This arrangement is frankly awful from so many different perspectives. The pair then created videos showing themselves gambling on the site and making sizeable winnings, while strongly suggesting that this was just a site they'd come across, recommending it to their viewers and making no mention of their ownership of the company. Two YouTubers who are popular with the CounterStrike: Global Offensive community, Florida-based Trevor Martin ("TmarTn") and Britain-based Tom Cassel ("Syndicate") started a website allowing users to gamble using skins obtained through CS:GO's random lotteries - skins which have an actual cash value, often fairly sizeable, when sold through the Steam marketplace. You've probably read something about this already, but just in case, here's the potted summary. It's thus with a rather weary and cynical eye that I view the new depths of utter corruption, dishonesty and genuine, honest-to-god, I-hope-these-bastards-end-up-in-jail illegal activity which a pair of very popular YouTubers have sunk to this week. "YouTube has increasingly acted like a publisher and curator, not just a technology platform, and that means it has the capacity to police the underhanded, corrupt behaviour of some of its creators" Pointing out the dishonesty of the broadcaster becomes interpreted as an attack on the very fanbase that he's been screwing over all this time. Revealing that someone has actually been taking cash and favours from corporations in return for lying to their viewers should puncture that, but the illusion of an actual relationship, even a friendship, with this cheerful chap beaming into his webcam is a powerful one for the vast majority of viewers. There's something teflon, in games media as much as in politics or any other public sphere, about the "hey guys, I'm just one of you, ordinary Joe everyman!" schtick. Not one YouTuber, that I know of, has seen their following or their career sink significantly after such revelations.
When this behaviour is exposed, the responsible YouTubers have generally done the absolute bare minimum to avoid actual prosecution - a note about the commercial relationship buried at the bottom of the video description is the usual "fix". Some have had undeclared commercial arrangements with developers. Some have taken massive kickbacks or enjoyed huge perks from game marketing firms, again without declaring them to their viewers. YouTubers - not all of them, but many, including some of the most popular - have taken undeclared payments to promote games on their channels. In the past couple of years the chummy, everyman image of many YouTubers has been challenged, albeit not notably blemished, by successive revelations of dishonesty and corruption.
It's probably not a surprise to anyone that YouTube is a wild frontier for media - and not so much in the exciting, frontiersman sense, as in the lawless, anything-goes, tread-carefully sense.
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