As many youtubers are now aware, youtube has removed its group feature from the website. Prior to the removal of its groups, youtube made the following statement which I will paraphrase:
"We will build new group features more thoroughly integrated into YouTube and decided to detach the existing YouTube Groups to avoid confusion among the community and make way for the new product, whatever that product may be. We believe that all group members are important members of the YouTube community and hope that all existing members will beta test these new features when they are released. Groups are going away December 1, 2010. Thanks for supporting this feature and we hope to replace it soon."
In my own words, I've been a fan of youtube groups since I created my youtube gaming channel ("terrencej18") a few years ago. Groups are a way for average youtube users to get noticed by other youtubers while making new friends and gaining insight on their videos. It's hard to get noticed when there's millions of youtube users and everyone is making videos of various types. Unless you're "Fred", "Smosh", "Ray William Johnson", "Schmoyoho", or a few other big-time youtube partners/music artists, the possibility that someone will find your video is second to none. In other words, the chance of "becoming famous" as people put it on youtube is very small, especially if no one is creating content to stand out.
For example, everyday, I receive requests and messages from different youtube users about "checking out my music track" or something of that nature. For the most part, they all have similar beats and they all talk about the same thing; either "women", "money", "vehicles", or "guns". Eventually, people will stop looking at these music pages as they are becoming more repetitive, just like the actual music industry were 90% of the music artists are using "auto-tune" to enhance their voices in their songs. Getting back on subject though, youtube groups were away for the average youtube user to communicate with individuals that share a common interest without having to search videos and track that person's channel just to add him/her as a friend. For instance, I am a hardcore gaming fan, so I would join gaming groups and communicate with fellow gamers that share a common interest while making new friends on youtube, but that can't happen anymore.
The primary reason I think that the groups were shutdown was due to the "sub4sub" groups and "porn" groups that were being created on youtube. I've done sub4sub before on my channel and I still do it because I know that there was no way in hell my channel views, video upload views, or subscribers would have not substantially increased within three months without joining a few sub4sub groups. Some youtubers talk down "sub4sub" groups but there are several youtube partners that would have never became youtube partners (individual or full-account) without joining sub4sub groups including myself. I'm not a full account youtube partner yet, but I have gotten several videos under the individual partner program [ad-revenue sharing] because of sub4sub groups and posting topics inviting people to watch my videos, while telling them to rate, comment, and subscribe.
The second reason I think the groups were shutdown was because of the increase in "porn" groups, in which some of the porn groups had thumbnails of explicit porn images, however, the porn videos posted to these groups were private and could only be seen by whoever the owner of the private porn video sends that video to if they request to watch it from the group.
As a fellow youtuber, I am quite disappointed that youtube or "google" has shutdown the group feature of youtube. It would be nice if they would give an approximate date of these "alleged" new group features that's coming soon to youtube. It wouldn't surprise me if we don't even see any "Group" features until the year 2015, but then again, shutting down groups is not going to stop "sub4sub", not by a long shot because the youtubers that sub4sub can create videos and start the sub4sub legacy over again, which I am 100% for.
Thank you for reading my post.
