In my personal quest to make YouTube more enjoyable, here’s a tip to all of you content creators out there.

There is such a thing as acceptable audio levels.

Even among those that seem to understand the principles, there are many content publishers that believe it is ok to blast their cheesy intro music.

There seems to be an assumption that loudness is a valuable tactic; that we all have the same taste in cheesy music and want to hear an entire 15 seconds of yours, often accompanied by equally cheesy graphics. These intros are not that entertaining. If creators feel they are building their brand, think again. Annoying your potential audience is hardly a path to brand success.

Nobody needs or wants to get blasted by your intro.

Broadcast networks and streaming platforms adhere to and enforce guidelines.

YouTube continues to allow the abuse of decibels. It takes care on the part providers to make sure the decibel level is within compliance. YouTube, appears more interested in its own interest than it is in delivering a consistent quality experience to its users.

I will routinely and immediately stop watching content when the audio level is significantly higher than the preceding content. Tolerating bad behavior will not lead to change.

There are several sources that provide guidance. Here’s an example from Frameio: https://blog.frame.io/2017/08/09/audio-spec-sheet/

Specification #1: Loudness

The U.S. Congress passed the CALM Act (H.R. 1084/S. 2847) in 2010. It requires the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to establish rules that govern television commercial loudness. And it states that commercials can’t be louder than the shows that precede them.  The FCC, along with a few television standards committees and organizations, established an algorithm called the ITU-R BS.1770-3, which measures the perceived loudness of program material.  This algorithm itself is applied to the technical standards known as EBU R128 (in Europe) and ATSC A/85 (in the United States) and you should check the standards of your particular market when delivering.

I’m doing a disservice to advertising suggesting that content is adverting. It’s clearly not advertising in the legitimate sense. But as part of the world of video communications, content creators need to be held accountable to the same guidelines as everyone else.

The loudness tactic by content makers is a fool’s game.

Does Facebook invade your privacy?

Facebook and the Web, in more general terms, and other technologies have redefined what is possible in terms of worm-holing into our lives. This is old news at this point. What’s a little shocking is that the social media wunderkinds come across as unaware and apologetic, as if they have no clue of the havoc they have wrought.

Can they be that ignorant of their own business model? Of course not. They just assume the rest of us will keep buying the aw-shucks act.

I’m a fan of the European opt-in model, and I think more Americans should be as well.  Here’s why: All this invasive technology is not going to stop; in fact, it’s going to get worse, much, much worse. As the internet of things comes on-line, more and more aspects of our lives will be under the microscope, more data, ever more personal.

As Americans, we are a bit naive on the topic of privacy and the abuses of privacy that have gone on and continue to go on all over the world.

We live in a country that ostensibly does not make a habit of spying on its citizens. And even if we’ve crossed that line on occasion, for the most part, we’ve been spared the abuses of family members disappearing forever in the middle of the night at the hands of our government. God Bless our democracy.

But this happens every day in many other countries. Can it happen here? Do these newer technologies threaten our personal security and freedoms? What is happening is that big business is spying on us, and we’re gleefully letting them make scads of money while many Americans struggle to survive. But who owns the right to your data? Who owns the right to profit from it more than you? The big question is, who owns the internet? Social media exploited a free communications channel, one made free by our government funding the internet. Does our government maintain rights over the internet? Will they exercise these rights to protect us? Will the government step-in and leverage available data from these businesses to help protect our privacy?  These are vexing questions. That’s why I favor the opt-in model. Opt-in will not solve the privacy problem completely but it is a step in the right direction. By default our privacy should be protected.

Social media have built business models that exploit our privacy and have become extremely profitable as a result.

Not only does the model make money selling our user data, it’s also sells a lot of ads. The majority of these ads are useless and annoying clutter, the junk mail of the internet. What value are they providing? To my mind, there is very little exchange of value beyond the revenue generated to the social media platforms and those clients that have the types of transactional business models that profit from the mercurial, whim-based purchases of a bored and distracted populace.

When we subscribe to a print publication, we opt-in. We’re agreeing the publication provides value to us in some equal measure of our money. Why should online media channels get to play by different rules? Especially since we are the ones producing the content. Opt-in increases the value exchange and gives us a voice in the matter. Ideally, it also forces a quality dynamic down on the media channel and the advertisers.

Opt-in has the potential to open the door to more competition; which of course, will drive improvements in the marketplace.

The businesses thriving from our interactions and data are never going to change until we, the content generators, demand it.