AtheneWins

….Is the beginning of a new revolution. Youtube has been recognized as the premiere user generated network on the internet and boasts its compliance and service to the mass attention seeking audience. Chaingangproductions talks about perhaps the initial purposes of Athene’s video’s displaying his girlfriend; and that is to see a) number of views racked up b) how well his social experiment of using a woman to give men advice works. But below the surface of the big breast laden, softcore, nipple-less porn, is the idea of a revolution. He now is trying to start a revolution (or perhaps already has).

For those of you not completely immersed in YouTube, let alone its history, you may not be aware that YouTube has delegated and put priority on videos done by ‘paying customers’, or ‘promoted users’. If you check the front page of YouTube, every user usually has these video categories: Subscriptions, Featured Videos, Most Active Videos, Friend Activity, and Promoted Videos. Athene’s issue falls with the last category. It seems that until December 6th, 2007, Athene was proving a point with his videos simply under the idea of sex sells. Up until this date and after however, he was reborn with a new purpose. A quote from Athene referring to one of his videos of his girlfriend Tanya giving men advice:

“The previous version of this clip got removed (flagged) by YouTube for commercial reasons, not by the YouTube community but by the YouTube staff themselves. Flagged clips are removed from ‘Videos’ front page and all the ‘popular’ lists (‘top rated’, ‘most viewed’,…) and become inaccessible to normal YouTube visitors. Which means they don’t get any chance of reaching a large audience….

My clips get flagged by YouTube even when they just have some cleavage, because YouTube doesn’t want non-partners to get all the views on the ‘Most Viewed’ front page. There can only be 20 videos on that page at all time, and YouTube wants to have that filled up by partners as much as possible.

To do this, they only allow partners to use sexy thumbnails, they even allow them to break YouTube’s Terms of Service by using fake thumbnails (i.e. a picture of a sexy model that has nothing to do with the clip). Non-partner clips with (non-fake) sexy thumbnails simply get flagged asap when they gain popularity.”

(from http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=281010946)

Because he a) refused to be a promoted user, b) was gaining popularity and obtaining too many views, and c) taking popularity away from paying users, Athene was flagged and taken down from YouTube as a solution to his monopoly of the “sex sells” market. His purpose then morphed into bringing down a new entity that has been considered the next revolution for new media; but in fact, has now become something that has started to, and probably will continue, to mimic the old forms of corrupt media, such as television, film and the music industry. His cause could possible be the next step and catalyst in video’s evolution, and the changing user generated environment.