Why do we gravitate towards the same YouTube creators, publishing the same kind of content again and again? It's not like nobody else is talking about those same topics, but yet we choose to go return to certain channels. There is something that draws us in time and time again. Why is that? Well, there's a secret sauce, a magic ingredient, and on today’s Today episode of TubeTalk, we're going to be discussing that exact ingredient.

I think it's fair to say that I've seen a fair number of channels, big and small, with creators across virtually every vertical, and every niche. Something that's always struck me is, how come two channels, which are virtually the same could get radically different audiences? How come some get more subscribers, and more views, versus others which may have equally great content, but are just not resonating with the YouTube audience? What's that missing ingredient that the one channel doesn't seem to have?

Well, one critical element is the way the story is told. Being a great storyteller is critical on YouTube. We've been telling you this forever now. Which is why I'm super excited today to speak with 

, who is the Founder of Transformational Storytelling, a facilitation coaching and consulting business based in Vancouver, Canada. Jordan spends most of his time leading business storytelling workshops for some of the biggest companies in the world. In this podcast you will learn:

How storytelling is the key to connecting with your audience

How every creator has this skill, they just need to build on it

The audience wants to build that connection with you so let them

Why copying other creators will stop you from finding your true voice

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

Why Story Telling is the Greatest Skill For Any YouTuber: Full Transcript

Liron Segev: Jordan, welcome to TubeTalk.

Jordan Bower: Thanks, Liron. I'm happy to be here.

Liron Segev: Tell me, what do you do, this transformational consulting, this storytelling consulting? This sounds exciting. What do you do that?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, so I'm a Storytelling Consultant. Maybe I'll just take a quick second to give you a sense of how I got into this in the first place. When I was about 26, 27 years old, I went through what I called at the time, my quarter-life crisis. Imagine, I had a job I hated. I had a girlfriend I liked but didn't like enough. I was feeling like I just didn't know who I was in the world. I wanted to do something more meaningful.

I wanted to do something more creative. I had an okay job, but not a great job. I was thinking like, "What do I do?" One day, over the course of more or less two weeks before my 26th birthday, I quit the job. I dumped the girlfriend. I moved out of my house and I bought a plane ticket to India.

Over the next more or less three years, I went back and forth to India, three times for about six months. India is cheap, which meant it was an easy place for me to travel for that extended time. I spent a lot of time when I was there, wandering around, meeting people and really poking at my own story. "Who am I? What does it mean to be someone like me in the world and what do I want to do?"

At the end of a bunch of soul searching that ended up taking about five years, and ended with me walking from Canada to Mexico, I founded this business called Transformational Storytelling. The work that I do in the world, is often with big organizations. Although I work with everybody, from small entrepreneurs, all the way to some of the biggest companies in the world. I teach storytelling in a way that's a little bit different than most people think.

Most people tend to think that storytelling is like, I'm going to get up on stage and I'm going to tell you this anecdote. For me storytelling, like what story literally means, is taking information and infusing it with emotion.

Who want to motivate people to change, the leaders of organizations, salespeople. I work with lots of people across some of the world's biggest organizations, teaching them how to speak with more emotion. Which is going to give them more trust, more credibility and most importantly more connection.

You can imagine like, what's the most common question any of us get? You know that question, "What do you do?" Maybe you've got an answer. "Oh, I'm a YouTube creator, I've got a channel like this. I'm a consultant, I'm a whatever." People would say, "What do you do?" I noticed myself having to tell the story over and over again. Gradually what literally happened is, I got sick of my story.

I started having to think, "Well, how can I tell the same story in a different way?" That insight is the heart of what I teach people now. How to tell the same story in a different way, so it's going to be more meaningful, more trusting, more impactful on whoever your audience is.

Liron Segev: Well, and whoever your audience is is pretty important. Identifying who you're speaking to, do you then adjust your story accordingly?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, and I mean, this is maybe the jumping-off place for good storytelling. Is, there's never one story. What you learn, what we all learn as we're communicating is, how do we find a match between the story we want to tell and the whoever we're trying to connect with? I use the acronym harmony, we're going to get into this a little bit later.

Harmony is like two voices different singing together. When you're communicating information to somebody else, even if your information is smart, solid, logical, one person is going to think a bit differently than the next person will.

To be a good storyteller, is to have an aspect of being kind of like a chameleon, where you find creative, innovative ways to tell the story a little bit differently. Depending on what you're trying to get across, and who you're trying to get it to.

Liron Segev: Does that mean that storytelling can be done effectively, by all types of niches, all types of industries? Whether you are a vlogger, but also the how-to type channels. The, looking for a solution channels, like “How do I unblock my toilet?" Once people know how to unblock the toilet because you've told them how to do this, there really isn't a reason to subscribe to come back to your next video, because you've just given them a solution.

Could we use the storytelling elements, to not just give them the information that people want, but also to connect with that audience?

Jordan Bower: Yes, and I would even go one step further to say that, you are already telling a story no matter what you think. There's already a choice that you're making. If you're just talking about your toilet, and you're shooting your toilet and you're shooting how to fix it, I mean, you're telling a story.

Liron Segev: Are there certain elements of a story that we need to pick out, and we need to deliver in a certain way? Or maybe I should just give them the facts, give them the specs and then get out of there.

Jordan Bower: Well, I like to say that, learning storytelling is different than say learning code or learning a foreign language. If I tried to learn... I don't know, Russia. I have to start from scratch. I got to learn, what does the alphabet look like? What are the basic words to say things like me and you?

I have absolutely no basis for that learning framework. Storytelling is different. Every single one of us has been steeped in stories. We've been listening to stories and telling stories, since the moment we came into this planet.

It's a very interesting skill to learn, because all of us start with no experience and gradually and steadily build up experience. I like to say that, when we're thinking about storytelling or learning, or trying to become a better storyteller, there's really three Ts. I call these Ts: tools, tactics, and taste.

Good storytellers are iterators. Which means they try, we fail, we try again, we fail. Gradually, we slowly get to the heart of the story. We need to go through a process of trying things out, and seeing how the audience reacts. It's one thing to have a thought, and it's something different to take that thought and put it into form. The tools of storytelling are all about iteration.

Of course, they can be learned and they're simple. It can be as simple as writing something out, doing some reflective writing, editing, coming back to it over and over again. The tools are simple. The tools are all about effort.

The second T, I call it tactics. What you'll see about tactics, is that there are certain commonalities of great stories that apply across the board. Whether we're talking about how-to videos, whether we're talking about one-on-one connection videos from influencers, or Hollywood movies, or good advertising or great books, or speeches, or Ted talks.

Any or most of them are built on the same basic foundational tactics. The reason those tactics work, is because they're linked to the way our brains work, right? There's like certain ways that we learn and process information as human beings, and the cognitive biases that go with it. That makes us more susceptible and more interested in narrative techniques or tactics.

The third thing is taste. I think this one is really important. It's really important that we know what a good story looks like for ourselves, so we have something to aspire to. The more that you can develop your taste of what's good and what's not, that helps to guide the creative development.

All three of those things together, tactics, tools, and taste are essential for the process of becoming a good storyteller.

Liron Segev: Could talking-head videos still be able to make those connections? Or our visuals and story go so hand-in-hand, we have to think much bigger?

Well, I want to equivocate and say both. Which means that, if you're going to make a talking-head video, your talking-head video will certainly be much, much more interesting by becoming a better storyteller.

Storytelling can be a massive business, and it can be a totally micro-business. The important part to know is that the approach and the tactics are exactly the same. Once you start getting good at it in an inexpensive way, then it's quite natural to start to see how you might be able to scale.

If you know how to grab people's attention and connect to them, people are interested in you. They want to be able to find the people who have that specific skill.

Liron Segev: Okay, what are the elements that make up a good story?

Jordan Bower: I've used this word, harmony because it really rings true in terms of, storytelling is emotional and it's something that we should feel resonating inside of us. When we're thinking about a good story, it's important not to take these ideas and call them how-tos. They're more like ideas, guiding ideas that can help us understand good composition.

It's important to know first, before we go any further, to know that these aren't rules. Storytelling is an art. Like any art, rules are made to be broken. You're going to find these kinds of principles across all good stories, no matter what they are.

Every great story is based on hooks. It's not just a hook that starts the story, but it's the series of hooks that move us through the story. The English word, ‘entertain’, literally means to hold between. If you look at that in the etymology, at entertain, hold between. What is it that we're getting held between? One really easy way to think of this, is the question and the answer.

The word ‘suspense’ literally means asking a question and then suspending the answer. Let me give you an example. "You'll never guess who I just saw in the coffee shop. Before I tell you that, let me just give you a little bit of background."

You see what I did? Is I offered you a question, with some sort of compelling answer and now I'm suspending the answer. It's worth thinking about, well, what kinds of questions are compelling? If I said like, "You'll never believe what's on the bottom of my shoe." Or like, "You'll never believe what the most popular word in the newspaper was today."

The most compelling questions are the ones that promise an emotional payoff. If I ask you a question that promises some sort of emotional payoff, you're going to be interested.

People can't remember what they had for breakfast yesterday, but they can remember the climax of a movie they watched 30 years ago. How is that possible? Well, the answer is emotion. The stronger the emotion, the more meaningful it's going to be for the audience. We hook people with emotional content.

Liron Segev: You give them a pitch, more of, "Today, I'm going to show you five reasons or five ways to make your Wi-Fi faster. Stay tuned, and I'll show you how to do that." We told them about the same kind of hook.

Jordan Bower: That's a really nice clear hook. The next question is, how do you take a hook like that and add an emotional payoff?

I'm linking two things together. I'm linking the piece of information that I wanted to communicate, but I'm wrapping it in emotion that's going to make it more interesting for folks. In great stories, there's not just one hook. There is a progression of hooks that build on top of each other. One question leads to the next question. What happens over the course of the story is that questions become more specific because we know more now. You know this pattern because it's in every single movie you've ever watched.

When it comes back to a YouTube video, even if you're doing a how-to, it's like, how do you find a number of hooks that are going to lead somebody all the way through to the end? How do you hold the juiciest, most emotionally meaningful moment of the whole video to almost at the very end, so people will watch all the way to get to that? Yeah, that's the question

Jordan Bower: The A, is of course Audience. How do we know our audience? We might say, "Oh yeah, my followers are women aged 24 to 30. Or my followers love toilets. The question for all of us is, how do we go one level deeper? Who are they really, these people? What is it in our story that's going to be truly interesting to them? Who are they as people? What values do they have? What are they yearning for at a real human level deep inside?

Being able to reach your audience at that level, that really captivates us. It's really important when you're considering your audience and think about, "Which of these major deep human themes are going to be the one most likely to resonate?" Remembering that the audience isn't just looking for toilet advice, they're looking for life advice wrapped up in toilet advice. How do you bring those two things together? Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Yeah, so you're already thinking of your content very differently. Instead of, first you put A, and then you do B and then you do C, that's the boring bit. That's just the how-to, it’s how else do you bring people along for that ride?

Jordan Bower: It's a strange thing about making content because you write a book, you make a video, you do any of these things, you spend so much time thinking about what you think you're trying to get across.

Most of us spend much less time watching the video from the audience's perspective, and seeing the stream of content as if you were them. What A reminds us to do, is to get out of ourselves, however we can, and literally switch sides of the screen.

Now, you're your audience watching back at you. How do you look from their perspective? What do they know or not know about you? What might they want to know more of about you, or the subject matter or so on?

Liron Segev: Love that, because I think that a lot of us would probably put a tick mark into, "Well, me as the audience member, did I receive the information I was looking for? Do I know how to make my Wi-Fi faster? Do I know how to get the best out of myself on camera?" The answer is probably, yes, because I've delivered enough value in the video. That's where it stops, brilliant.

Jordan Bower: On to R. R is about relationships. Relationships are the real reason we love to watch and we love to engage in any story, because as we all know, we're social animals. What we try to do as storytellers, is start a relationship between what we can call our characters and the audience, as quickly as possible. A subtle way to do that is, "Hey, I'm Jordan and I'm going to be introducing you to my toilet."

If you can give me a little bit more detail about the character, then it's going to be interesting and more fun for me to watch. Think of the difference between shooting a cell phone camera info video, in a white room by yourself, and shooting it in one of your favorite places in your house.

If you can create a relationship, not just with you, but also with the setting and the world around. What it does is, it transports us. Now, we're not just sitting alone in front of our computer or in front of our phone, consuming your information. We're literally there with you, in relationship with you as you're moving through stuff.

The strength of a relationship is what draws us all in. Relationships are like catnip to humans. The more you can tell us about the relationship, the more juicy the relationship is, the more we'll be hungry for it. Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Does that mean that we have to give a little bit vulnerable, a little bit open and beyond just the content that we're trying to deliver, but also being ourselves? As opposed to acting a role?

Jordan Bower: Yeah, totally. Really putting the relationship first. Like you say, being vulnerable, it's so essential, because that's what we want as audiences. We don't just want the Google Maps voice talking to us. We want humanity, we want resonance, we want connection.

Liron Segev: Well, okay. Everyone, I just wanted to reiterate that point, because I think it's super, super important, so many people are still making that mistake - everything has to be a 100% perfect or it's a failed video.

That is such flawed thinking, because we're not all perfect. We all going to mumble, we all going to step over our own words. It's just natural. We would rather could make a connection with someone who's real, than an avatar or the Google Map voice. Love that.

Jordan Bower: Yeah, and I would say too, one last point on relationships is, don't underestimate that you have a relationship with your audience. You also define the terms of your relationship. Our first fear is, "Oh, we're going to get judged. These people are going to judge us."

When we're worried about other people's judgment, we're much more likely to be focused on the perfection. If we flip that on its head and say, "You know what? We want to give something to somebody. We're creators. We're bringing some creative product to the world. Something that no one else in the world has ever done before.

Only we can do it in our unique way." It's a gift. When we start to change our attitude about that, then we can become a little bit easier on ourselves as artists and creators.

__*Liron Segev: If you're trying to emulate somebody else, it's only going to get you to a certain level. People have already connected with that person. How can they connect with you? Why are you the best gaming channel? Why are you the best tech channel? Why would I choose you over thousands and thousands of other channels? It's because of you. That's what you bring to the party. __

Jordan Bower: My advice to you if you're someone who thinks like that, remember that every great artist started off in the same place you are right now. Like Michelangelo picked up sculpting hammer for the first time and had no idea what he was doing. Leonardo da Vinci, the same thing. Everybody starts from scratch. It's really important to love the process. What I would say is, find a favorite artist and learn about them.

Liron Segev: We've got the hook, we've got an audience, we've got relationships. What's the M?

Jordan Bower: M is Movement. What's really important to know, is that stories move. Imagine if I was a YouTube creator and I'm making a video, and the whole time I was talking in a monotone voice. Would you want to hear me talk for more than 10 seconds?

It's really important to remember that stories move. They move literally from start to finish, but they also move emotionally from start to finish. You'll see, if you go watch a movie, over the course of two hours, you're going to get all kinds of emotional experiences.

What we look for in good stories, is the diversity of emotional experiences. Even as you're starting to think about your video, how can you bring in different emotional elements? I would say, in the beginning, if you're just starting, just try to bring in one different emotional tone.

It's ironic. Like with the message, you want to be clear in your message, but with the emotions, you want to be experimental. You want to be creative. I remember when I was learning to be a photographer, that some of the advice I got was to change the angle that I was shooting at. The moment I start to go down and go up and move from side to side, I start to give myself a diversity of tools to work with. You're just doing something that breaks your habitual pattern. Now, over the years of being a storyteller, I've learned how to talk like a storyteller.

The emotion comes through, the passion, the pauses, all of that, all of that is totally learned. It doesn't mean it's inauthentic, but it's like something that I learned gradually, works with audiences. I want to be understood, I'm playing with these various tactics.

What I notice in workshops, is that when people tell their story, whether it's a story of how they became who they were or how they started their YouTube channel, they tend to tell it chronologically. It's like reading a police report.

Even just starting the story in a different place, is going to take you to a different level. Challenge yourself to tell the story in a different way. I already gave you a little bit of a hint of how to do this, in the first letter, which is hook. Look through the story and ask yourself, "What were the most emotionally impactful moments? When did something interesting happen?

When did I fail? When did I succeed? How do I tell a story where those are the main building blocks, as opposed to the chronology? My advice is, just experiment.

Liron Segev: All right, we've got a couple of more letters. We need to get on to the O now.

Jordan Bower: The O, is about Open. Open is a really interesting thing to think about stories, because you think like, "Hey, I've got a story to tell. I want it to have a point." As we talked about a little bit earlier, the best stories are open stories.

We love stories that have that feeling of openness. If you can find some way to make it more of an exploration or a creative experience, that draws us in. As audiences, we don't want to be lectured at. We want to be provoked with open questions that ask us to participate. Every great story is participatory. If a story isn't participatory, it's propaganda. Does that make sense?

Liron Segev: Again, we keep on going back to the unblock toilet for some reason. Once I know how to unblock my toilet, once I know how to get the best out of my camera on my phone, I will get the fastest internet at home. What else can I do to make them have that openness?

Jordan Bower: Well, let's think of the attitude you bring to your channel. If I was like, "Hey guys, I'm Jordan and I'm going to show you how to unblock your toilet." Like what I'm delivering to you is clear, but it's also very closed. If I was to say "Hey guys, I'm Jordan, the handyman. I am a home expert. No matter what goes wrong in your home for the rest of your life, I'll be able to help you with it. Whether it's your kitchen sink, whether it's the toilet, whether it's what to do with your leaves outside.

I'm the guy to go to, to help you with everything in your house. Today what we're going to do is, we're going to talk about the toilet." What I just did there, is I opened up who I am in the eyes of the audience.

Liron Segev: With YouTube, we were told specifically to follow a formula if you want to be successful." Whereas a lot of that needs to be unlearned now because the platform has changed. The algorithm has changed. The way people consume information has changed.

Jordan Bower: It's a really great way to roll into the N. H is Hook, A is Audience, R is Relationships. M is Movement, O is Open, N is Now. With now, it's all about thinking through how do you be relevant? How do you tell a story that's relevant to what your audience is experiencing now?

Again, going back to the, O, that's a great way to be open. Is now you're not just talking about your toilet, but you're Jordan, the handyman, who's helping give you life advice for what's happening in the world right now. Finding a way, and making sure that there is a way to link the story you want to tell, to what's happening in cultural context. That's so essential now because if you don't, somebody else will.

What does it mean to be a good storyteller? The world very clearly needs great storytellers right now. Developing the skill is so essential, not just to get people to watch your videos, as important as that is, but to also be leaders in your family, community and so on. Do not underestimate how impactful storytelling can be, throughout all aspects of your life, relationships too

Learning the art of storytelling can transform you from a good YouTuber into an amazing one - and it's such an easy skill to learn! Find out more on this week's episode of TubeTalk.

Why Story Telling is the Most Valuable Skill For Any YouTuber: TubeTalk 201 with Jordan Bower

YouTube creators were hit with a bombshell in November 2019 when YouTube announced 

ground-breaking changes to audience setting

"Regardless of your location, we'll require you to tell us whether or not your videos are made for kids. We are making these changes according to an agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission, FTC, to help you comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA, and/or the applicable laws. Failure to set your content appropriately may result in consequences on YouTube or have legal consequences under COPPA and other laws."

That paragraph has sent shivers down the spine of the YouTube community around the world. What does this mean for a YouTube channel that has an audience of under 13 as well as an audience that's over 13? What does this mean for family vlogs? What does this mean for gaming channels? What does any of it mean?

We want those answers just as much as you do, so on today's episode of Tube Talk let's unpack those questions with someone who understands not only the law but also the influencer network, so someone who understands the YouTuber mindset. That man is 

 who's an entertainment attorney representing influencers for the past three years. He's the co-founder of 

, an amazing event for creators and brands to network and learn from each other. In this podcast you will learn:

Why the pressure to comply with COPPA is on creators not YouTube

Why there is so much confusion around COPPA

How creators need to determine whether their content is 'made for kids'

Why YouTube probably won't offer creators a 'mixed audience' option

How COPPA is going to fundementally change the YouTube platform

Wh creators need to contact the FTC and comment on the changes

Why COPPA affects you even though you may live outside the US

Why adding a disclaimer to your YouTube discription is not enough

__Just a quick disclaimer before we get started. This is going to be a long episode and anything in this podcast should not be constituted as legal advice. __

The COPPA and FTC Info Every YouTuber Needs to Know: Full Transcript

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, welcome to TubeTalk.

Jonathan Katz:	Thank you. Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, we're about to embark on a discussion to deal with the FTC and COPPA and YouTube. We're just having a discussion around this very sensitive topic.

Jonathan Katz:	Absolutely. I think a lot of attorneys are nervous to speak casually about this topic for fear that it might be interpreted as legal advice. There's a lot of nuance here. There's a lot of subtlety, and so I'm happy to share what knowledge I have, but in the context that none of this is legal advice. Nobody listening to this is necessarily my client, so everybody's situation is personal and you really should consult an attorney rather than rely on what some guy said on a podcast.

Liron Segev:	And with that legalese out of the way, let's jump into it. So, Jonathan, you must be a pretty busy man at the moment with trying to unpack the mysteries of COPPA and the FTC. What's going on?

Jonathan Katz:	Sure, so the first thing I would do is recommend that they check out 

 raising the alarm about this. A number of weeks ago before people were really talking about it, another attorney who happens to be a YouTube creator named Jeremy Johnston and I, we've been sort of mulling this over and being really concerned about it for a while. And so he published a video about it on YouTube.

I published an article about it and started making calls and contacting all the creators that we knew. And the thing that we were concerned about, the thing that we were anxious about is that after the news about the settlement with YouTube came out, we realized that there wasn't a ton of information spreading about how the settlement was going to impact the YouTube platform.

And the one thing that we knew and that was clear from the settlement is that creators were going to be bearing the responsibility of being COPPA compliant or not COPPA compliant going forward. That YouTube was no longer taking responsibility for complying with COPPA on a channel that was "directed at kids" and that it was going to come down to the creators having to self-designate.

And that got scary really quickly because we realized that by self-designating, YouTube is going to have to change what your opportunities and abilities to interact with the platform are based on if you designate one way or the other. And we started contacting YouTube and started talking to the FTC directly about what is the picture of what comes next? And we found that information was not forthcoming by either side. There was a lot of ambiguity. There was a lot of vagueness, a lot of uncertainty on how creators could self-designate to avoid violations of the law.

Liron Segev:	Is that strange when it's something that large of a magnitude and has such an impact on so many people for them to be that vague, is that unusual?

Jonathan Katz:	So that's an interesting question. How unusual is it? I would say that one of the things that's really novel about the FTC, and I suppose there are a number of regulatory agencies that experience this, which is they create a piece of regulation. And then they start to enforce it. And when enforcement actions are performed by a regulatory agency like the FTC, the shape of the law and the clarity of the law often comes out in legal cases.

A judge writes an opinion at the end of a trial stating, "This interpretation is correct. This interpretation of the law is incorrect." What's particularly unusual and difficult about COPPA is that there has been very little judicial opinion on the subject that lawyers can use as references to interpret their child-directed 10-factor test.

And so it's all incredibly vague because the FTC wants to have the room to have as much flexibility to take enforcement actions as they want, and there isn't a judge who has had a case brought in front of him who can check that vagueness by forcing them or obliging them to create much more clearly defined criteria.

And the reason that there haven't been court cases like that is because it seems like everybody settles with the FTC. And so if there's a settlement, it never gets in front of a judge and therefore no opinions are written, and therefore we don't have insight as to how the law works.

Liron Segev:	Yeah, because they said in their 20-year history, they've had just over 30 cases have actually resulted directly with fines from COPPA or the FTC.

Jonathan Katz:	Exactly. And so there's just ... So six years ago, they amended this law in 2013 making huge changes to it, and it has taken until now for these changes to even apply to YouTube content creators. And so nobody's really poked or explored how the definitions of kid directed, not kid directed, mixed audience, how any of this stuff is applied. It's not like we have a big case history where we can look and see, "Well, it applied here in this case and not here in that case," if that all makes sense.

Liron Segev:	Yes, it does. But it does hit one word which was mixed audiences, and I think we just need to understand that a little bit because content on YouTube is made up of a variety of every niche, every industry, every vertical that you could think of. And a lot of them have, especially things like K-pop channels and WWE channels, gaming channels, they have an audience that's definitely under 13, but they have an adult audience as well. So what is this mixed audience that we keep hearing about because YouTube's only giving us two choices. Are you for kids, or is this video not for kids?

Jonathan Katz:	And god knows that a lot of creators have been making videos talking about this subject, and it's been interesting watching all of the speculation that's out there. So COPPA has a series of factors that it uses to determine whether you are kid directed or not.

Each of those factors constitutes a certain amount of risk. And as YouTube will tell you over and over again, you need a lawyer to review that criteria, review your content, and then provide you essentially with a risk assessment, what elements of your channel, what elements of your audience put you at risk for a COPPA violation? And that's what I basically spent the last three months doing is performing these COPPA channel review assessments.

And so frequently my clients have come back to me after I provide them with this risk assessment, especially in the past week, and they say, "Wait a second. Wait a second. You've been telling me whether I'm kid directed or not kid directed, but what's all this I hear about a mixed audience?" And so the mixed audience exception is designed for people who have an audience that is not primarily kid directed but they are aware that there is ... because there's the reality of what was your intent in producing your content and also the incidental audience that you attract to your content. And then there's general audience content that appeals to a broad range of people including kids.

And so you got to remember the core goal of COPPA. The core goal of it is that they want that if a kid is online, and they're interacting with a piece of content, that their personal information isn't getting sucked up into some advertising network or some website. They offer essentially three ways to do that or two ways to do that, I should really say.

One is that you have a fully COPPA-compliant ecosystem that any time a kid is interacting with it, no data is being collected at all. And then they have potentially a mixed audience system which could be created which basically is just constantly checking in with the user to make sure that only people over the age of 13 are consuming the content. And there's all kinds of restrictions and regulations around that.

To say, "YouTube should just give us the mixed audience option." Well, I'm sure that there are a lot of technical requirements that they would have to meet in order to provide that. I don't know what they are. I am not an engineer, and I don't know the technical elements that would be required to, for example, verify that a parent is selecting the age option and not a child who is just saying they're 21 years old. There's plenty of that.

And so I don't know what the burden would be for YouTube to implement a mixed audience exception that would allow creators to monetize the part of your audience that is over 13 and not monetize the part of their audience that is under 13.

Liron Segev:	And I think a lot of it is the fear that we're kind of relying on YouTube's systems and their learning algorithm, which admittedly is getting ridiculously good over the years, but they still flagging things incorrectly. Right now before even COPPA and the FTC and all of this even bubbled up, you're demonetizing videos that shouldn't have been, taking people off the platform that shouldn't have been, and then on the flip side, doing absolutely the right thing by identifying content that should not exist on YouTube.

Do you think that COPPA and the FTC have the ability to really monitor a hundred million video creators, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, or is it going to boil down to YouTube offering some sort of system access, and they will flag content?

Jonathan Katz:	So I think this is as good a time as ever to remind everybody that nothing I'm saying should constitute legal advice. However, we can all do a fair amount of speculation and look at the resources that each body has available to it in order to assess what the future on the platform will look like. So YouTube's AI for whatever problems it has had, especially around demonetization, there are certain things it is really, really good at.

And I would say the number one thing is, it is incredible at detecting pornography. It is unbelievably good. YouTube's AI technology for spotting and removing porn off the platform is fantastic. I've never run into porn on the platform, and you think about the huge volume of people who are using it and the huge number of trolls that are on the platform who I'm sure think it's hilarious to slip porn into the middle of a video that they've re-uploaded. And yet, I never see it. And I would have to assume that that is in large part thanks to YouTube's very sophisticated AI that is able to detect that kind of thing the moment that it's uploaded.

And if we know that about YouTube, if we know that they have that level of competency, then I have to believe that there's a lot of content that their AI can spot and say, "This content is high risk for being targeted at kids." And it will have lots of false positives. It will also have lots of false negatives. But the capacity for YouTube to find kids' content being uploaded to the platform and not being designated correctly is, I'm confident, very impressive. And while I certainly see a lot of false positives and false negatives in my clients' channels right now, I am also confident that over time, this system will improve and improve and improve and improve and get to be very sophisticated.

Because identifying kids' content is a lot easier than identifying what might be brand safe because the definition of brand-safe or friendly for advertisers is just so ambiguous and confusing. Whereas a kid can spot kid content when they're watching it, and so presumably this AI can do a fairly good job too.

Now you compare that resource that YouTube has against the resources that the FTC has. The FTC doesn't have a ton of resources to put towards this. And in their settlement agreement with YouTube, it was not a requirement that they have an automated system that serves as an enforcement arm for the FTC. It's voluntarily chosen to do that, and what they do with that ultimately is up to them.

However, I imagine that given they just paid the FTC $170 million, they're very motivated right now to cooperate with the FTC and be a useful source of information gathering for the FTC and provide information that the FTC is looking for in order to pursue actions against content creators who are abusing the self-designated option on the platform.

Liron Segev:	Why didn't YouTube simply say to the rest of the world say, "Look, our terms are you've got to 13 and over to use our system." Why are you making this our problem? People know that they've accepted the terms and conditions. That's it. End of story. Why are you making us jump through all these hoops? You used pornography earlier as an example, you go the site, and it says, "Are you over 18? Are you over 21?" You click the yes button, and that's it.

Jonathan Katz:	It's a very good question, and I think that it's one that is particularly difficult for everybody to sort of navigate because on some fundamental level, I think there is a principle that companies should be able to trust their users, and in the case of kids, the parents of their users to monitor what their kids are doing online and make sure that they're only visiting websites that are age-appropriate. And that if they are visiting a site that isn't COPPA compliant and they know that and they know that the site says it's only intended for people over the age of 13+, that they are accepting the responsibility as parents to whatever data collection that happens incidentally on that site.

By the way, that data collection is typically of the account holder rather than just the person who happens to be passed the device to consume for a moment. So it's not like these websites are collecting social security numbers from children. Personal information is a very ambiguous sort of term. I think there's a lot of parents out there that accept the fact that YouTube is tracking the watch history of whoever is using the account at that particular time. I don't think that's even secret information given that you can go back and look at your own watch history. And so those parents are like, "You know what? It's okay for YouTube to do what YouTube's going to do."

Now the FTC has not taken that approach. They have not laid the responsibility at the feet of parents in saying that, "Okay, parents, you've clicked through that the site is 13+, and you've passed the iPad to your kids, therefore you are consenting to this information being collected by YouTube, and therefore YouTube has done nothing wrong."

I think there's a bit of an overreach by the FTC by saying that parents can't choose to allow their kids to watch YouTube despite the information that's being collected. And I think that a big part of that is that the law doesn't make it convenient or easy for parents to provide that consent. And I think that that's where clearly COPPA needs to be updated and the degree to which parents actually care about persistent identifiers and cookies on their machine being used to provide their kids with the entertainment they want that all of my clients produce for them, how much do parents really care about that? How sensitive are they to various kinds of data collection that are used for the purpose of making a better user experience on the platform?

Liron Segev:	It seems to be, for me as a parent, and I'm okay for my child to watch this movie on the big screen, I am making that as a parent. That's my responsibility. Why is that different when it comes to a YouTube platform, where I'm signing in with my account, and I understand?

Jonathan Katz:	Exactly, and I think that what's unfortunate about the FTC taking six years for the effect of this change that was made to COPPA only felt like in this moment is that in those six years, a healthy and wonderful and diverse content creator ecosystem of all these creators that I know and love who produce amazing and valuable content for their very diverse audiences. They're all in peril. Their platforms are going to be taken away from them because they will be demonetized.

I represent all kinds of diverse minority creators, mixed-race families, families with adopted children, families who create content in all varieties of different languages for all different kinds of audiences, for audiences who have disabilities. And it's all for kids, and that content only exists because of the democratization of content creators being able to build audiences on YouTube and monetize them through personalized ads.

What's unfortunate is, when you remove the personalized ads, all of those content creators suddenly lose their ability to produce this content. And then all you have left are billion-dollar corporations who are going to continue to flood the internet with their mainstream, middle of the road, Los Angeles and New York content and instead of the diverse array of content that clients enjoy, clients' audiences enjoy.

A perfect example of this is faith-based content. And regardless of what faith you are a part of and even if you're not part of any particular faith, you'll discover that on mainstream television, you don't see much conversation about faith or much content being produced about families of faith. And that's because of various economic and cultural decisions being made in those businesses.

But there are so many people of faith all around the world who would love to watch content that reflects their families. And if we allow these massive corporations to be the gatekeepers of what kind of content gets to be displayed and they say, "No, we're not going to have any queer families," or, "We're not going to have mixed-race families," or, "We're not going to have families with adopted kids in our content." Then they get to decide that for everyone else what content is available.

And what YouTube has done, to its credit, is allowed all kinds of families to create content about themselves and about their experiences so that those underserved audiences can see the content that is meaningful to them. And in making their actions, the FTC is annihilating all of those communities in one fell swoop, in large part because I fundamentally believe they don't understand the business that they are regulating.

Liron Segev:	And is this what you guys, the people who have access to both the legal and the YouTube community, is that what you're fighting for?

Jonathan Katz:	Absolutely. So if you go back and you read the article that I published in TubeFilter about the coming COPPA-colypse, we end the article with very clear calls to action. We say, number one, we said to everybody, "Go comment on the FTC. Let them know that you love family and kids content on YouTube, that you love content that is child attractive on YouTube, whether it's Minecraft or slime videos or any sort of toy collectibles, etc. because all of that content is at risk and the FTC needs to understand that whether you are a family who enjoys sharing that content with your kids and want it to be able to continue or whether you are an 18 year old who doesn't want the borderline content that you enjoy to be destroyed as a casualty of this regulation.

So the FTC comments really effective, and we're asking for them to clarify their rules and to offer creators a moratorium or an opportunity to adapt their content in order to survive in whatever the new ecosystem is going to be.

Liron Segev:	A collective voice is what we need here. We need lots of people from diverse walks of life around the world really jumping in on this because it does affect absolutely everyone and things going forward.

And we're talking about YouTube specific, but I'm assuming there's going to be ramifications of things off YouTube. Maybe Instagram, maybe TikTok, maybe LinkedIn and Twitch. It's got to have ramifications. We have to speak up and educate the lawmakers about how things are done today. And things will constantly change, but the law doesn't keep up to the way that we are kind of changing.

Okay, a quickfire round, fact or fiction. Because I don't live in the US and all of this is US done, therefore none of this affects me. Fact or fiction?

Jonathan Katz:	So again, none of this constitutes legal advice. YouTube is based in the US and it is governed under US law. And YouTube is going to be taking action to protect its platform from further violations or further regulations, and so even if you're not based in the US, you are held to YouTube standards.

So I think if you are based outside of the US and you run a nursery rhyme channel, the FTC might have a hard time prosecuting you, but ultimately YouTube will not allow you to put YouTube at risk for violating COPPA. So it's a blurry question. Jurisdiction is a thing, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't apply to you at all.

Liron Segev:	Okay, so definitely keep abreast of the situation. A ramification, it might not be the FTC themselves, but there will be ramifications. Right now, we've been seeing this a lot. If I add a disclaimer to my video description that this is not for kids under 13, surely that simply protects me from COPPA.

Jonathan Katz:	I mean, there's a big logic gap in that one. If you're making nursery rhyme videos, and the kids can't read, how could they read your disclaimer? Ultimately, YouTube has been very clear that their compliance is limited to you notifying them that you need to comply because you're creating kid-directed content. I saw, what's his name, Stuckman posted a disclaimer on his Frozen 2 review video. And I mean, that's kind of comical because a film review is not really, wouldn't really be kid directed. I think that's a pretty low risk in terms of an assessment. And I think he meant it tongue in cheek anyway.

I don't think that sort of a disclaimer would weigh in in any way as to whether or not you were kid directed and therefore whether or not you were appropriately self-designating on the platform.

Jonathan Katz:	The only thing that you can really do is get a risk assessment from an attorney, and then make informed choices about how you label your content after you have a full risk assessment.

Liron Segev:	Okay, so I just wanted to touch on that very quickly. Since a lot of the content creators are maybe not in a position to go out and seek legal advice, small channels don't have the money to do it, do you think maybe YouTube is being a bit tone-deaf by saying, "Seek your own advice?

Jonathan Katz:	Tone-deaf? YouTube? Never, never. Their PR is always nuanced and sensitive and thoughtful in every way, shape, or form. While this law has existed for six years, you could also think of it as if it was passed today, as if Congress just passed a new law and that law is creating a regulatory burden on content creators that didn't exist before. And if you think of it from that context, YouTube doesn't have a lot of options in terms of informing its audience as to what kind of risk that their content is at.

And one of the things that's really tricky about it, and sometimes I emphasize with YouTube in this and sometimes I'm infuriated with them. And I think one of the things that I keep getting stuck on is I don't expect that YouTube could provide a meaningful assessment without creating more liability for themselves.

And the entire reason they've set up these systems is to eliminate the responsibility that could imperil the platform. It is tone-deaf, but it speaks to the poverty of imagination that YouTube is exercising in responding to this settle. That this is a solution that seems practical at scale for them without avoiding massive problems for a significant portion of the creator base.

Liron Segev:	It just feels very almost passing the buck situation. And $42,530, it's the magic number. Everybody seems to be focused on it. Are we really going to see that as soon as somebody uploads the wrong video, expect a letter in the mail saying, "This is your fine?"

Jonathan Katz:	So I do not believe that the FTC will rush to start issuing fines, especially given the incredible amount of pushback in the FTC comments that we've been encouraging creators to raise their voices. That they've received communicating that that is not the will of the people for the FTC to start issuing gigantic fines that bankrupt creators.

They've made statements, unofficial statements, saying, "Hey, we're not here to bankrupt creators." Although, unfortunately, Commissioner Wilson did make his, "We're going to shoot them like fish in a barrel," sort of comment. Which I think was incredibly destructive and personally, I would like him to apologize to the creator community for that, especially if now they're saying that that is not what they intend.

On the other hand, I don't think the creators are immune to fines. And I've seen some people making comments saying, "Oh, the FTC isn't going after individual creators." Because I think one of the things that people forget is that the FTC's commissioners can change with one administration to another. We have a revolving door in this country. potentially every four years, we have a new president of the US. And that new person could be ... And the turnover of who make up the commission could change at any time, and the choice of what they choose to enforce and what they don't choose to enforce could be very ambiguous and it could change.

And so to suggest that given the huge number of US families that consume YouTube on a regular basis, I think that it's very reasonable to believe that the content creators could grow to be sufficiently famous or could be making content that is sufficiently egregious that the FTC decides to take action.

It's all at the mercy of public opinion and political will, which is why it's so important for the audiences and the creators to communicate to the FTC, to communicate to their congress people, to communicate to their senators that this is a massive overreach by the FTC and that it is damaging an entertainment ecosystem that's very delicate and that we value and want to preserve. And they need to take that into account when they think about how they're going to enforce in the future. I'm sorry that's not much of a quickfire answer, but I hope it covered our basis.

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, if you could have a message out there to the content creator community, something that everybody will see, be it a tweet or Instagram post, a billboard in Times Square. What would that message be?

Jonathan Katz:	It would be two things. It would be to communicate to the FTC, whether through a comment on their feedback page, which we'll have linked in the comments or in the description, or by signing Jeremy Johnson's Change.org petition. Make your voice heard. That would be number one. And number two would be get a COPPA compliance channel review or channel assessment. Make sure it's from an attorney who is really well-informed about the YouTube ecosystem and about COPPA, has read the settlement, the commissioner's statements, the case history about all of this.

It is, I think really important, and I'll tell you why. I think the reason that it's really important to do is that over the past six years as kids content became more and more popular on YouTube and more and more kids were watching YouTube, what has happened over time is that creators have acquired kid audiences without even being aware of it. They don't see that five or 10 year olds are watching their content, but they notice that when their thumbnails include more bright colors, they get more click through.

When they notice that they use simpler language or when they speak in a higher-pitched voice or when they have more extreme reactions to things, all kinds of behaviors that make their videos perform better. But maybe the reason they're performing better is because they're attracting more kids to them and therefore more kids are engaged and watching for long periods of time. And therefore their videos are performing better.

And I think that this is a real blind spot for a lot of creators, particularly in the gaming community who think to themselves, "I'm playing Fortnite. It's a teen game. So I'm going to have a teen audience," without realizing that such a massive part of that user base is eight years old. And so all of a sudden, their videos are performing better and better and better as the eight-year-old audience is growing and finding their content.

And so we don't know exactly what is going to happen in January, but if you're labeling your content "not for kids" and all of a sudden, you're losing all of that audience, you may not lose monetization, but you might discover that your audience disappeared overnight. And that's why I think having these assessments by people who are super familiar with this ecosystem and how the algorithm functions is so important because you want to know now rather than be surprised later on how things are going to shake out algorithmically in the new year.

Liron Segev:	Right. And to that point, if I mark my video as "not for kids" and then I find that I lose my audience because it was kids, have I got a way to then quickly go, "Oopsie!," re-market it for kids and try to get some of that audience back? Or is it, once it's done, it's done?

Jonathan Katz:	So there's a ton of mystery. And I know that everybody wants to speculate about this stuff as to how the algorithm is going to function in the new year. My understanding is that you do have the option to turn on and off whether or not your content is kid directed. And you can make those changes.

And if we assume that users who are watching made-for-kids content will only have made-for-kids content recommended to them, like the experience in the YouTube Kids app is, then if you have a large kids audience, and you would rather keep the audience and lose the monetization, come the new year, if your content is market "not made for kids" and you flip it over to being made for kids, you may discover that the views start returning to you because through rate and watch time with the audience that is now seeing your content will pass through.

I think one of the questions that's really interesting is, once this new ecosystem is established, how is borderline content that is also marked as "made for kids" going to perform? So if I have a channel that is made for kids but is about martial arts or if I have a video that's marked as "made for kids" but it's about girls' gymnastics, which has a lot of that content people have said has gotten suppressed this year.

Maybe if I mark it as "made for kids" that will actually do more to suppress the viewership than if I had left it as "not made for kids." So there's so much subtlety and nuance and all of this. And honestly, I'm just an attorney who's I think very familiar with the ecosystem. But the algorithm is still a black box. Nobody really knows.

On this week's episode of TubeTalk, we cut through the confusion to bring you the info around COPPA and FTC that every YouTuber needs to know.

COPPA and FTC: What Every YouTuber Needs to Know: TubeTalk 191 with Jonathan Katz

If you've got a YouTube kids' channel, you must be freaking out right about now. Yes, YouTube has released a new update to their policies, and how they will be handling kids' content starting in January 2020. But what's actually going on? How will this affect your videos? How will this affect your revenue? How will this affect basically everything you do on YouTube? If you've got a kids' channel and you want answers, this is the episode of TubeTalk for you.

Today we're dealing with something new, something bigger than the ad apocalypse where people lost some revenue from their ads. Today we're talking about kids' channels, and the complete change to the way YouTube handles that kind of content. YouTube was recently fined by the FTC $170 million for collecting data on young viewers and then targeting them with ads, something that the Child Online Privacy Protection Act clearly doesn't allow you to do. In turn, 

YouTube has released new policies, new documentation, and new processes of how they're going to handle kids' content.

However, the new direction YouTube is taking is still a little vague so we still need real answers. We are fortunate enough to be able to speak to our good friend Shaun McKnight, who has spoken to the people at YouTube to understand what the changes are, and how they will affect kids' content channel. Now to be clear, Shaun does not speak on behalf of YouTube. This is purely his interpretation of the conversation and what he has been told, and the questions that he has asked, and he's just sharing the conversation with us. Shaun does not represent YouTube, just want to be clear.

Sean, and his wife Mindy are the team behind the highly-successful 

 YouTube channel one year later. Their family of channels, which include 

, now has over 15.5 Million subscribers and more than 2.6 Billion video views.

New YouTube Policy on Children's Content: Full Transcript

On this special episode of TubeTalk, we discuss the bombshell changes YouTube are making to the way kid's content is promoted on the platform and the implication that has for creators. It's a must-listen to!

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