Nintendo's YouTuber Affiliate Plan Is A Bureaucratic Mess Of Delays And Control

from the who'd-have-thought? dept

You may remember that several months ago, Nintendo announced plans to create a YouTuber-affiliate program that would finally allow YouTube personalities to, according to Nintendo, share in the ad revenue generated by YouTube videos featuring Nintendo content. Leaving aside the notion that such videos are essentially a version of free advertising for the company, there was also a great deal of concern over how much control Nintendo wanted to leverage over the content within the videos. The wording in the agreement made it clear that access was being traded for positive coverage, essentially destroying the trust relationship between YouTube producers and their hard-won audiences.



Well, as if those concerns weren't enough, it turns out that Nintendo can't even administer to their own program appropriately, the result of which is them attempting to exert even more control. The problem? Well, it turns out too many people wanted to sign up.

Many people are still waiting for Nintendo to approve their first set of submitted YouTube creations despite the company’s promise to process videos in “two to three days.” The game publisher has acknowledged the problem, and it says that it’s still working on getting caught up. Game videos on YouTube is a big business, as that category regularly has the biggest audience of viewers and subscribers.



“Due to your enthusiasm for the program, we’re receiving a higher volume of applications to register channels and videos than expected,” reads an update on the Creator’s Program website. “It is taking longer than we anticipated to confirm the applications. We appreciate your patience as we work through them as quickly as possible.”

Nintendo posted an extensive whitelist of games that it has said are OK to monetize on YouTube. You can read the list for yourself, since it’s far too long to include here. For people who did want to submit their entire YouTube channels to Nintendo, the company is now saying that it will have to turn down your application if you have any uploads featuring games not on the whitelist. That includes non-Nintendo games.



“If a video within your channel contains game titles outside of the list of supported games, please remove it from the channel before registering,” reads the website. “If you are unable to remove the video from your channel, please register each video that contains game titles on the list of supported games individually.”

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Given the kind of money involved in game videos on YouTube, you have to believe the request for patience is being met with glares and stares. Especially, as I mentioned above, since Nintendo appears to be a subscriber to the theory that every crises is an opportunity. In this case, an opportunity to tighten their grip on video content even more, to a degree that's actually quite stunning.Except, as Nintendo also noted, the company is first completing registrations or entire channels, while the wait time for registering individual videos has ballooned. What does this mean? Well, if you actually want to get this stuff rolling, you register your entire channel. And if you do that, you have to delete any videos that aren't on Nintendo's happy-happy approved list. That's about as clear-cut an example of using a bureaucracy to shape a message through complicit media as it gets, and it should be a warning to anyone who was thinking about getting into bed with Nintendo on this YouTuber thing but hasn't yet.Because, and this is important,. If Nintendo is attempting to control video producers' content this way at the beginning, imagine what they have planned once they've convinced enough producers to sign up.

Filed Under: ad revenue, affiliate, bureaucratic mess, let's play

Companies: nintendo, youtube