Your Success: it is ill Gotten – Blog 4
(452 words)
It is a common misconception that the podcast community does not have any conflict. That, due to the format of the podcast community being predominantly a one way street of discourse; avast! That is not so. Things get surprisingly and deliciously spicy from time to time; however, most conflict in the podcast community is in the form of rabble rousing and greatly benefits the channels involved. On the StarTalk Radio podcast, Neil Degrassi Tyson’s beef with other astrophysicists about Pluto’s status as a planet is hardly a legitimate source of conflict. In fact I’d say the community feeds off of that kind of conflict and grows from it.
Aside from some intra-podcast channel drama, I think the largest, nay! The dangerous conflicts are coming from the misappropriation of podcast content. Podcast content is frequently being misappropriated by 3rd parties and used for their own gain. I hear this talked about from time to time; back on February 3rd I had listened to Joe Rogan explain the problem to his guest Jim Norton. He pointed out the problem of “Companies […] taking clips as we were live and uploading them immediately and building these huge channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and you could use that for anything they were selling things they had links to stuff, they were basically building a business off of your clips.” (Rogan, 2020). He went on to explain that while there are copyright laws that protect community members, it is becoming increasingly hard to track due to the sheer volume of content being uploaded.
Whenever they are found these parasites get exorcised pretty fast, but new ones sprout up very fast. The idea is that these people setting up the channels use clips from popular content creators, and essentially leach the analytics of the original channel. Aside from taking subscribers and affecting the original channels’ analytics, creators have a problem with what other messages are being attached to their clips and what kind of products are being sold. It could easily be some unsavory individuals using the creators popularity to push their own agenda or sell products that the creators would not want to be associated with.
Many content creators on the internet deal with this same conflict. While individual instances can be resolved, the fight is ongoing. As an avid purviewer of quality podcast content, I for one do feel irked to say the least when I find channels that have essentially stolen from creators I follow. Not much I do but spit a little and make sure you don’t give troll accounts the views, downloads or subs they’re scamming for.
I hope you learned something from this, and remember, comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.
And here’s my name to say so.
D.A. Mills
References
Rogan, J. (Host). (2020, February 03). #1421 – Jim Norton [Audio podcast]. In The Joe Rogan Experience. Google Podcasts.
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