The Evolution of Reaction Content

As you may have known from my various streams, the theme within my articles and my youtube videos. I heavily dislike Reaction Content because it is essentially reuploading someone else’s video.

I often see the same justifications and arguments from people who I feel have geniunely never created anything or think that everything is generic.

It is disrespectful to upload someone’s elses hard work with your face in the corner with the same name as the original video and the same thumbnail with your face in the corner. You took none of the risk and costs but you want all the market share that came with the risk and costs.

I don’t care if it is an obscure youtube channel or a feature film.

In short, you’re a thief and I do not care if you’re an expert on the matter or you added anything. You can simply make your own video or ask permission.

The content industry has money, sponsorships and various other rewards attached to it.

What is changing with reaction content?

After that quick foreword, let’s discuss the new evolution in reaction content.

Recently, I’ve been coming across channels where they upload mostly an edited reaction with to a video or TV show. For the TV Show, they often overlay it with their logo (because the Youtube bots would pick it up for contentID). For the video, they don’t bother.

The newest layer is that they’ve put the full uncut reaction video onto Patreon or a similar subscription service platform. So not only are you collecting impressions and ad revenue on Youtube but collecting subscription fees on your Patreon as well?

Isn’t this what everyone wanted?

The issue with reaction content wasn’t that it was lazy content. The issue is that you’re garnering a reward from someone else’s content.

Simply put, without the content, your reaction and tangents would make no sense. The video is providing everything for you and you’re providing nothing.

The issue wasn’t the visibility of it. It was the existence of it because if you’ve watched the reaction, you can say that you’ve watched the original.

It doesn’t matter that you lock it behind your Patreon but advertise it on all of your socials.

You are still showing the entire video or TV Show except now you’re clipping a ticket on content that isn’t even yours.

Having a Netflix subscription means that you are only allow to view it personally and you are not provided the rights to use it commercially. You can read your terms of service if you don’t believe me. What you are doing is not just direspectful but copyright infringment as well.

Reactors are now playing a Dangerous Game

With Patreon involved, you are now involving another platform to potentially placating large production companies.

Just as Youtube had to create contentID before it becamse the next Napster, Patreon and other similar enterprises might have to do the same thing.

You see if people keep doing this strategy where they put full uncut reactions to videos and TV shows on Patreon.

The Production Companies are eventually going to go to Patreon and state that they’re allowing this to happen. This means that anybody creating content on Patreon will be impacted by this change.

If Patreon decides to close its doors because of this then every reactor’s greed has impacted many content creator’s ability to live and create content full time.

So what I see happening is that it will keep continuing and these sorts of reactors will go to the next subscription platform until there is none left.

Why? Because copyright is expensive to enforce against an individual both in financial terms and in social terms. However, it is much easier when enough of them do it to enforce it against the platform itself.

The evolution of reaction content could cause small subscription based sites to either shut down or be put under the weight of monitoring copyright infringement. And this is all because of a few creators who want free money for doing absolutely nothing.