When I first posted here a year ago I was met with a warm welcome and had a lot of great interaction with all of you. I hope my videos have brought you the info needed to make informed purchases. But I can no longer support a site that openly extorts me for money.

Earlier this month I posted a thread in the 50CAL section sharing my "Ultimate 50BMG Giveaway". Many of you know that most of the companies I work with on YouTube have agreed to giveaway a model of whatever I'm reviewing. So, we just did a simple giveaway of a AR50, 200rds of 50BMG, a Cerakote Job, 50BMG gong, and a rear bag. The winner was a 26 year old Marine Vet. This is on top of the 5 suppressors I have given away already and we have 6 more this month to giveaway. It's one way I give back to our community, besides the charity shoots I do that are open to the public.

I just received a PM from an admin saying I must pay them or change my screen name. This is in reference to the attention I brought to the 50 BMG giveaway so no forum members missed it.

I already have a paid membership to support this site and actually just paid for another year. But now they say I must have a dealer account which of course, costs much more $. This site has a very bad reputation across the internet and I still gave it a shot. The members here in the NFA section are good to go and I thank you for the conversation over the last year. But I can not do business with a site that extorts a YouTube channel and treats them as a dealer. HKPro and NFATalk pulled the same crap, guess where I no longer visit.

Thanks for your time,
NFA Review Channel

P.S. For those of you that want daily updates and info on the giveaway you can find them on my Facebook page.

SCREEN CAP OF PM
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We have a bad reputation?
Sorry about your trouble.   Seriously.
Given your post, surely there can be some middle ground where you can achieve your goals and not be a dealer.  Have you asked?

Sad to see you leave, but I completely understand your point.
Luckily I already follow you on the other media locations, so I will see you over there.

Thats ARFCOM for ya.  All about the freedoms you can afford just ask half the members here.

ETA: however if you paint enough graffiti on my wall I will eventually charge you advertising space.  So all other things aside I get it.

ETAA: who else knows about us besides the DU?  I'll be happy we got any cred at all.

That's messed up, a YouTube giveaway is not being a dealer IMO.
ETA: I was following your YouTube channel before you became a member here and will continue to do so. Don't forget NOT to leave those of us out of the giveaways that don't have facebook.

Thanks for everything, OP.  Sucks it went this way.

That's pretty fucked up.  I'm totally with you man, best wishes, and I know where to find you.

You are advertising your business on their site, right?

Rules are rules I guess

Thanks for all you've done on this site and on YouTube (God knows how many times I watched your vids).

But if this is the third forum that requires you to be a dealer it might just be standard procedure across all boards.

...So your not coming to ColaWarrior? It was nice while you were here then, take care.

IBTL

Second, Third, and Forth on that, -to ALL, not just the OP

It's an interesting dynamic with a lot of assumptions being made from those outside looking in.  However, we have metrics available to us that show how much of our traffic is coming from forums.  In short, the number of advertising impressions a forum gains from me posting a video is several multiples the impressions it generates on my video.  Thread visitors will watch my video once, but they'll keep returning to the thread to read new posts, and every visit and every page turn on a thread is a whole new set of ad impressions for the forum but zero new views on a video.

Gun channels earn about $1.00-$1.50 per thousand views (we don't actually earn anything unless an ad is watched or clicked, though), to put things into perspective for you, but forums are likely earning more than that per ad, and there are how many ads per page on a typical forum?  I stopped posting to another well-known site when they wanted to charge me 10x/month what I made from all of the views coming from all of the forums combined.

For example, the thread I started to share my video on the Ghost M currently has 1424 views, but my traffic from all non-YouTube sources combined (forums, blogs, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is currently at 749 views.  Total.  For all sources not directly associated with Google or YouTube.  

AR15.com is some small subset of that.  Who do you think made more money off my post, AR15.com or me (currently somewhere less than 75 cents for posting and then answering subsequent questions)?

No YouTuber participates in forums to make money.  We do it because we like being here the same as you, but part of our ability to contribute to the discussions is by sharing videos, deals we might have for our viewers, and giveaways.  

Does AR15.com have a right to charge for this?  Sure.  Their house, their rules.  Does it make financial sense for a YouTube channel to pay what they're asking?  Nowhere even close, which is why I don't know of anyone who does it.

This site would be awash with unmitigated shilling if it weren't for their business account policy.

Sorry to see you go, but sorry more that you can't understand the policy.

To be fair, you have approached this in a manner that has personally and financially benefited you, right? You used the NFAreview name because of familiarity and maybe a little for the revenue generating aspects from youtube and others, right? So, while it is a shame that you have drawn your line in the sand, I understand both sides. I am a subscriber and I do watch your videos when they come out, and that won't change - I enjoy the effort you put into all of that. While I don't necessarily agree with the ruling, I can certainly understand it. I've run a very successful internet forum before, and it's always an interesting interpretation of advertiser vs fringe advertising vs skirting the rules. Looks like it finally became a tipping point for "them."

Everyone is saying "to be fair" yet they don't completely understand how a content creator is compensated.

As QuietRiot outlined above. A YouTuber makes $1.00 over 1,000 views IF they are lucky. So just to recap, the AR50 video has 7,000 views. So after taxes I've made what? $5 on it. If forums want content creators to pay then they need a more reasonable payment plan. Like I said, I'm already a contributing member and already pay more than this forum generates for me in a year. Food for thought.

At the end of the day they make more in AD money off my posts as it is. It doesn't make sense to give us the shakedown and for that. I'm gone.

It's not about philosophy- it's just math, and I break out the math for you above.  Retailers and other advertisers are obviously doing their own math and deciding they make more than what is being charged.  That's the answer.

Forums already make more money from our content (detailed above) than we do for posting it here, and we'd never make enough to cover the cost of paying to be an advertiser.

Yeah, I don't see how you can lump him under the same category as a dealer.
Maybe have him purchase a lifetime membership on here or something?

Dude was a great addition to the forum.
Admins should really try to work with him.

Sounds like the OP is use to getting his way.

Ones status does tend to facilitate that.

Welcome to Arfcom and the Internet bro, the great equalizer, where zero fucks is given to who you are in the real World.

"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."

You're gaining more from the views to your site generated by his presence and content he is sharing with your audiance than he is gaining from any extra views generated by your site to his.

Your proposition costs him more money than it can make.

If you dispute this, please explain.

If you don't you're demands are unreasonable.

please see link