Youtube has some new policies. The forum moderators have issues with the changes. Until this gets resolved, it may be that we don't have access.

Well that stinks .. I can cross post on my account if that helps.

Hey Cal,

You can watch the Tongs videos here until the issues are resolved:

Ed Clarke Knives YouTube

I'm not sure about Matthew's... hopefully he'll chime in here <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//wink.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Thanks for the information. I hope they get things worked out.

The ABS YouTube Channel IS Online and all videos can be viewed. The ABS Channel was only offline for 48 hours.

I started the ABS YouTube Channel over 5 years ago. I went through a long process with YouTube to obtain the Channel as a non profit organization. After I set up the Channel, I followed all of YouTube's rules for years to the letter. The penalty for violating any rule was that they would run ads on your channel and your videos. Well, I followed all of their rules and over the years NO ads have ever run on any of our ABS videos.

Google purchased YouTube a while ago and now the rules are changing. They sent me an agreement that they wanted me to agree to which was full of double talk and appeared to allow ads to be run on all of our ABS Channel videos. They stated that the existing agreement we had was "outdated" and if we did not agree to it our videos would no longer be visible in the USA.

I did some research on the agreement and contacted YouTube about my objections. Today they provided an "Addendum" to our exisiting agreement which I reviewed and signed. It does not provide for ads to be run during our videos and our ABS YouTube Channel videos are again Online- without any ads.

As of today, our educational videos on the ABS YouTube Channel have had more than 1,210,454 views in 217 countries. We have about 1,200 members in the ABS but we have 7,712 subscribers to the ABS YouTube Channel. YouTube provides detailed analytics and statistics on our videos which I constantly monitor so I can see viewer trends and provide content that will continue to capture their interest in bladesmithing and fulfill our Mission of Education.

Dan-

I'm guessing I'm not alone in thinking "wow, that sounds like a ton of work" when I read your above response. Thanks for all the work you put into the forum and the YouTube channel (and all the other things I don't know about). I'm probably like many, not realizing all of the effort behind the scenes. Thanks for doing it so well.

Jeremy

Thank you Dan!

Brion

You betcha! Dan has worked tirelessly to keep the ABS forum running smoothly. He and Sally are the reasons it exists.

Thanks Dan!

Thank you Jeremy, Brion, Lin, and Robert! I am determined to keep our ABS videos Ad Free.

You can see the plan that Google has for most of YouTube from the email that I just received about the "new" YouTube Red. The YouTube Red plan calls for viewers to pay $9.99 a month or $12.99 a month for IOS users to have ad free videos.

You know it's kind of funny, but I must have watched a hundred or so videos on You Tube and I never even noticed that there were any ads.....Maybe that's why my wife calls me "Mr. Oblivious".

Anyway, thanks Dan.