Pffffhhhh!!!
This is pretty massively obvious? C’mon man.
And add upon the fact that while watching a heavily shilled product vid, you are often still nailed with YT ads. You are still the product! Just 10x.
I mean, wtf is your argument??? 1x = 10x? One shouldn’t care about excessive shilling because you are already being used by YT?
I’m just commenting upon the shilling. Not on other motives, like trying to get others into the sport. Hell, I’m not in the sport.
The fact is, the more one shills (or promotes), the less trustworthy one comes across. This is undebatable.
I mean, you aren’t going to seriously debate that, are you?
It helps to imagine that you are in the live audience, next to the camera, and the hosts are talking directly to you. How would you feel about the hosts?
Even worse, now imagine the host is talking right to you in a personal conversation, saying the exact same things? Gross man, gross.
As I mentioned, there’s better and worse ways of promoting. Garand Thumb/9holes promote products much less offensively (and less) than that specific Dirty Civ video.
It helps to think about the word “shill.” Shilling is different than promoting.
The prototypical shill is a planted member of an audience that is loudly enthusiastic with whatever the host is saying/doing in order to whip the crowd into a frenzy.
Promotion bleeds into shilling if you do it wrong.
I guess I just don't see it. But maybe I'm just not as sensitive to it, or as easily offended by it, as you are.
I'd honestly be more likely to agree with you if they were lying about what support they received and what product was provided to them instead of stating it clearly for the viewer.
I'd say them reading sponsorship ads (Mod Light, Snoring Desert Institute, etc) in the middle of the video instead of closer to the beginning like Henry & Josh (who are mostly funded by Patreon and very upfront about asking you to support them there) or GT is a matter of taste. But again, maybe I'm just less sensitive to someone who's obviously trying to make content for a living paying the bills with advertising.
When a guy says "We used these Sig Cross rifles - thanks to Sig & to Kyle Lamb for connecting us with Sig - which are fine and were great to get us started but honestly aren't as good for this game as a purpose built match gun."
or
"Thanks for Leupold for sending us these Mk4 HD scopes to use - they've been a sponsor of the channel for a while now. We chose the Mk4 because it represents a balance in spending on rifle and optic, falling closer to the price of the rifle than a more or less expensive optic." "The guys a Leupold were a huge help to us and taught us a lot about precision rifle shooting"
or
"We bought these Kestrel Elite devices with our own money, and they were painfully expensive, but they provide enough capability that we thought they were worth it. Still, you can totally also just use a phone app to get started."
None of that strikes me as shilling, which as you said is essentially dishonest marketing by someone pretending to be impartial and disguising their relationship with the product in order to be more persuasive.
Another example: "Here's why keeping your rifle level is important, and we used these MDT Send-It levels which are great because they use LEDs and so you don't have to come out of the scope to look at them - thanks MDT for providing them for us" does come off as a product promotion, because it clearly is exactly that, but to me it doesn't cross the line into shilling or make the video unwatchable. Especially since what they said in support of the Send It is true and is the main reason folks are willing to buy the damnably expensive little thing.
Maybe we should just agree to disagree?
Just out of curiosity, does this strike you as shilling? In some ways it's even more of an obvious advertisement than the DC video we've been arguing over, even though there's no direct disclosure of a relationship with the brands being promoted:
