It started on March 25. I was on vacation with my wife, our first brief time away from our two kids. Besides setting context, the preceding sentence also exists to prove to the Internet that I had sex. Twice. Take that, high school! Anyway, I have two YouTube gaming channels (which really invalidates the sex thing). The bigger one, retsupurae (we sort of riff on things MST3K style) was having issues. Specifically, revenue just tanked out of nowhere. As you know from reading my previous Polygon article over and over again, CPM/ad revenue tends to be pretty volatile. I figured it would come back in a couple of days. It didn't. My smaller channel, slowbeef, which is more like a typical stream VOD/Let's Play channel was totally fine … until April 7, when that channel’s revenue tanked as well. I started asking around and it seemed like people were either not affected, or affected in no pattern I could figure out. More and more people started to report a drop in revenue as time went on.
