Keep Turning Left.

I don’t begrudge him a penny. I love his films and am intensely jealous of his ability to travel so far and wide. I’ve donated and he has always thanked me promptly. I’m just sad that it seems to have come to an end. If he comes up my way he’ll not be short of beer.
 
Impaler said:
I don’t begrudge him a penny. I love his films and am intensely jealous of his ability to travel so far and wide. I’ve donated and he has always thanked me promptly. I’m just sad that it seems to have come to an end. If he comes up my way he’ll not be short of beer.
Click to expand...

Humm well stated kind Sir certainly well stated
 
I'll agree with the above.
My personal opinion is that before Dylan fell foul of Google he was making enough to cover costs, but after that it became a simple case of those of us who enjoyed watching his exploits were going to need to at least subsidise him, especially as he ventured north of the Wash, and I was quite happy to buy DVD's and to click on the PayPal button.
I appreciate that some forumites were rather aggrieved to be asked to contribute to his adventures, and even though this was not compulsory, there were some acrimonious conversations held on the forum...
To be honest I do think that there was quite a lot of "dummy spitting", and although I was disappointed, I could see why KTL came to a halt.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone who uses these forums.
 
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I think his films are better than many others on YouTube. The narrative part of them is even more interesting. I also like that he is opinionated. Better than neutral. The fact that may be he breached copyright laws regarding some photos (not certain about that) is a minor thing in comparison with the essence of the stuff that is his own. Payment on a voluntary basis is a donation. Full stop. You are not supposed to claim back your money if the guy disapponted you. But of course you may express your disappointment.
Rumen
 
fergie_mac66 said:
Dylan didn't ask for adverts to be clicked onnly donate if you enjoyed via paypal .
Click to expand...

That's simply not true. The encouragement to click on ads occurred in at least two separate films/blogs that I saw, although that was back in the old days when YouTube/Google was funding his voyage. It was long before he attempted to raise money via 'tapping'. I doubt those films still exist. However there will still be a lengthy thread or two from that time on here where many forumites, including me, were supportive of him because they felt the punishment from Google automatic algorithms was excessive.

He would be probably quite happily continuing his voyage without any direct requests for money if he hadn't fallen foul of YouTube/Google.
 
sailaboutvic said:
SO to put the records straight .
In an earlier posting, I was accused of " laying into the forumites "
I guess the posting was started in that way to get the few other that disagree to lay into me which didn't Seen to work,
Click to expand...

Not in the least. Never accused you of that anyway but I've seen you leap to the defence before without looking. Just saying stop and listen to a fuller set of facts first.
 
Got all the early vids( paid for)going back to bembridge including the first anitfoul when he first got the slug on the bought dvds non of those mention clicking ads but could have been on an early thread.
 
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fergie_mac66 said:
Got all the early vids( paid for)going back to bembridge including the first anitfoul when he first got the slug on the bought dvds non of those mention clicking ads but could have been on an early thread.
Click to expand...

The DVDs sales came after the income source from YouTube dried up. The YouTube income source dried up as a result of an automatic Google algorithm detecting unusual activity. I saw films* pointing out that clicking on the adverts on the side would gain him money in the weeks running up to the YouTube revenue ceasing. Presumably so did the wild clicker who triggered the algorithm. I'd be very surprised if any of the subsequently re-published early vids repeated the bit about clicking on the ads.

As I've said a few times, I believed the Google action was disproportionate and pretty much most forumites shared a similar view.

*I include the blog films in that term.

PS This was not the main thread from the time of the 'ban' but does include a good few links. As you can see Dylan got a lot of support at the time. http://www.ybw.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-259209.html
 
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Impaler said:
I don’t begrudge him a penny. I love his films and am intensely jealous of his ability to travel so far and wide. I’ve donated and he has always thanked me promptly. I’m just sad that it seems to have come to an end. If he comes up my way he’ll not be short of beer.
Click to expand...

+another one

Our YC hosted Dylan and KatieL when he was in the Forth. He was not short of a beer.

I have no criticism of Dylan "upping" his boats as he sailed north: KatieL is not an appropriate vessel to sail the Northern Isles. The Pentland Firth is no East Coast river. A Centaur is not exactly ritzy.

I think it a great shame the KTL project is incomplete: a video record of the coastline of the UK in the early 21st Century by an expert film maker is both an enjoyable watch and an important record.

The clicking and copyright issues were unfortunate but should not have been enough to derail the process: the pity is that no effective funding mechanism was found.
 
lpdsn said:
Not in the least. Never accused you of that anyway but I've seen you leap to the defence before without looking. Just saying stop and listen to a fuller set of facts first.
Click to expand...


I don't need to read the life and times of DW to come to the conclusion that the guy make good films people enjoyed, it's very clear here that's the case, even you agree to that much.

What's got you and a few people backs up enough to want to run the guy down and stop supporting him, seems to be that he ask watches to donate to help finance making the films they themselves enjoy watching,
where the problem?
If he broken a few copy rights on the way, he answered for that,
And the outcome deal with that.
Am I right to say the out come was to his favour?.
And If some guy on the other side of the world when mad and click on ads day in and day out, that's nothing to go with him or is films,
My God it could had been a bunch of school kids who running some program.

The real loses here are tho who enjoyed his films, which in my eyes is a real shame.
There no way near enough good sailing stuff around.

On his personally circumstances, don't go there,
It as absolutely nothing to do with his films.
It doesn't matter one penny how big the guy house is what car he drives or that he happen to keeps his boat in the most expensive Marina in the world. ( although I very much doubt Kip Marina comes any way near that)
That just start to sound like jealousy
 
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"Guest Column

by Dylan Winter - England

Adsense, no sense at all -
what it’s like being sacked by a computer...

http://www.keepturningleft.co.uk/

My name is Dylan Winter. I am a freelance journalist and film-maker from England. I am 55 years old. Two weeks before Christmas, I was sacked by a Google algorithm.
I have worked for the newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV stations. One of the things you get used to as a freelance is being sacked.

After all, that’s why they take us on – we are easy to sack.

Sometimes being sacked is as simple as coming to the end of a contract – and no-one offers you any more work. I have also been let go by decent men and women who have told me face-to-face that ‘this next block of work is your last’.

Programmes close, magazine sections change focus.

Once, I was ‘let go’ by a boss via a casual comment passed through the window of his car as he drove away from the last day’s filming. The word has come by phone, letter, fax, text and email. I am used to it. It’s part of the game.

But this was different.

On Monday the 13th of December – two weeks before Christmas – I was sacked by a Google algorithm.

It sent an email to me and summarily killed my main source of income. No humans were involved in this process at all. It was, literally, the most inhumane letting go I have ever experienced.

As well as ‘letting me go’ the Google Algorithm also confiscated all my earned income October 31st to December 13th. Tough indeed - and no human has ever done that to me; they have always paid me for work done.

Then twio days before Christmas I got a letter from my bank saying that the check for October – worth £1,700 had been stopped.
That is £3,700 gone from my family fiancés in the two weeks before Chisitmas.

Welcome to the world of Google. Kafka would be proud of Google, whilst Orwell would be perfectly unsurprised.

This is how it happened:

Over the past 18 months I have been making films for Google. In fact, I make them for Youtube – owned by Google. I am the 97th biggest reporter on YouTube ever, globally, and No 7 in the UK.

At the moment I am delivering 1.5 million good solid hits a months to Youtube. My Youtube space has now had 20,000,000 visits.
One film in particular, ‘Big Trucks in the Canadian West’, has received 13,000,000 hits.

Now I appreciate that if you don’t like trucks but still choose to watch it then it is likely to be the dullest four minutes of your life, but both I and Youtube make money from these films.

Adsense – owned by Google – places adverts against them. About one per cent of those viewers will click on an advert. Youtube get paid per click - and they give me a share.

It ends up at about 1c per click. I have no idea how much they get paid per click – that is a secret.

The mathematicians amongst you will already have clocked that the trucking films have earned me about $18,000. Good money.

So I made more films for Youtube. I diversified into films about rodeos, dog training and cattle ranching.

The Adsense check – which arrived bang on time every month from a bank in Switzerland – was rapidly becoming a major part of my household finances.

I need it. I still have two teenage children at English Universities. So I have to bale pretty hard to stay afloat and this seemed like a good way of earning money. No capricious boss to ‘let me go’ whenever he felt like it.

All my life, sailing has been my main hobby and I have always wanted to sail around Britain’s ridiculously crinkly 20,000 mile long coastline.

I have a small boat – aka “The Slug” - and I spend my weekends and holidays slowly sailing it around the UK and shoving its ugly little bow into every aquatic nook and cranny I can find.

I spend a month or more on each river or estuary drinking in the atmosphere before moving it onto the next port or inlet.

I began to think of my little project as “Keep Turning Left”.

Being a cameraman I obviously never travel without a camera so I started filming the journey, which I turned into a series of nicely made short films and posted them on Youtube – a good one would get 25,000 hits a year, whilst an average might get 5,000.

Pathetic compared to the truck films, but pretty soon sailors were asking me for DVDs of the sailing venture and asking when I would be posting the next film. Clearly there was a small but firm demand for my sailing films.

So I built a website – and started posting all the new films there in high definition. There are now about 150 films on the website. I have 700 subscribers paying $4.99 a quarter to watch the films.

If I can keep them interested then that’s around $15,000 a year. Not a massive income, true, but it all helps the mix.

I was still losing money hand over fist on the sailing – after all, making films is a labour intensive business, some are 25 minutes long and take two weeks to cut and master and each represents at least three days editing - some take two weeks to make.

The Slug is a 50 year-old 18 foot sailing boat. It cost me £2,000 and bits fall off it almost every week.

As well as telling the Keep Turning Left subscribers about the rivers of the UK I also share details of the times The Slug falls apart
This makes them happy because my subscribers also spend their weekends screwing and glueing bis back onto their boats. I showed them how I fixed the holes I made in the boat when I hit the rocks off Cromer, and how much the engine repairs cost. I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter.

The subscribers can see that I cut every possible financial corner in an effort to keep costs down and the project going.

As part of the deal, and as a way of involving the sailors, I tell them about the revenue for the project which all comes from the website. The more the website earns the more sailing I can do, the more films they see.

I send out a monthly or bi-weekly update explaining how the project is going and about the films I am posting.

So what’s coming in? 100 new subscriptions a month at $4.99. I also have an advertising block for a UK chandler www.saltyjohn.co.uk that earns me £14 a week. And I have a special little box from Amazon. If a sailor buys a sailing book by entering Amazon via my website, I get a 5 per cent referral fee. If some-one spends $200 on a Kindle or a camera, get their next three month s subscription for free.

That postage stamp sized box on my front page is shifting $10,000 worth of business through Amazon this month (December 2010). So, it’s pretty good for them, pretty good for me.

It was jolly nice of my subscribers to take the effort of taking the extra step of entering Amazon through my site. Loyal lot these KTL subscribers. They all own small boats and love to see another bloke sailing his boat.

Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors.

I thought this was not much of a revelation - as any fule kno that is how it works.

The click through rate on Keep Turning Left was at 6 per cent which I now know is high enough to upset a Google Algorithm but www.keepturningleft.co.uk is a film streaming site and some of the films are 25 minutes long compared to the four minutes for the truck films.

The mathematicians amongst you will again realise that Youtube is getting an advert click for every 400 minutes of web time.

My films are longer, so that I am getting a click every 200 minutes – but my films are also in high definition (HD) and take longer to buffer than the pixel soup dished up by YouTube.

Plus the adverts on my site are aimed straight at my subscribers. They are for chartering yachts and sail training courses; over on YouTube they were being offered adverts for computer games – duh!

I did get the odd subscriber sending me an email saying that he had clicked loads of adverts. This is called demon clicking. I would reply that I would prefer them to only click on adverts they were interested in.

I allow my subscribers to leave comments on the films. If one of them mentioned clicking on adverts to show their appreciation – well it’s a nice gesture, but I would edit their posting to remove the mention.
The advertising revenue started to climb along with the number of page impressions and the number of subscribers.

Nothing was earning as much as the truck films on Youtube because 1.5 million views from truck enthusiasts is always going to outgun 30,000 hits on a sailing site.

The click-through rate for the truck films was a rock solid one per cent while click-through from www.keepturningleft.co.uk went up and down a bit more – sometimes less than six per cent, seldom more.

Then on the 13th of December I went into my home office, opened my emails and there was this from a Google computer.

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded to the affected advertisers.
Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google's advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we've taken, how you can appeal this decision or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153

Yours sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
-----------------------------------------

There is an appeal process where you go to fill in some boxes on a web page. But I did not know what was wrong with the account and I no longer had access to the data because they had suspended it.

You may have had school friends like this – the rich ones who owned the football. As soon as they had enough of the game, or mummy called them in for tea, or they got in a huff, they would pick up the ball and walk off with it.

I filled in the tiny boxes on the link they gave me and submitted the following answers:

27_TrafficSources: they are subscribers. I promote the site through keepturningleft on YouTube and by being active in the sailing forums in the UK, USA and Australia. This is a classic 1,000 true fans operation. They are keen sailors and they are watching my well produced sailing films

28_AdvertiserValue: sailors who love sailing and who have heard about the films from other sailors

29_UserIncentive: Some of them click adverts to support the films - they have emailed me and told me so. I tell them not to but to only click on adverts that are of interest to them

31_InvalidActivity: I have two sources of Adsense revenue - the main one is from my YouTube space that has 1.5 million hits a month. Dylanwinter1. Films about trucks; one has had 13 million hits.
#7 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Reporters

#92 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Reporters - Global

Impossible for me to influence clicking on that site. 50,000 hits a day.It gets a click through rate of between 1 per cent and .5 per cent.

The subscription sailing site gets a higher rate - much higher after I post a new film - extremely erratic but I have no idea how such sites should perform. I only have this one website - www.keepturningleft.co.uk

The sailing website www.keepturningleft.co.uk is a small subscription only website. I cannot control their clicking activity however, it is a download site so they have to wait for the films to buffer. One man did email me to tell me that he looks at the adverts while waiting for the films to buffer.

Many of them have turned off their adblockers. One man said that he had saved himself £50 on his boat insurance. For some of them these are the first sailing related adverts they have ever seen.

I also have an Amazon box on the site - that brings in about £80 a week at the moment.

A sailing advertiser has bought space on the site and is extremely pleased with the response.

I will quite understand if you decide to kill the Adsense account for the sailing website if, as you report, it is producing some weird click-through patterns - however, disabling Adsense for my YouTube activities seems counter-intuitive. I am very happy to provide you with a login for the website so that you can assess it for yourself

Yours sincerely, etc etc

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The next email I got was this , two hours later ...

"The winter holidays are approaching and we'd like to take the opportunity to wish all our publishers a very happy and delightful holiday season and a successful start to the new year!"

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday afternoon this arrived ...

Hello,

We are currently in the process of reviewing your account with the additional information that you have provided. Please understand, however, that there is no guarantee that your account will be reinstated into AdSense. As a reminder, Google does reserve the right to disable an account at any time, as stated in the AdSense Terms and Conditions (http://www.google.com/adsense/terms).

Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

-------------------------------------------------------

Two hard days of worrying and walking the dog followed ...

I also spent a lot of time on line finding out why people get thrown out of the Adsense scheme and discovered that Google has three sets of rules you can break:

1. The ones in the very long contract that I confess I did not read very carefully

2. The rules that they try to explain in their many pages of Questions and Answers and FAQs

3. The rules they do not tell you about because they are secret and deal with their algorithms"

(and it goes on bla bla)
 
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sailaboutvic said:
I don't need to read the life and times of DW to come to the conclusion that the guy make good films people enjoyed, it's very clear here that's the case, even you agree to that much.

What's got you and a few people backs up enough to want to run the guy down and stop supporting him, seems to be that he ask watches to donate to help finance making the films they themselves enjoy watching,
where the problem?
If he broken a few copy rights on the way, he answered for that,
And the outcome deal with that.
Am I right to say the out come was to his favour?.
And If some guy on the other side of the world when mad and click on ads day in and day out, that's nothing to go with him or is films,
My God it could had been a bunch of school kids who running some program.

The real loses here are tho who enjoyed his films, which in my eyes is a real shame.
There no way near enough good sailing stuff around.

On his personally circumstances, don't go there,
It as absolutely nothing to do with his films.
It doesn't matter one penny how big the guy house is what car he drives or that he happen to keeps his boat in the most expensive Marina in the world. ( although I very much doubt Kip Marina comes any way near that)
That just start to sound like jealousy
Click to expand...

+1
 
sailaboutvic said:
I don't need to read the life and times of DW to come to the conclusion that the guy make good films people enjoyed, it's very clear here that's the case, even you agree to that much.

What's got you and a few people backs up enough to want to run the guy down and stop supporting him, seems to be that he ask watches to donate to help finance making the films they themselves enjoy watching,
where the problem?
If he broken a few copy rights on the way, he answered for that,
And the outcome deal with that.
Am I right to say the out come was to his favour?.
And If some guy on the other side of the world when mad and click on ads day in and day out, that's nothing to go with him or is films,
My God it could had been a bunch of school kids who running some program.

The real loses here are tho who enjoyed his films, which in my eyes is a real shame.
There no way near enough good sailing stuff around.

On his personally circumstances, don't go there,
It as absolutely nothing to do with his films.
It doesn't matter one penny how big the guy house is what car he drives or that he happen to keeps his boat in the most expensive Marina in the world. ( although I very much doubt Kip Marina comes any way near that)
That just start to sound like jealousy
Click to expand...

Merry Christmas. that's why you got a ban.
Keepturningleft has been debated, its old news and unwelcome.. hes still working. he has a blog. hes doing very well. you can see his latest films. Hes just not freeloading his business on here like he allways used too. Hes not hard done by and in fairness needed a little reality check. plenty of people offered support including me. I'm not sure why, it fell on deaf ears.

Steveeasy
 
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steveeasy said:
Merry Christmas. that's why you got a ban.
Keepturningleft has been debated, its old news and unwelcome.. hes still working. he has a blog. hes doing very well. you can see his latest films. Hes just not freeloading his business on here like he allways used too. Hes not hard done by and in fairness needed a little reality check. plenty of people offered support including me. I'm not sure why, it fell on deaf ears.

Steveeasy
Click to expand...

Steve the reason I got ban was because someone went running to the Mod because they didn't like the idea that I wouldn't stand by , while some in sighted hate against people less fortunate then them .
But hey that old news now .
 
sailaboutvic said:
I don't need to read the life and times of DW to come to the conclusion that the guy make good films people enjoyed, it's very clear here that's the case, even you agree to that much.

What's got you and a few people backs up enough to want to run the guy down and stop supporting him, seems to be that he ask watches to donate to help finance making the films they themselves enjoy watching,
where the problem?
Click to expand...

If you're not interested in the reasons why I've reached the attitude I currently have regarding Dylan then no worries, but for many of his supporters and former-supporters (e.g. me) it is relevent.

I supported him. I supported him after the Google/YouTube nasties got him, even though I knew he wasn't entirely the innocent victim. I supported him during the copyright issue, but as I said he again wasn't entirely innocent and I was disappointed that he copyrighted someone elses work (that to me was significantly more than just taking the work) but I was still a supporter.

I certainly did not support his 'freeloader' attack on his supporters. It was badly done. Even Micheal O'Leary wouldn't have offended his customers in such a blatant unsophisticated way. I also really objected to the false poverty line he spun.

I wish Dylan the best of luck with completing his circumnavigation. I really hope he does finish it. I simply won't give him any more money and having decided that I feel obliged to watch none of his films from the point after I stopped giving him money.

That's simply it. No jealousy at all. If you think it is just jealousy that's a lazy way of considering the issue.

He is a far better cameraman than me. Far better. There are better cameramen than him on YouTube. I occasionally watch some of their films. Google advertisers pay for that so I have no qualms about freeloading there.
 
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