u/Annoying1978

Linus has to be one of the most transparent YouTubers out there. I’m sure by now a lot of you have watched the WAN show. Linus shared his screen, so we could see his YouTube analytics.

So basically, the new YouTube raw view counts can’t be cleanly compared to previous videos, because there isn’t even a set ratio you can apply to new videos versus old ones. It depends on the video. There are all sorts of reasons someone clicks off a video. On his video where he was helping his wife Yvonne pick a phone, it looked huge, like over 3.2 million views, but in reality it was something like 1.6 million. Yet there were other videos where the gap was way smaller.

I get why YouTube had to do it. If an advertiser is comparing a YouTuber to an Instagram influencer, the view counts are not measuring the same thing, and that matters when you’re trying to land sponsorships. But what they could have done is make it easier to analyze in the analytics.

Instead all we get is a little warning on every single page saying counts have changed. What they should have done is just given us a checkbox or something so you can keep looking at engaged views, because that’s what I actually care about. I don’t care about people who clicked on and left in one second. I care about the actual views I got.

And what’s annoying is that on the homepage, if your mouse just happens to be sitting over a video, that now counts as a view. What I haven’t been able to find out, because I haven’t read through all the help docs yet, is whether that affects your average view duration, and if it does, whether it affects the number of impressions they’ll send you.

Also, I know everyone on the sub complains about the different types of sponsorships, but you can actually see the revenue numbers and there’s a reason for it. I ran this through an AI bot to work it out and it looks like LTT is making roughly $3 million from YouTube AdSense, which lines up with Linus’s own comments that it’s only about 10% of overall LTT revenue. So there’s a reason why so many sponsorships have to exist to pay 120 salaries. Obviously this is only the main channel, but still 120 people x $40,000 a year is $4.8M.

If these calculations are even close to reality, that means YouTube revenue doesn’t even cover the cost of labor for LTT.

Maybe if YouTube could find better advertisers it would be different, but almost every single ad I get is either something that looks like a scam, made by AI, some mobile game I’m never going to play, or gambling. I don’t understand how the largest online video platform on Earth can’t figure that part out.

Anyway, now I’m starting to rant, but my point is I don’t like how YouTube implemented this. It makes it way more complicated to look at my analytics and see how I’m doing, and I’m just a small channel doing this as a hobby. For channels where it’s basically a business, like LTT, I’m surprised they aren’t complaining about it more, because YouTube did a shit job on this rollout.

I can’t believe people actually buy this, but at the same time, I absolutely can. Gross.

Republicans complain that Muslim immigrants want to end American freedom and institute Sharia law, even though they have no idea what that means. Meanwhile, Shomrim (hebrew for “watchers” or “guards”) and Shmira secured $300,000 in New York State budget funding in 2024 to enforce laws in mostly in Haredi and Orthodox neighborhoods. They are funded with both private AND public tax payer dollars.

They often make citizens’ arrests under New York law and detain people until police arrive.

For clarification, EVERY religion has a set of religious laws. It isn’t just in Islam. In the Jewish religion it’s called halakha and a court full of rabbis (called beis din), handle divorce requests,

and business disputes under Jewish law.

When Muslims tried to use private non-profit funding to do the same thing in their communities, republicans claimed that they were trying to enforce Sharia law to all Americans. They even attempted to ban Muslims from having the same volunteer community officers they explicitly allow Jewish groups to have.

It’s completely hypocritical. However, discussing this hypocritical injustice will be labeled “antisemitism”. The reality is that we treat different religions differently because of xenophobia and marketing.

Americans somehow find this acceptable because of the literal hundreds of millions of dollars spent to make Americans feel comfortable with the Jewish religion and to be fearful of Islam. So far AIPAC PAC and its super PAC, United Democracy Project has spent over $104 million in 2026, and it’s not even a presidential election year.

$30M alone was spent on Michigan’s election, against El-Sayed. It was the most AIPAC has ever spent on a single congressional race. In 2024, AIPAC was the largest PAC contributor to federal candidates and it gave its money across party lines: 233 Republicans, 152 Democrats and 3 independents.

AIPAC is still incredibly strong, but they’re losing their grip. Public funding for religious-based community enforcement measures have to end. I am in support of all groups getting money to prevent violence, but funding Jewish community enforcement actions are absolutely ridiculous. That’s money that could be going to REAL solutions to prevent violence.

It’s insane that anyone is OK with this while complaining that Muslims want to control us with “Sharia Law”.

I finished the first stage of my Homelab. Since I’m a Batman aficionado and my home office is called the Batcave, my server is called Robin.

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, Intel i5-8500, 6C/6T @ 3.0 GHz, iGPU | UHD 630 (Coffee Lake, Gen9.5), 16 GB RAM, SanDisk 256 GB M.2 SATA for my OS and an ORICO 512 GB 2.5" SATA for pretty much everything else. I’m running Debian 13 with KDE Plasma. I ran ethernet to the office (finally) and my speeds are so much better (300-400Mpbs to 700-800Mbps)

I’m running some basic stuff like pihole to stop some of the ads before they even get loaded to nay clients at the house, but I’m also running stuff that specific for me. First, on Hommar I can directly add a whitelisted site or add a blacklisted site, see those recent changes and revoke them if needed. 

I run a small business marketing company, where I design websites, marketing materials, make product videos, product tours, web commercials, and corporate interviews plus I have my own YouTube channel. Most of my day is in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere on my M3 iMac.

The first real custom change was using NextCloud, but instead of using it as it comes out of the box, I have a custom Finder automation function that allows me to right click and folder with the shared network drive and share a file or an entire folder. I can even create an upload only folder for my clients to send me files. It goes directly on Robin so I don’t have to waste time downloading from the cloud. The files live on Robin, served over a Cloudflare tunnel on my own domain. It essentially works exactly like DropBox now. 

Then the next thing is software, and I used Claude Code to help me with this. My channel makes political videos. So many times that means I need to talk about speeches, interviews or even broadcasts that are on the news. Mac users are probably familiar with PullTube which is a GUI for yt-dlp. It’s good. Much better than the random free sites you can use that try to infest you with malware and porn ads. But I needed it to be better so I created my own with Claude. That’s what you see called Grabber. 

First it’s a Mac OS app that not only allows me to throw basically any link (Reddit, YouTube, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc…) but also any site like local news sites that use HTTP Live Streaming and break their videos up in chunks (like in .m3u8 or .ts files). So I can use them in videos breaking down policies and the political narrative. The bigger build is that I can choose to have the transcoding done on Robin, so AV1 and VP9 and all the files that don’t play nice with Premiere Pro are automatically converted, but they use the processing power on Robin so that it doesn’t touch my Mac. That helps me continue editing my 4k timeline while my server does the transcoding. All of it is done with VAAPI, and while it’s slower than on my Mac the important thing is that it isn’t using any processing power and the machine that I’m actually editing. So I can just queue things up and edit other pats of the video.

BUT, it’s also an iPhone app that I can choose to download files on my phone (those downloads will max out at 1080p), but I can also choose to save them on Robin in 4k and that shared folder is mapped directly to my Mac. So when I’m ready to actually start my edit, I can look at already converted files ready to go and put in a project. Plus I use it for non-work related stuff, like capturing video files and sharing them however I want. 

And I also use Robin like a media server, so I run Jellyfin. I’m using Tailspace so I can watch anything on my server wherever I am and I can send the link to some of my non-techie friends that want to watch something but can’t seem to find those files. 

What I lack the most? A NAS. Right now I have  4 drives on my Mac - the internal SSD that came with the Mac. That’s where the OS and applications live, but no actual media files or anything to. Then I have 3 external SSDs. 2 of them are fast. Those are the ones I can edit on. They’re a TB each, and then I have a much slower 2 TB SSD that I off-load projects that I’m not working on. I need both a NAS and a real backup solution. But the prices are still insane and I spent like $250-300 for this entire setup. A real NAS solution is going to cost me well over a thousand and likely several thousands right now. 

Any recommendations that I haven’t thought of so far?

I finished the first stage of my Homelab. Since I’m a Batman aficionado and my home office is called the Batcave, my server is called Robin.

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, Intel i5-8500, 6C/6T @ 3.0 GHz, iGPU | UHD 630 (Coffee Lake, Gen9.5), 16 GB RAM, SanDisk 256 GB M.2 SATA for my OS and an ORICO 512 GB 2.5" SATA for pretty much everything else. I’m running Debian 13 with KDE Plasma. I ran ethernet to the office (finally) and my speeds are so much better (300-400Mpbs to 700-800Mbps)

I’m running some basic stuff like pihole to stop some of the ads before they even get loaded to nay clients at the house, but I’m also running stuff that specific for me. First, on Hommar I can directly add a whitelisted site or add a blacklisted site, see those recent changes and revoke them if needed. 

I run a small business marketing company, where I design websites, marketing materials, make product videos, product tours, web commercials, and corporate interviews plus I have my own YouTube channel. Most of my day is in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere on my M3 iMac.

The first real custom change was using NextCloud, but instead of using it as it comes out of the box, I have a custom Finder automation function that allows me to right click and folder with the shared network drive and share a file or an entire folder. I can even create an upload only folder for my clients to send me files. It goes directly on Robin so I don’t have to waste time downloading from the cloud. The files live on Robin, served over a Cloudflare tunnel on my own domain. It essentially works exactly like DropBox now. 

Then the next thing is software, and I used Claude Code to help me with this. My channel makes political videos. So many times that means I need to talk about speeches, interviews or even broadcasts that are on the news. Mac users are probably familiar with PullTube which is a GUI for yt-dlp. It’s good. Much better than the random free sites you can use that try to infest you with malware and porn ads. But I needed it to be better so I created my own with Claude. That’s what you see called Grabber. 

First it’s a Mac OS app that not only allows me to throw basically any link (Reddit, YouTube, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc…) but also any site like local news sites that use HTTP Live Streaming and break their videos up in chunks (like in .m3u8 or .ts files). So I can use them in videos breaking down policies and the political narrative. The bigger build is that I can choose to have the transcoding done on Robin, so AV1 and VP9 and all the files that don’t play nice with Premiere Pro are automatically converted, but they use the processing power on Robin so that it doesn’t touch my Mac. That helps me continue editing my 4k timeline while my server does the transcoding. All of it is done with VAAPI, and while it’s slower than on my Mac the important thing is that it isn’t using any processing power and the machine that I’m actually editing. So I can just queue things up and edit other pats of the video.

BUT, it’s also an iPhone app that I can choose to download files on my phone (those downloads will max out at 1080p), but I can also choose to save them on Robin in 4k and that shared folder is mapped directly to my Mac. So when I’m ready to actually start my edit, I can look at already converted files ready to go and put in a project. Plus I use it for non-work related stuff, like capturing video files and sharing them however I want. 

And I also use Robin like a media server, so I run Jellyfin. I’m using Tailspace so I can watch anything on my server wherever I am and I can send the link to some of my non-techie friends that want to watch something but can’t seem to find those files. 

What I lack the most? A NAS. Right now I have  4 drives on my Mac - the internal SSD that came with the Mac. That’s where the OS and applications live, but no actual media files or anything to. Then I have 3 external SSDs. 2 of them are fast. Those are the ones I can edit on. They’re a TB each, and then I have a much slower 2 TB SSD that I off-load projects that I’m not working on. I need both a NAS and a real backup solution. But the prices are still insane and I spent like $250-300 for this entire setup. A real NAS solution is going to cost me well over a thousand and likely several thousands right now. 

Any recommendations that I haven’t thought of so far?