General GunTuber thread

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ellroy said:
Just remember, PSR tried bullying Botkin into doing Finnish Brutality and Botkin absolutely refused. Polenar Tactical's defended Lucas because the bullying offended his central European sensibilities but I don't think Varusteleka gave a shit because the company president was sharing PSR's videos challenging Lucas on Instagram.
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PSR came out to my WV event this year and won his division.

Lucas would probably do decent at my match format because it’s just shooting skills executed at speed, not much match specific footwork and memorization nonsense.

But putting oneself to the test in public comes with the possibility of taking an ego hit, and disappointing the audience so I don’t think I’ll ever see Lucas out there.
 
Othais said:
It's because they subsidize with data collection.

From the very start of our series I have never considered myself a "YouTuber." Our slow release, long format, in depth material has always been incompatible. We are MUCH more akin to a PBS show but, of course, they would never have us.

Since we have to use YT we have had to adapt to its perverse incentive structure as much as we can. The results are mixed and inefficient. This effort on shorts and other hoop-jumping acts as a time and attention tax on the series as a whole. Extra, performative work just to tread enough water to sell the actual product.
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I've never quite understood why you don't also upload to Rumble or Odysee. I know Rumble's monetization is a bit of a mess and Odysee's in whatever cryptocurrency they've tied themselves at the moment, but at some point YouTube is going to fuck you. Is the ad revenue -- what, $5K a month -- worth the single point of failure?

Better to have built up an alternate presence and community elsewhere as insurance.
 
Zyklon C said:
I've never quite understood why you don't also upload to Rumble or Odysee. I know Rumble's monetization is a bit of a mess and Odysee's in whatever cryptocurrency they've tied themselves at the moment, but at some point YouTube is going to fuck you. Is the ad revenue -- what, $5K a month -- worth the single point of failure?

Better to have built up an alternate presence and community elsewhere as insurance.
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This applies to all guntubers to be honest. Even if you don’t want to go to the effort of manually uploading an uncensored copy of a video, Odysee has an automatic sync program that does it for you. If for no other reason than archival purposes (which is definitely important considering YouTube’s habit of changing policies on a whim), a mirrored channel on a YouTube alternative seems an easy option.
 
Zyklon C said:
I've never quite understood why you don't also upload to Rumble or Odysee. I know Rumble's monetization is a bit of a mess and Odysee's in whatever cryptocurrency they've tied themselves at the moment, but at some point YouTube is going to fuck you. Is the ad revenue -- what, $5K a month -- worth the single point of failure?

Better to have built up an alternate presence and community elsewhere as insurance.
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You'd think that Hop, at the very least, would be doing that sort of thing since he has a seldom-used second channel dedicated to bideo gaems and video game channels tend to have a backup on another site in case they fly too close to the sun. Sseth, for example, has a secondary channel on BitChute where he mirrors all of his videos, especially the ones that Neal Mohan doesn't want you to see.
 
Also what is up with
AGPinochet said:
You know what Website has hundreds of millions of largely English speaking users, the ability to upload long videos, A large firearms community, an algorithmic recommendation system AND has a mechanism to monetarily compensate creators for their content?
View attachment 9389270


But no, niggas want to upload to deadwithin5yearsalttechvideohostingplatformnobodyhaseverheardofandcostsmoneytojoin.com
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X wouldn't absolutely horrible for Ian's content. It like other social media don't care about referring back or being an archive.
 
Huge Guntuber Drama involving FocusTripp and some faggot

Like a year ago I wrote this post, read it for context
AGPinochet said:
Huge drama in the 3D Printed gunsphere and oh boy is this more autistic than you would think it is
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Anyway, huge faggot "John Galt" (Whose man name might be "Daniel Peng" based on FT's possibly intentionally shitty redactions, can anyone who is good at Dawxing check to see if a Daniel Peng lives in Dallas, Texas?) has copyright struck two of Jonathan Campbell AKA FocusTripp's videos talking about his rifle design, the MBAR, because I guess he didn't dickride him enough for his ego or whatever
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Zyklon C said:
I've never quite understood why you don't also upload to Rumble or Odysee. I know Rumble's monetization is a bit of a mess and Odysee's in whatever cryptocurrency they've tied themselves at the moment, but at some point YouTube is going to fuck you. Is the ad revenue -- what, $5K a month -- worth the single point of failure?

Better to have built up an alternate presence and community elsewhere as insurance.
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We did for years and no one noticed. I still have people saying "why did you never use Odysee?" You don't use it either.

We also did Bitchute, Vidme, Utreon, and do have a slowly populating rumble. The problem is all of these added up to hours of work for no effect. We aren't a normal opinion show. I am pulling minimum 60 hours so adding another one or two here or there needs to have a return. Especially with shorts, why spend extra time on another soon-to-be-failed platform when that time could earn another round of viewers?

YT definitely doesn't even make us $5k a month btw. We have the flat lowest RPM of any guntuber and no one can explain why; less than half per view as FW and 1/1000th the views. If it was $5k a month I would go exclusive to YT if they asked, that's how tight our budget is.

The real concern is patron attrition vs new supporters. I doubt we would last a year on an alt platform because there is no discovery so every lost supporter is permanent lost revenue. Every year new adults are made and join the hobby and older ones do die off or lose jobs etc. We have to have new supporters coming in.

Edit: Also, because everyone confuses us with FW, we never joined the pay walled garden. I disagreed with that approach because our core mission is to inform. We give it all away and ask for support afterwards. Somehow people still get angry at this
 
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Othais said:

We did for years and no one noticed. I still have people saying "why did you never use Odysee?" You don't use it either.

We also did Bitchute, Vidme, Utreon, and do have a slowly populating rumble. The problem is all of these added up to hours of work for no effect. We aren't a normal opinion show. I am pulling minimum 60 hours so adding another one or two here or there needs to have a return. Especially with shorts, why spend extra time on another soon-to-be-failed platform when that time could earn another round of viewers?

YT definitely doesn't even make us $5k a month btw. We have the flat lowest RPM of any guntuber and no one can explain why; less than half per view as FW and 1/1000th the views. If it was $5k a month I would go exclusive to YT if they asked, that's how tight our budget is.

The real concern is patron attrition vs new supporters. I doubt we would last a year on an alt platform because there is no discovery so every lost supporter is permanent lost revenue. Every year new adults are made and join the hobby and older ones do die off or lose jobs etc. We have to have new supporters coming in.

Edit: Also, because everyone confuses us with FW, we never joined the pay walled garden. I disagreed with that approach because our core mission is to inform. We give it all away and ask for support afterwards. Somehow people still get angry at this
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A lot of the time people don't go looking for your stuff elsewhere until and unless you get banned permanently or temporarily on the first location. Whether or not there's enough of a footprint in the new place and whether or not enough people make the jump is iffy even if you've laid the groundwork so I can see the lack of interest in a uncertain roi. However youtube is evidently increasingly hostile to gun content so it might be worth the hassle to do just in case.
 
Banned isn't even a fear though. If we were banned it would create a wave. The real terror is being throttled, like I know we are... but by how much?

Don't forget, we had one video escape once. A Portuguese Abadie revolver netted 8,000 new subs in 48 hours and so many comments about "how have I never seen this long form gun content?". Youtube arbitrarily deleted 10,000 subscribers in response.

It has wrecked our "Lifetime" subscriber chart.
 

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Othais said:
We did for years and no one noticed. I still have people saying "why did you never use Odysee?" You don't use it either.
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I'm actually one of your subscribers on both Rumble and Odysee :-) I'd actually prefer watching you at either just because they aren't YouTube.

I do get your rationale though, both audience and economically speaking, for viewing the other web sites as distractions and time sinks. Unfortunately, YT is where it's at. Still, given YT's mercurial attitude, having cheap insurance...

Othais said:
Banned isn't even a fear though. If we were banned it would create a wave. The real terror is being throttled, like I know we are... but by how much?
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By a fuck ton, mate. As early as a year ago you regularly had few videos hit 100K. These days you course between 20-50K. But you don't need me to tell you that.

And I don't believe it's because people aren't craving long form content on the subject matter. I know a few creators in the space and they tell me that in the past year two it's become patently obvious that YouTube is gaming the platform against them.
 
Anyone that tries to make a living off youtube, regardless of what type of content they make, is an utter retard. People that try to make a living off youtube by posting firearms related content are doubly retarded because youtube is an innately hostile platform for that type of content and has been for well over a decade.
 
YouTube is run by malicious, manipulative social engineers whose primary goal is to make more money. They also clearly have a good number of malicious activists in the mix, so you get to play the game of "does YT think my videos are harmful to their financial interest, or does some tranny communist or H1B jeet with the right access just hate my videos?"

I know I've posted about this before relatively recently, but YT's rules/policies are intentionally vague, often arbitrary, and constantly shifting. And those are the written rules. I think everyone knows by now that YT has plenty of unwritten rules. Yes, your video is not monetizable (we'll still run ads on it though), or yes your video violates YT's guidelines. Why is it unmonetizable? Why was it removed? You'll have better luck getting an answer to that question by asking a ouija board than asking YT. Even channels with many millions of subs seem to often have to fight to talk to an actual human at YT when they have a problem.

YT is a bad platform to make a living on for anyone, and that is 10x true for firearms and anything firearms adjacent. However, I'm also aware that nobody is making money on Rumble or Odysee, and while it's possible to make money on X, it's a garbage platform for video and you'd still be competing with the same kind of never-ending third world slop factory that exists on YT, and that Musk refuses to do anything about.
 
Anyone picking up Headstamp's upcoming From Hartford to Vietnam: An Illustrated History of How Colt Brought the AR-15 to War? I have to admit being interested in it despite the book being an "illustrated history" of the AR-15/M-16's early years. That said, I'm also mildly annoyed that you have a Colt collector and presumed expert author the book and not have an autistic level telling of the story.
 
Zyklon C said:
Anyone picking up Headstamp's upcoming From Hartford to Vietnam: An Illustrated History of How Colt Brought the AR-15 to War? I have to admit being interested in it despite the book being an "illustrated history" of the AR-15/M-16's early years. That said, I'm also mildly annoyed that you have a Colt collector and presumed expert author the book and not have an autistic level telling of the story.
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Can't lie I am considering it. I kind of wish I could get the Hartford book separately.
 
Ian is growing too powerful, his thumbnail game is impressive! Video itself was rather basic beyond Ian's morale patches, but it is pretty apparent why the French police decided to unload those airsoft FAMAS'es to US. The frogs chose Cybergun to provide them and they are the shit-tier of shittiest-tier of airsoft brands.

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Source
 

The guys who interviewed Isaac have done a follow up with Lucas.

First big difference was a livestream where Isaac was prerecorded.

at about 15 mins in Focus shows up in the chat

at about 45 mins in Focus' audience show up in the chat and immediately begin spamming "nigger" and "kike" in chat

They start with his life at the start of Trex, he was living with his parents and doing odd jobs around the farm as "rent" and had started making selling holsters to fund his intertest in competitive shooting. He refers to going to college as a "no-no" in his family, and says he considered the military but that military service was discouraged by his church community. That's not surprising as a lot sects of Christianity discourage service to secular organizations. Remember his dad is the head of their church. I'm extremely curious about Botkin senior's theology cause I feel like it's going to be batshit.


They start by asking about the evaluations over what Lucas should be paid. Lucas says according to the ownership agreement the evaluation must be done by a third party agreed upon by all owners prior to the evaluation being conducted and he didn't agree to the evaluator the brothers used so he's not going to accept it regardless of what comes back. Lucas' feeling on this I think can be summed up as the brothers love the part of the agreement that gives them ownership of Trex so he's going to make sure they follow every other bit of the agreement to the letter as well.

Lucas is asked if he thinks his brother had any underhanded intentions at the start or if he thinks it was pure at the start. He says he doesn't think his brothers had any ill intentions or anything, that none of them knew what they were doing at the start and were all just making it up as they went along. Also that none of them could've dreamed how big Trex would become. Lucas goes on to say that giving the brothers partial ownership was the right move and they did deserve to own part of the company, just that the share they were given was far too large.

They now move to the AC1 drama. For those unaware the initial run of AC1 plate carriers were made in Mexico despite being labeled made in the USA. Getting the carrier nicknamed the AC Uno. Lucas' telling of the story is that at time he saw a large push for civilian body armor and wanted to get into the market, he also wanted to launch the product on black Friday of that year. This was a bit of a push and his brothers were concerned if they could do it that fast. They found an OEM who was highly recommended and said he could make their timeline and was based in the US. This would turn out to be a lie. They ended up cutting corners on their normal vetting process to make the black Friday timeline at Lucas' insistence. Lucas' argument is that their standard vetting process at the time wouldn't have caught the lie anyway and they sold over 1500 AC1s that black Friday so even if the plan could have been executed better it was the right decision. It must be mentioned that Lucas comes off notably defensive about the situation. Arms crossed, looking away from the camera, and a change in tone.

This would lead to the formation of the executive board and Lucas having a lot of his previous unilateral authority stripped. Everything over $20,000 must now go through the board. This would paralyze the company as the board struggled to make decisions and would just argue and postpone decisions. Eventually the board decided ruling by committee wasn't working and they create a CEO position. Lucas applies and is rejected.

Lucas addresses the assumptions people have about his wife's involvement in the split, saying the issues that cause the current situation predate the marriage and even predate Trex arms as a company.

They cover the politics situation Isaac brought up. Lucas' side is that he didn't like how "half assed" the brothers are with political activity.

They ask about the voluntary prayer meetings that Lucas opposed. They initially had a voluntary company prayer meeting when Trex was just the Botkins and their church members but as they grew they began hiring "outsiders" ( Lucas' word), he said he saw a divide between the prayer meeting people and those others. He than alleges the brothers wanted to make the prayer meeting mandatory. This would conclude with Lucas and another member of the executive board in opposition with the brothers over this, as you will obviously get sued into oblivion for this. They compromised on a voluntary 1200 prayer session and a mandatory 1215 meeting.

Lucas recounts when he tried to fire all the fat people at Trex, cause they gave off the wrong image of the company.

Lucas is asked about the statement Isaac made about holding back and that they have info that could destroy Lucas' reputation and have the internet pull a 180 and side with them and that they are protecting Lucas. His response is he thinks they sincerely believe this is true, but the brothers don't really understand culture outside of their bubble. He never explicitly says what this might be but reading between the lines: they have footage of Lucas yelling racial slurs.

The rest is just them asking Lucas about his plans for his two new companies. The take away:

The reason Adaptiv and Lethal corp are two separate companies is because of weird shopify rules

They are going to do AI generated zero targets, where you can put in your barrel length, grain weight, caliber and distance and it'll produce you a custom zero target
 
RSU 1741 said:
japanese tobacco
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The funniest thing is the author of this specific one is a borderline lolcow in the militaria community. He's a literally nobody that can't even read Japanese and mostly just copies oudated info from collecting forums and the occasional out of print magazine. I occasionally spot him in collecting groups begging for info or period photos to illustrate his next project.
 
schwrz said:
The funniest thing is the author of this specific one is a borderline lolcow in the militaria community.
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Tell me more, if you can. I'm rather curious.

I have not read Tobacco (nor do I intend to) but I've read his Armax article about the imperial mon, and I was kinda puzzled by the claim that "it solved the mystery" (it's extremely baseline knowledge that you can find with a cursory Internet search and a couple of books, so maybe you have a point), but your claims are rather extreme. This guy is apparently writing another book about Nip medals, are you sure he can't read Nip? That would be hilarious.
 
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