Ah, another day, another batch of insanity on the internet. Today, we have an event that happened yesterday and I just now got to writing about: WatchMojo, you know, the YouTube channel that does nonstop top 10 lists? Yeah, apparently they stole the research that YouTube content creator Guru Larry had done for his “Worst Selling Consoles” episode of the wonderful video series Fact Hunt!
I didn’t get to see the original video, and I’m having to piece this all together, so take it all for what you will – It’s still worth talking about, that’s for sure.
Now, I know your first thought – you can’t steal facts! It’s coincidental. Well, sure, you could say that, but there is a catch here – Larry presents his information in such a way as to sort of tag it as uniquely his – little tweaks in how it is phrased or presented. To that end, the video WatchMojo put up apparently used these same phrasings and nuances, and people caught onto it quickly.
Great thing to wake up to, @WatchMojo has literally stolen all the research from my Worst Selling Consoles episode!
— Larry Bundy Jr (@LarryBundyJr) August 10, 2017
Both fans of Larry and some people who helped him create the video noticed this, and called Watch Mojo out on it, as well as alerting Guru Larry to this. He called them out and, amazingly, WatchMojo actually took the video down!
That’s cool, or at least it seems it would be cool, but this goes further: WatchMojo sent Larry an email regarding this… one that is a little but insane.
You will want to click on that and open it up in a new tab to read it, but it basically goes to admit that they sourced all of their research for that video from Guru Larry – they had no other sources at all! They then go on to explain the hell they have had in sourcing content for their videos (all just generally stupid top 10’s and clickbait, if you don’t know) and then going so far as to claim that Larry shouldn’t have put “false information” in his videos to begin with!
Or, maybe you idiots at WatchMojo need do something other than pathetic top 10 lists that pretty much require you to just look up someone elses content and repackage it almost as a rule. Perhaps trying to do something, you know, original, that actually takes talent, effort, and skill, would be nice.
Of course you could go back to how you started: Lingerie fashion shows, city profiles, random people talking about video game companies for a few minutes, and other relics of YouTube from a decade ago – at least that content required some original thought and effort beyond copy-pasting information, right? To be fair, it isn’t that I hate top 10’s, it’s just the way WatchMojo does it is absurd (more on that in a video below, though)
Sertiously, go to the WatchMojo YouTube channel and look at their oldest videos – that’s really what it all is, and it’s kind of hilarious to see!
Actually, let me end this article with a couple of videos: one, from Top Hat Gaming Man, telling this story probably a little better than I can (as he saw the original video in question and talked more directly with Guru Larry on this one) and another from YouTuber I Hate Everything where he talks about the garbage that is WatchMojo.
Enjoy!
Oh, and for the fuck of it, the original video our good friend Guru Larry did that got stolen from! I’ll actually go into detail on this one at a nother time in more detail, but for now, I present it here without comment. Enjoy!
Pretty sure WatchMojo doesn’t put any real effort into their content, pretty sure they have a site where all the lists and the entries on the are decided by the other people. This doesn’t actually surprise me.