The Mike Abundo Effect

If you’re in the US and you’ve been running searches on YouTube lately, you may have noticed a change in the ads next to the search results. Those ads now feature promoted videos from YouTube creators.

The ads seem keyword-targeted: different promoted videos show up for different keywords. Google’s bread and butter is keyword-targeted search advertising via AdWords. If these ads work the same way, then YouTube creators are themselves bidding on YouTube search keywords. Apparently, not every creator can do this: I can’t buy search ads for my own videos, and probably neither can you.

Having YouTube videos in YouTube search ads seems like a natural progression, but it has interesting implications for all involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Mere days after 4chan DDoS attacker Ryan Cleary threatened me with a DDoS attack, his co-conspirator “f” does the same. Whereas Ryan issued his threat in my comments, f decided to use his preferred form of communication: an email bomb. He just sent me thousands of emails saying this: Read the rest of this entry »