Spoonflower Shenanigans

I no longer have fabric and wallpaper for sale on my Spoonflower account because they changed the rates so I wouldn't get paid very much at all and it isn't worth it.  Cutting out the artist is disrespectful to both the artist and the consumer because supporting an artist is probably a small but meaningful part of what motivates someone to buy products designed by artists in the first place.

Thank you to everybody who's bought my designs in the past, that's huge, I appreciate your support over the years and it means a lot to me!

Since yardage and merch haven't panned out, the only products I have left are coloring books on Amazon:

amazon.com/author/jpmorrow

And if you've bought any of those thank you as well!

And I've got plenty more ideas for artistic projects for the future if I have time...

Youtube 'Made For Kids'

November 14, 2019 edition.

YOU PROBABLY DO NOT WANT TO MAKE YOUR VIDEOS ‘MADE FOR KIDS’!!!

I got an email from youtube today saying they have to comply with a new law; COPPA Child’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

They are dividing all of their content between videos that are ‘made for kids’ and videos that are not.  They did not define what makes a video ‘made for kids’ but they will be happy to suspend your account if it doesn’t comply.  It doesn’t have anything to do with whether its porn or not.

You can either set it yourself, or their automated machines will do it for you, (viz tumblr), I don’t think you can change it once you set it (or if you do you might get your account suspended).

If you set your video as made for kids, they aren’t supposed to track people for personalized advertising.

On the other hand, if you do set it as ‘made for kids’ some features will no longer be available:

• Personal advertising
• Comments
• Channel branding watermark
• Donate button
• Cards or end screens
• Live chat or live chat donations
• Notification bell
• Playback in the Miniplayer
• Super Chat or Super Stickers
• Save to playlist
• Stories
• The Community tab in the Channel page
• Notification bell
• Channel Memberships

This list was not in their email and I only found it by following one of their links.

THEY APPARENTLY DIDN’T FIND IT IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO MENTION THAT COMMENTS ARE DISABLED IF YOU MAKE IT ‘MADE FOR KIDS’?

I don’t know what’s going to happen to youtube, when all this happens.  I think eventually the only movies that show up are going to be ones that are obscene or inappropriate.  If you have a regular channel and want to keep going with it you probably want to mark all your content as ‘not made for kids’.  For most of us it probably means an exodus to other video streaming services.