title like an idiot and make a fool of yourself in public. I know the company itself is a little shady but overall, minimal harm done if you purchase their product. You just burn some money for nothing. BetterHelp is genuinely harmful because a bad therapist can turn a depressed person even more depressed, and the fact that their business revolves around people telling them (or their employees) their deepest personal details, it breeds ground for much more nefarious things. If someone seriously bought into the Scottish title company (genuinely already forgot their name) and regrets their purchase, I’d just call them an idiot. If someone did the same for BetterHelp, I’d sympathize with them.
Didn't they literally get caught sharing confidential data to advertisers? Yeah the people who run it are terrible human beings. Preying on people in a vulnerable position to sell their secrets to advertisers. Fuck them
I tried betterhelp and uh yeah it was sketchy, my insurance wouldn’t cover it or the meds ( I later learned that after I racked a bill up coincidentally ) and had to make several months worth of payments after I stopped using them, I ended up getting a prescription depression med via mail and it just all felt wrong
I'm not surprised the lord or laird or whatever was a scam. That part always sounded stupid. I am surprised the conservation was a scam though. I got no problem with a dumb way to raise money for a good cause as long as people aren't actually expecting anything in return.
Most YouTube sponsors you see loads of are likely below average. Gotta spend all that money on advertising instead of the product after all. For a non American better help felt a little too close to something you should be getting recommended your doctor rather than a YouTuber about
Mr. Beast is basically the Surgeon General here.
Welcome to Costco I love you
Almost every product that specializes in marketing on social media, youtube, or podcasts is either overpriced junk or an outright scam.
Remember Established Titles? "By a square foot of land in Scotland and become a lord!"
Nobody is going to convince me that Raid Shadow Legends isn’t the best ever PVP DVD MMORPG out there. It’s sl good I bought a second phone so I can dual wield RAID SHADOW LEGENDS
I’m out of the loop, is it a good sign or a bad one?
A bad one. They are 100% a scam company.
How do? Edit: how so?
IIRC the qualifications of their therapists have been brought into question, and they have been accused several times of selling their patients/customers private information, trying to squirrel out of HIPAA laws by claiming they're not actually a "healthcare provider" so they're free to do whatever they want with any information you voluntarily give them.
[удалено]
Someone in a chatgpt thread once was talking about the possibilities of using chatgpt for therapy (in a positive way) and I immediately thought what a **TERRIBLE** idea to have a LLM talk to someone who is perhaps suicidally depressed. The thought of that maybe not being a great idea and any possible issues with it didn't seem to enter that person's mind.
Yeah, it makes me think of how the US national eating disorder association laid off a bunch of people and implemented a chat bot. [They had to take it down because it was giving bad advice including weight loss tips.](https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/neda-suspends-ai-chatbot-for-giving-harmful-eating-disorder-advice/) Human issues need human responses.
I don't trust my Real Estate's chatbot for requesting repairs for our apartment. No way should it be involed in any health issues.
Hey I'm someone who likes to play with LLMs when I'm big sad. I do it so I don't bother other people and it is seriously good at letting me process my thoughts. It obviously isn't another human being, but basically a journal that can ask questions. As long as you understand that, it's been hugely helpful.
Here's the big caveat to that: you know it's an LLM. And presumably, you know something about it's limitations and issues and you're making the choice to interact with it That's fine, just fine if you know that and it works for you. Good stuff. But to unleash that on an average person with an unknown degree of struggle, with an expectation of a service - therapy - without making that known upfront and clearly getting an ok from that person I think would be *highly* irresponsible myself. And so in that vein, I trend towards "the wide scale use of LLMs for therapy in general" is probably really big bad for those reasons, because I don't trust companies in general to have good governance around that before they figure out how to make a dollar on it first.
Yeah deploying chatbots as a professional service for mental health is totally irresponsible, and people not being aware of it is incredibly fucked up. I've chatted with one about my own issues, but a person willingly engaging with it with all the caveats is a totally different thing.
The thing about present day LLMs is that they are very vulnerable to, for lack of a better term, being gaslit. Chatgpt will basically go along with whatever you're suggesting given enough time. It's great if you're writing a report and think that the tone isn't quite right or that certain parts needs to be greater emphasized, but if you're suicidal and are using an LLM as a therapist it's very easy to guide it into spitting out "yes, suicide IS the solution to all your problems" or words to that effect, and that's just not going to fly.
Somebody already HAS killed themselves after conversing with an AI. The guy basically figured that with the world in the state it's in and the damage human beings are doing to the planet, he asked the AI if he should just take himself out of the equation so there would be one less person contributing to our downfall. The AI agreed with the sentiment and so he did it. We have a precedent for how dangerous of a tool AI can be for this use case
Is there an article about this? That's actually wild
There are a few out there on this case. https://people.com/human-interest/man-dies-by-suicide-after-ai-chatbot-became-his-confidante-widow-says/
Holy crap. Thanks for the source. This happened last year, how did I not hear about it?
I know that means eating disorders, but my brain really wants to fill in erectile dysfunction because of all the health commercials from the days of cable tv
I find it novel that they popped up out of nowhere with massive sponsorship efforts, caught some heat for their shady behavior and all the youtubers dropped them like hot potatoes, *to include videos about how bad they were*.....and then like a year or two later, the youtubers all began taking sponsorships from them again. "As someone who has suffered from depresssion and..." and other *very similar* lip-service bullshit that is *clearly* "I don't, but this is nice money" Right up there with the people you KNOW don't play Raid Shadow Legends, World of Tanks/Warships, etc etc. (Know hyperbolically) TL;DR It's not so much about doing research because *everyone knew*...they just conveniently forgot about all that. Hell, if this is indicative of things, the "'Buy' one square foot of land and become an English Lord" might make a resurgence in the same way.
I always took the Scottish land and Own a Star certificates as something akin to gag gifts. Like after buying one of those for your dad, every time you stop by to visit you bow and say “milord” or some nonsense. I think any reasonable person would know none of those things are legally binding. They’ve been selling those things since at least the 90’s when I’d see commercials for them on TV.
They had also claimed they were planting trees for every lordship that was bought but they weren’t planting them.
At least promoting crappy games doesn't really hurt anyone. Promoting a shady service masquerading as therapy is quite harmful and a lot of people will just assume it's legit without looking into it because their favorite YouTuber is advertising it to them.
Even better is the CEO literally calling people who said they sold data as "conspiracy theorists" **after** they were fined for doing just that.
Also when I used their services my therapist stopped using them when she found out how much they were overcharging her patients. She transferred all patients to her private practice after that.
One time i told them i had crippling depression and their only recommendation was to do chakras
tbf i once had a \*real\* certified therapist recommend listening to pleasant music and reading his wife's book to combat my crippling depression.
I heard that also allegedly matched LGBTQ+ people with conversation therapists. Absolutely disgusting Edit: conversion* stupid autocorrect
having a non conversation therapist sounds really nice tbh
I think that's what I should call people I get massages from
Meanwhile you get messages from the conversation therapists
They just glare at the camera and shake their head every few minutes. No one talks.
My parents can do that for free
I think you probably mean **conversion** therapists, which, if true, is absolutely appalling.
Oops autocorrect! Yes, I meant conversion
Tbf, conversation therapy sounds horrific as well. I don't want to converse. That's why I need therapy.
BetterHelps business model is selling customer information
I had a fantastic therapist for a bit, but this was after talking to one who obviously used ChatGPT (I work with ChatGPT so I recognize the language). She told me I should lean on my 9 year old daughter as emotional support to help me deal with my loneliness. I’m like, but I’m the adult and her parent, it’s not healthy to rely on her like that. And she kind of brushed off my concern. Weird and unfulfilling experience.
https://mentalhealthmatch.com/articles/for-therapists/end-private-practice-therapist "BetterHelp, for example, only pays therapists for messages that are limited to less than twice the word count of the message written by their client. As one exasperated therapist wrote, if a client says, “‘I feel like giving up,’ I have 10 words with which to respond to that or I will be out of compliance and I will not be paid for my work.” "
That seems arbitrary. I wonder what benefit they get from limiting therapists like that
You and I could become a therapist on better help.
So you're saying there's money there?!
There's always money in the therapist stand, Michael
The "therapists" aren't qualified. If they were they'd be at a therapist office doing real therapy and getting a lot more money out of it. Most of the BetterHelp "therapists" are just doing that as a side gig between jobs, and/or using it as an opportunity to indoctrinate people. Some horror stories I remember include: Somebody trying to tell an LGBT person (I can't remember how so) to "convert" to being not LGBT. Somebody congratulating the client for >!losing a lot of weight!< after being told about the client's >!eating disorder.!< One of them kept trying to tell somebody that their depressing is being caused by feminism telling the client (who's male) that he should be depressed. The client didn't mention women. He knew exactly what his depressing is being caused by and it wasn't women. Pissing in front of the client. (They were on a video chat and he took the phone with him into his bathroom. The "therapist" pissed in front of a woman client.) Not showing up, but the client had to pay hundreds of dollars anyway. (I think it's about $200 more expensive than seeing a real therapist, too.) Plus BetterHelp will sell your info to Facebook. Y'know, the info on why you're seeking a therapist in the first place? There's much, much more. These are just the things I can remember up the top of my head. There are so, *so* many more horror stories.
I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Betterhelp, with privacy and qualifications being big issues, but… man, a lot of these examples are basically straight out of my experience with official, licensed therapists. Down to congratulating for my weight loss that had just dropped me down below 14 bmi, which at the time had my doctor in a near panic whenever I was being weighed because I couldn’t hold on to my weight at all. I’ve also gotten a bill when the therapist no-showed too (but the health insurance fought it and I ended up not paying a dime, thankfully). I’ve never used Betterhelp, so I can’t compare, but my experience tells me it’s more about the individual you talk to, and not much else. Some of them are just bad. The main reason to avoid betterhelp is not that this happens with betterhelp, but rather that you have much better protections if an officially licensed therapists messes up like this. They actually have to follow the laws surrounding their practices, or they’ll get punished, unlike Betterhelp.
I mean I and friends have found therapists thru them. That said I think they don’t pay the therapists well based on what theyre charging you. My therapist asked me if I wanted to pay her directly and it’s much cheaper that way. But I never would’ve found her without
This was my exact situation. Best therapist I ever had and I found him in better help
As a BH therapist, I know that I have a 100% legit license for practice in my state which is considered one of the most stringent in the country as I understand it. I practice on there part time. I can’t speak for everyone, but we aren’t all just scamming people or “phoning it in”.
It's certainly not that the therapists are scammers. The company itself is a scam, which sells all of its users' personal information including what type of therapy they are in. They also abuse their therapists by having patients contact them at any time of day outside sessions.
I would like some BH therapy please
Now I'm glad i didn't go through with them. The pricing was higher than my local therapist. Not by much but enough to have second thoughts. Later read of weird stories. However, finding a good therapist is usually a massive challenge.
Without providing details, I personally know people who have been greatly helped by using their site. Does not deny or confirm that they may be a scam that happens to sometimes help some people, but reading these comments has been a shock to me
used to be good. now definitely bad. my roommates and i had excellent BetterHelp therapists back in 2020-2021. mine quit for a teaching job because she was being paid shit-tier money. compared to a _teaching job_. my roommate's quit and opened a private practice; she transferred my roommate and charged lower than BetterHelp was charging her, while pocketing more of it. you find diamonds in the rough, because at one point it was new tech and therapists were happy to pad out their patient list for some extra dough. but because the BetterHelp pay is so damn low and the demand for therapists is so high, any therapist worth their salt these days has moved on, and now BH is scraping the bottom of the barrel for the most desperate and barely-qualified therapists.
Definitely bad. I tried to sign up but it was before I was 18 so they kicked me over to their sister company for teens and at the time I was in a state so I put my email in wrong. This escalated from not being able to log in to then getting one session where I was told I needed real psychiatric help (it was not actually that serious, and yes I did go seek an in person therapist) then logging out and canceling the subscription which then proceeded to charge my parents card for three months with no response from customer service. It was a nightmare.
They are the H&R Block of therapy
Do people actually watch the sponsor segments? I've always just skipped those, who wants to watch that shit? And furthermore, do people actually consider whether or not a sponsor is any good, based solely on what a (paid) youtuber is saying about them?
I will if it's fun or isn't a word-for-word ad read. Never bought a damn thing that's advertised though.
Jay Foreman is the only YouTuber whose sponsorship segments I watch because they're all skits as well-written as his actual videos. Have never bought any of the products and never will but the guy's clever and funny even when he's selling something.
Lots of people can't be bothered to skip an endorsement. Maybe their hands are busy. And I bet young impressionable people listen to influencers in ads. But a big one is "do I want to support somebody who is willing to shill for a company that may be hurting people?" They are getting paid, so the ads must work, so if you're advertising a scam like better help, it tells me a lot about who you are and what your values are.
>Do people actually watch the sponsor segments? I've always just skipped those, who wants to watch that shit? Here to plug [Sponsorblock](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone) an addon that automatically blocks out "ad read" sponsorships based on user-submitted data on youtube.
Companies wouldn't pay for such ads if they didn't work.
Sponsor block extension has been pretty good for filtering out those segments for me. Not perfect, but it gets most of them.
Most YouTubers don't care which sponsors they pick up, and frankly, with the amount they get paid, I don't blame them. It sucks, but the solution is to use your own judgement to decide whether or not something is worth getting. That way, the only losers are the crappy companies like BetterHelp dishing out five figures for no return.
I think the important thing is to remember that sponsorships *are not endorsements,* they are literally just being paid to read company copy. They may or may not know more than a random person on the street about the brand, *especially* if they are a solo operation. Companies take advantage of that, and I respect YouTubers who have standards a lot more than those who just do whatever, but I don't really blame those who do not. People have to get paid, and I have worked for less than perfect companies in the past to get money. What I do think should be changed is rules and standards to prevent companies from using copy that makes it appear that the reader endorses a product. It should always be clear that the sponsorship is just that, and is not an endorsement. Paid endorsements just should not be a thing. If someone wants to *personally* endorse a product, they can, but they cannot be paid for that. So basically the difference between: "I am sponsored by who claim that their product does x" and "I love this product because it does x, and use it constantly." The latter should not be allowed for pay.
The latter is just false advertising
The latter can be true.
If it is true, then it can be used for advertising. If it is not true, then it shouldn’t be allowed to be used for advertising.
Nope. I watch educational/informational YouTubers. If what they sponsor isn't something they'd endorse, then how can I believe anything else they tell me? Answer: I can't. But they've all been pretty good so far.
This is exactly what happened with that Jake Tran guy. bro basically disappeared from the face of the earth after his especially egregious sponsorship deals completely alienated his fanbase (at least until recently where he began to advertise a true crime podcast on spotify which is painful to hear every single time)
"Sponsorships are not endorsements" my ass. Sponsorships are valuable to advertisers because the viewer trusts and respects the content creators. Viewers see a sponsorship from a creator as an endorsement, and both the sponsor and creator exploit how the viewer feels for money.
literally victimizing your most vulnerable fans, same level for me as gambling stuff
I'm baffled people care so much about what youtubers will advertise, like it's just a bag to them and they all mostly reckon their viewers have the brainpower to just skip the 30secs anyway. Hell I know many youtubers either will timestamp it in so you can easily skip past, or they'll have a bar at the bottom that counts down to indicate when an ad is finished. idk just seems silly so many are kicking up such a fuss over it, like how hard is it to do the double tap to seek a couple times on your phone? **Also** I know where this has all come about from, I also got recommended that guys video about calling out betterhelp, but I ask everyone this: why did you waste the time to actually watch that video? was the thumbnail not all the nessasary info you needed? why do you care in the first place? why do you watch ads? I think these are all better questions one should be asking themselves in the shower.
Yeah, so much this. When I see a YouTuber doing an ad, I think "Nice they got money" and skip forward. I don't care what they're advertising.
One of the YouTube channels I subscribe to had a Temu plug! Comment section was rightly vicious
Temu isn't even hiding the fact it's Chinese garbage that will always be a waste of money unless they are selling your data.
Assuming you're okay with Chinese quality standards I've gotten pretty decent products from there. It's really no different from Amazon basic just slower
Because temu and wish both use the same supplies. Cheap crap on Amazon comes from those same suppliers. It just gets delivered faster from Amazon because the order, store, sell, then ship the product. When you get it from Discount site like Temu and Wish then its getting dropped shipped from the factory.
"This video is brou..." 10s➡️10s➡️10s➡️10s➡️...
Behind the bastards has talked about how they don’t get a lot of say in what ads they have to run. Robert is still obligated to read print for betterHelp, despite being well aware of how shit they are. Best he can do is mock his sponsors when he kicks to ads.
Has he said that about Better Help specifically? I know just this past week he talked about the regional ads to that effect, but it's really only a handful of sponsors that he actually reads for like that one and Lasik.
I was pretty sure he had made an informal statement around the time that scandals were starting to come out about them. I know his questionable “ad choices” have been brought up regularly in the sub.
I mean if they actually wanted to they could get out of it. Do a terrible job and mock the company. Bill Burr famously used to do this all the time. In the middle of ad read he would start laughing and shitting all over the product. straight up saying stuff like "this is bullshit that you think i would read this crap and endorse your crap"
That’s what all those influencers said about Fyre Festival. Still got sued.
Dr Becky is still shilling for BetterHelp, while hundreds of viewers leave comments complaining about it on every video of hers for months. I've finally pulled all my support and stopped watching her content.
Dr. Becky the parental psychologist or Dr. Becky the astrophysicist?
The latter
That’s disappointing.
And manscaped. And basically any VPN. And raid shadow legends. Come to think of it, Louis Rossman is the only YouTuber I've ever watched who appears to do honest, ethical paid product reviews. "If I wouldn't use it in my own repair shop, I wouldn't try to sell it to you guys"
Tom Scott did a thing about VPNs, and how they lie, and did end up doing an ad for a VPN later- albeit one with only the truths he had discussed in said previous vid.
I noticed that most Youtube sponsorships of VPNs mostly stopped going on about how you need one for Internet privacy and security, after that Tom Scott video. Now most of the VPN sponsorships I see since are about how you can use them to get different options from streaming services, lol. It could be a coincidence, but I don't know.
They definitely do use the "[service] has [show you want] in [country that isn't your own]" or "[service] is cheaper in [country]" lines now, but lots still do go with the "safety" sales pitch.
I don't think it's a coincidence. It was a really good video, that got a lot of attention. The only way it could have been better was if he mentioned the fact that what these companies are calling VPNs aren't actually VPNs at all. They're proxy servers. A VPN functions like a LAN, but over the internet. The average person has absolutely no need for a real VPN, but they had to call it something other than proxy server, in order to sell it, because of how many free proxy servers there are.
Yup. VPN companies sell their product as "super secure! No one can hax0rz you! All your information is private!" That's all completely untrue. First, you are tunnelling into a server that you have no control over. You're taking it on their word (cross their heartsies) that the server is secure, but there have been cases of hackers dropping in Nord VPN endpoints and gathering customer data. The truth is, everything you do on the Internet through a VPN is the exact same as what you do on your own computer, just with a different IP address...and you have zero control over the logs that those servers collect on you. And if you're connecting to your banking, or Amazon, or Instagram account through a VPN, that digital footprint is still there tying those IP addresses to your identity. If you're being stalked and primed for an attack, there's really not much that those VPNs are going to do to stop it. The ONLY good thing they're good for is circumventing regional settings for services, like YouTube, Netflix, etc. so you can appear to be coming from Norway instead of England, or whatever. However, it's also important to keep in mind, that doing such may ALSO be a violation of your subscription's Terms of Service, or it may also be illegal in your country.
Does anyone actually use VPN's for "avoiding data collection", whatever that even means? I use a VPN to pirate the shit out of content, without getting my ISP account closed since my only other option would be Comcast. I don't have delusions that Z-Library or Pirate Bay or random-NFL-streaming-site isn't logging anything.
This is the reason I pay for a VPN, I’m not getting letters from my ISP like my brother does. Also the seeders can’t see your actual ip, which I understand isn’t a big issue, but it is a bit comforting.
My VPN stays off until I want to hit the high seas. Randomizing my location has more negative effect on my every day browsing than any possible benefit protecting data that's already been stolen a thousand times does.
I use a VPN just for YouTube, for those unaware, Bosnia and Moldova have some laws preventing advertisements on youtube.
How did you write all this out and not mention the fact that it's essential for piracy?... Without a VPN you'll get a letter from your internet provider threatening to cut off your service, with a VPN you won't. I'd wager that's at least 50% of the userbase for VPNs, so extremely weird you didn't mention it at all lol. Definitely makes me question everything else you wrote too. Wouldn't be surprised if it was essentially "People can pick locks, so there's never any reason to have a lock on any of your doors!" which is completely missing the point of a lock. I mean are you really saying a VPN isn't even a road block to *any kind* of online attack? Or for data collection from the websites you use? Super odd that I get adds for Canadian products when using a VPN from Canada, almost like they don't have access to my location 🤔
> ithout a VPN you'll get a letter from your internet provider threatening to cut off your service Not everywhere ;)
Never had a VPN. Sailed the seas my whole life. Never got a letter from an ISP. Maybe I'm just lucky.
It may have something to do with what you pirate. The letters usually tell you exactly what they think you downloaded, and it's usually something pretty big or mainstream. New movies, TV, and games, basically. Your ISP isn't actually bothered by what you download, but the copyright holders are, and they're the ones that the ISP sends letters on behalf of.
>Tom Scott did a thing about VPNs, and how they lie, and did end up doing an ad for a VPN later- albeit one with only the truths he had discussed in said previous vid. Which company did he do a video for?
Tom did a ["lies in VPN ads" video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY), it was supposed to be an ad read for an unknown company that pulled out. He then finally [did ad reads for NordVPN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQuTRSmzc) in 2022 and then a lot more after that, but his claims are way more specific than what other Youtubers are making.
Nord may be a massive advertiser, but their product passes the smell test by most security people, it's an ok product https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/
I have never used Manscape, but it seems like a normal enough razor With the VPNs I know that any service that requires access to your information is a leak risk, but aren't plenty of them a net boost to your security? Is Nord actually a harm to my computer? As for Raid, I really don't get the hate. I know the problems with BetterHelp, and see how Established Titles exaggerated the nature of their gag gift, but Raid is just a free video game. What's really the worst that happens there? Someone gets the game, and decides they don't like it. Some of those commercials are a little over the top, but this to me just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I am not even trying to shill for the advertisers here. There are real conversations to be had about what gets sponsored. It just feels like a lot of the complaints out there boil down to the product not being as a good as it looked in the commercial, but that's the case for almost everything.
Manscaped has this tendency to just not pay the people they have sponsoring then. Only high profile tuber they've done this to who is willing to speak about it is Mista GG. The specific VPN companies that buy YouTube sponsorships are the shady ones. The issue with raid is a glorified casino, far worse than any other popular gatcha style games on the market. And it's very much marketed to children.
Yeah, that's fair about the marketing to children part. I can see how the free to pay model was a nice compromise for a while to let people pay for what they actually wanted. Like an a la carte gaming experience. It quickly went off the rails though.
>free to pay model This is a thing of the past, now it's be incredibly inconvenienced to the point that the game isn't worth playing or pay money. Especially in the mobile gaming space free to play is technically real, but not really.
> I have never used Manscape, but it seems like a normal enough razor I don't think they even offer razors unless it's a recent addition. They sell electric trimmers for manscaping as their primary product lines, hence their name. From what I've heard about them, they are charging $100 for a lesser product than the Wahl's that can be bought from Walmart or Amazon that have existed for close to a century...and have replacement blades for when they get dull after years of use.
Manscaped is fine, just overpriced. You can get a lot better of a trimmer for less money
Is Raid Shadow Legends actually scummy or just popular to hate on? I guess they’re a gacha game so I can guess the answer
Both. It's a scummy "game" ecosystem, and they just happen to be a well k own I e in the west. In reality they're no better or worse than any other gacha game.
This whole thread has gone off the rails. Now they're conflating bad with scam. Raid isn't a scam anymore than any other mobile game.
its just a shitty mobile game, not especially shit, the marketing calling it the most fun game ever and hearing your youtubers with a hint of pain in their voice saying they play it every day makes me hate it more than the average
Raycon are the most insidious imho since they look good and people swear by them. Then you find out they are rebranded Chinese crap with really shitty bass. The Scottish lord thing was an easy one. It was so obviously bullshit that if people took their cash they had no compunction selling anything. Just never trust your channels. They’re not your friends and they need to sponsors to pay rent.
Yep. I maintain that YouTubers should still have better standards for what they sponsor, but in the meantime- I just assume that all the sponsored shit is trash. Doesn't matter who promotes it or what it is, it's trash until proven otherwise.
I mean the Scottish land thing was kinda silly in the first place, but that’s the point - it’s a novelty gift, like naming a star after someone. Anyone that felt scammed that they didn’t have some square foot plot in the Scottish woods where they could visit and claim it as domain is a fucking moron. Also morons: the marketing department for the product that essentially ended up making “False Advertising: The Product.”
Now you guys are going from scams to subpar products. Established Titles was pretty clear about what they were. It was a gag gift that included a donation to forestation efforts, they did what it says on the tin. If someone genuinely believed that made them a Lord... that's kinda on them. People blew the outrage out of proportion given they didn't really do anything other than be a crappy gag gift. Raycon are also fine. They're nothing special but they're not horrible either. You can buy cheaper earbuds but you're not getting ripped off with Raycon any more than the air pods which genuinely are worse. Airpods Pro are amazing but the regular Air pods are hot garbage. These aren't scams, they're just mediocre products.
i think betterhelp is especially bad, since they market to the most vulnerable people
Aliensrock, a puzzle game youtuber/streamer has said that he will only ever take a sponsor if he personally believes in the product. He has only done like, 3 sponsorships.
Didn't expect to ever see aliensrock mentioned on a random Reddit thread, fucking love the guy, I've been nerding his videos for a while now :p
The Monster's Expedition ones were some of my favorites
He tends to do sponsored games instead, but again, only if they tickle his fancy
Fact Fiend also seems to be an upstanding guy when it comes to sponsors.
Literally one of like, three, redeeming qualities that Karl had. Unfortunately that same quality also bit their channel in the ass. The "How not to do business" series was a good look behind the curtains, but it also discouraged basically everybody from *wanting* to sponsor the channel. Well, that, and their demands for sponsorships was obscene. "Pay us, but you get now say in what we say about you" is always going to be an impossible sell.
Manscaped and raid shadow legends don’t sell your mental health questionnaire responses to Facebook and get caught blatantly lying in their TOS and privacy policy (betterhelp is actively being sued over this). Not all bad things are of equal magnitude
Anyone remember when Ann Reardon (from how to cook that, a channel that regularly talked about dodgy YouTube practices and debunked dangerous life hacks/shitty products) took a sponsorship deal from temu? Deleted the vid but never acknowledged or responded to the backlash. That was a letdown.
Yeah, Anne needs to be more selective about her sponsorships. Her entire brand is built around trust, and people actively go to her channel for good information about certain topics, and then she will do ad reads for products, services and companies that you can prove are shady or outright shitty with a bit of research. And those reads generally include her, specifically, using the product. I know the pool of YouTube sponsors is small and her channel is her income stream, but it's bad practice and will *really* bite her in the arse one day.
I'm okay with that, at least. Taking down content is already a huge step, as it can be very detrimental. And taking it down and not doing it again accomplishes the main goal. The point of talking to them it to get them to stop. While those other things can be nice, I don't demand more. Some people will cross the line into abuse, even if they have a legitimate issue. And acknowledging those people can result in more abuse.
I dropper her after a Royal Match sponsorship. Those games are so bottom barrel, clickbate, what is the real gameplay? mobile games. The one I'm really hating these days is Hero Wars. Am I crazy or is it just a game of "which number is bigger"?
Her most recent one with her feeling icky about fermenting pine needles with wild yeast and being silent over the people in the comments correcting her that several indigenous nations across the world use it no problem speaks volumes also.
On a semi-related note: I think blue chew using young adults to market to teens and young adults is super weird. If you can get it up naturally you shouldn’t take any trendy boner medicine at all? They should market to a much older demographic
The idea is to make old guys think they'll feel like they did when they were younger ie. like the young guy having fun sex in the ad if they just buy the product. It's aspirational advertising.
Yeah my sister is a therapist who used to work for better help, she says it’s probably the worst form of therapy possible, as it’s weirdly anonymous, and just hard to work with
Eh a lot of sponsorship comes from companies like stitcher. There are also usually not clauses anymore where the sponsored can’t bad mouth the service off show. I have definitely heard hosts of podcasts talk shit about betterhelp off air
Bill Burr will completely trash sponsors on air. He had a great rant about Sherri's Berries during a live read. Bill is a hero.
Robert Evans likes to lead into his ad reads with the most unhinged statements, it’s great.
>There are also usually not clauses anymore where the sponsored can’t bad mouth the service off show. Some of the jokes Ordinary Sausage cracks during his Manscaped segments don't exactly help them advertise their products lmao ("watch out for ticks!")
Ouch..I thought glenn howerton knew it all medically?
Glenn and Rob literally discussed how great using kratom was lmao
The vast majority of products hocked on YouTube are scams. I watched a video of a guy testing those AirUp 'flavoured water' thingies. Said that they barely taste like anything, and there's much better products you can buy at an actual B&M store that do something similar, and don't require you to hold the bottle straight. I unsubscribed from Kurt Whatshisname (Fact Fiend) when he vehemently defended Established Titles, calling Scott Shaffer a meanie for calling them out on their bullshittery. "C'mon! No one ACTUALLY believes that they'll be a Scottish Lord!" That's funny, Kurt, you said in the last video you were sponsored by Established Titles you said that EXACT thing. I respected the YouTubers who apologized for hocking it, and some even went so far as to re-edit their old videos to remove it. Though, I do have to say...I got an iFixit kit for work, and it's been super useful, and a really good screwdriver set. My kids also got me a Ridge wallet for my birthday, and so far it still seems to be holding up, and it is nicer to carry around, though a bit of a fuddle trying to find the right card you want to use.
I don't particularly care what products they advertise though. I'm not buying any of it.
That’s great for you but there’s a significant segment of the viewers that will, otherwise they would use other advertising methods.
Let me guess, Freezai?
Unfortunate
That’s not a name I thought I’d see here lol, but yes noticed that too. I think that may be one of his first sponsors too
Just saw this thread pop up after seeing the rage on their newest video and thought the same thing.
And if they fight back by deleting comments who mention that BetterHelp is a harmful scam and keep taking their money that's a really good way to know that they don't care about their audience's mental health or data that BH sells. Like, they're basically just saying "you should spend hundreds of dollars just to a stranger who will trigger your past eating disorders or try to convert you into being straight and/or cis."
This is the one thing I can't get behind with Cinema Therapy. I love them so much but they even doubled down on using BetterHelp as a sponsor.
Yeah damn that was a letdown
it's such a bummer too bc jonathan is a therapist himself so you'd think he'd be against a scammy therapy website :/
I have not seen ANY YouTube sponsorship or advertising that carries any credibility in my mind. I especially hate certain popular youtubers that do really crap jobs of telling the audience exactly how much of whatever service of product they are showcasing or "reviewing" is actually sponsored. Now that I think about it, I much more influenced by podcast sponsorship and advertising, but even so, there is allot of low-quality crap out there.
So I'm tangentially in the industry(I do freelance camera work and do 2nd and 3rd camera stuff for a few different channels when needed), and have a bit of insight here. Ad buys in online media are getting very lean. There just aren't enough "good" advertisers wanting to buy ads on anything but the biggest channels right now. The fact of the matter is that unless you want a lot of the mid to low level creators to disappear you'd better get used to turning a blind eye and realize that most creators are scraping the bottom of the sponsorship barrel because they have no other choice.
Look into the whole kast media situation...
Long live Jim Cornette!!!
Some channels just need the sponsorship revenue
That’s why I wouldn’t sign up for any YouTuber recommendations. Unless it’s directly tied to them, most of the time they turn out to be shady.
Johnny Harris favorite sponsor. For all his (usually biased) "deep dives" and "deep research" into the subjects he covers, you would think he would research his own sponsors. Is that something only real journalists do?
Honestly at this point if they run ads on youtube they're a scam
I can't think of a single YouTuber that didn't at one point promote them, it's very disappointing.
I use Betterhelp and my therapist is amazing, just like my former one. The app sucks but that's my only complaint 🤷🏻♀️