Are you ready, because this is gon na be good? Now, a few days ago i went and released a video where i talked about some shady practices that some other youtubers engage in when they talk about their portfolio updates. Just to stress the point. This is not all youtubers, just some people that i particularly noticed do some things that i personally don't agree with. They either exaggerate in some cases, kind of mislead and other cases just completely lie about the returns that they're, seeing with their portfolios and as a result, they potentially go and put a lot of people in harm's way because they go and believe the numbers and trust The people more because of the numbers that they're being told and that might affect real people's lives.

Now i did not make that particular video about any specific person. I didn't name anyone i didn't even allude or hint at anyone. It was generally born out of a few months off real, genuine frustration by watching several of these videos over time, and actually some of these are probably very, very tiny channels that nobody will have heard of, but i wanted to go and put it out there so Anyway, this video became really popular. It collected 6 000 views already in the first three days or so, and that is a lot for my channel.

My channel is really small, so that is a really big number. But after about a day uh from when i posted that video, i suddenly began getting a lot of angry messages from all kinds of popular youtubers in the finance space in the uk finance space, who are very upset with me, posting that video. Because you see a few weeks ago, as my channel was growing, i was invited to a special group for uk youtubers and bloggers um, because people noticed that my channel was big enough and they wanted me in that group. Just so we're clear.

I am not going to be naming anybody in this video, i'm not going to be even hinting at anyone in this video. I'm not going to be making anyone guess, and i don't want people to go and write in the comments below, because i don't want it to be that kind of video, even though i'm gon na go and tell you everything exactly as it happened so anyway. A whole load of people within this group, some of them very big, with very well known, youtube channels on uk personal finance began. Sending me these angry messages and some of them began sending angry messages to other people and it kind of got all very ugly very quickly, because you see highlighting the doing stuff that is somewhere between a moral and illegal.

You know misleading people about the possible returns on investments in videos, apparently highlighting this as being bad is itself bad. The most interesting thing about this is that the people who seem to get particularly upset and the people who were contacting me in some cases were actually some of the people who are maybe guilty of some of the things that i mentioned in that video. Hence why you know this whole thing started. One in particular was upset because, a few days before i posted that video that channel actually put up a portfolio update that included, something that i mentioned in that video that i posted funnily enough.

I didn't actually see that update of that video until i was made aware of it a couple of days after i posted mine, but but that's kind of funny in itself anyway. So the situation is this: this does not apply to all finance youtubers. Please don't take my word as meaning nad. Please don't there's a lot of good guys out there far from it, but there are a group of finance youtubers in the uk that have a bit of a clique.

This group have rules, you're, not allowed to say anything negative about other members of the group or even imply mention anything that they have done, that you don't agree with. This is like a literal rule within their community. They also have a rule which says you have to delete any comments that say anything negative at all about any other member of the group on your youtube channel. You know in case anyone sort of gets any negative publicity for whatever reason i'm not kidding you.

These are literally officially printed rules for this cabal, so anyway, here's the thing i haven't ever ever deleted a single comment from my youtube channel other than actual spam, no matter how critical, no matter, how badly they talked about me or what they thought of my content. I haven't ever deleted one i even go to the spam folder. So when you create content, some automatically gets put into spam and i go and fish out any comments from there that are not actual spam, even if they're really rude and really bad um some comments. I think youtube automatically gets rid of not even putting them to spam.

Unfortunately, there's nothing. I can do about that now, well, that what i just said is not strictly true. I actually once accidentally deleted a comment when i tried to reply to it, but i replied to that comment anyway. After deleting it so anyway, i got a lot of people attacking me because, in their words, not supporting the community is what i was doing.

You see pointing out stuff that is plain wrong, is not the right way to go about it. What i should have done, instead is send them a quiet message. You know to the people who maybe at some point when i come across, something that they're doing. That is really bad.

I should just go and inform them, so they can go and improve in the future and fix this, because you know it's bad to let the actual people viewing those videos know that it's happening, because then they might begin noticing that this is happening. So after i got given this advice that i should go and raise any issues about things that i dislike or things that i'm not comfortable with internally within the group, the appropriate moment came really really quickly because the conversation very quickly turned to talking about paid for, Or sponsored content, because here's the thing that will completely blow your mind - or maybe it won't a lot of these people in this group - actually get paid money by big companies that they talk about, so that they can go and talk about them. They get paid for specific review, videos or general monthly retainers so that they can keep talking about the brand and telling their viewers. How really great and amazing that brand is so if you go and watch a finance youtuber talking about some really weird app that nobody has ever heard of that you haven't heard of, and that seems to have only just launched, but they spent a whole video talking About how amazing it is and how they magically try - and you know a few different youtubers begin doing this exact thing at exactly the same time.

You might be a little bit suspicious as to what the intent and the motivation behind making this kind of video is because it may well be that they're being paid to make this content. But the problem is that the people who get particularly upset with this is that they don't actually tell you that they're being paid they don't market is sponsored. They make it absolutely impossible to know that they've been paid to create this kind of content, because you see the rules according to these people are not clear now, each time you upload, a video youtube has a tick box each time i upload a video, at least Maybe they have a different screen, i don't know, but each time i upload a video, there is a tick box that says you have to choose to tick ticket or not. Take it, and it says i'm going to read it.

My video contains paid promotion like a product placement sponsorship or endorsement in case anyone's not quite sure what that means, because you know it's a great area, it's really unclear. They do provide a lot of clarification. For example, they say if your content has a paid product placement endorsement or other commercial relationship. You need to tell youtube so that we can facilitate disclosure to users.

I kind of think that it's somewhat clear and somewhat obvious, but maybe some people disagree, because you know it's difficult to understand. It's like words in the sentence anyway. Not only that, but there is also an uk regulatory body called the cma and they have a page on the uk government website which, within that particular group, the person who actually started the whole conversation actually referenced. And then the other people seem to read it and not understand it, because you see that really simple summary of what the law in the uk is has there's a lot of stuff in there i'm not going to read the whole page, you can go and do It for yourself, if you really want to, but here are the subtitles at the top of the page subtitle number one says what you need to do.

Subtitle number two says say: when you've been paid given or loaned things subtitle number three says be clear about your relationship with a brand or business and subtitle number four says: don't be misleading. So, despite this and the wording below all of these, that explains and stipulates exactly what this means and what it means to be paid for content and what you should do about it. The view from some corners of the finance youtube community is that this is a grey area that is subject to individual interpretation, because why should your viewers know that you get paid to make a video? You know? Sometimes they make an argument. The company that pays them does not have full creative ownership of the content of the video and therefore it is not the same thing.

These rules do not apply, except that's completely, not true, and these rules absolutely do still apply. I recently did three paid videos where etoro sponsored them. Maybe you saw one of them, not that many people watched all of them but itara, don't even know the final titles of these videos, what they are going to be when i publish them and they certainly don't know anything about the content whatsoever. They don't see the script, they roughly know the topic because i chose to let them know not because they even asked they never saw anything about the video before i hit publish, but guess what i marked them as sponsored.

I told people that these videos were sponsored right at the beginning of the video and i even had a massive green box that said sponsored by etoro, because you know it's the right thing to do well, apparently, even this is bad, as some people told me, because Uh, what i'm doing with disclosing this so prominently is actually casting shadow on some other channels that maybe aren't doing it, and maybe their viewers get confused, and maybe it casts some kind of doubt as to what the motivation is behind making those videos about. Some of the companies that those people talk about as well, amazingly out of the hundreds of people in this facebook group, i had very very few people actually agree with me. A few people made some neutral remarks, but i only really recalled two people who supported very strongly following the law and doing the right thing by your viewers. One of those is someone that you should really go and subscribe to.

This is a guy called damien from david talks, money channel. He came out really strongly supporting what i was saying, and i was really amazed that he was one of a very tiny number of people who seemed to think that disclosing things being transparent, honest and upfront and following the law is, you know the right thing to Do so that's about it? I quit the group yesterday because i have absolutely no interest in associating with people who seem to openly advocate and condone doing stuff. That is immoral or maybe subject to interpretation. I guess illegal and i noticed that damian did exactly the same thing at the same time as well.

Hopefully you guys will be more aware. Next time you go and watch one of these youtube videos. Maybe you'll go and listen to what people are saying and if somebody is waxing lyrical about some particular brand over and over again with never really pointing out anything particularly negative about them, maybe they're on a retainer, maybe they're, being paid in some way. For this maybe they're not telling you that they're being paid for this, maybe not everything is quite as genuine as it seems.

Well, that's all i've got for now. Thank you very much for watching. I really really appreciate it. If you like, this video, don't forget to smash the like button feature algorithm.

Thank you. So much and i'll see you guys later, you.