How I BROKE YOUTUBE with Real Life Superhero Battles!! The Sean Ward Show

Published 2023-11-06

How I BROKE YOUTUBE!! The Sean Ward Show
Subscribe: bit.ly/SeanWardShowSub | 🔔Make sure to enable ALL push notifications!🔔
Watch the NEWEST videos: • Latest Videos | TeamSuperFunny

Check out the story of how the Real LIfe Superhero Battle format that I created turned into a PR nightmare for YouTube and spawned the Elsagate phenomenon!!

Join this channel to get digital perks, free comics, and cool stuff in the mail!!!
youtube.com/channel/UCEvLUnQiH-i1XUNikh0Zm4g/join

Follow me!!!!
instagram.com/seanward
twitter.com/seanward

My first viral hit did 1 million views in a week.
My channel wasn’t monetized yet so I wasn’t making any money, but I kept creating videos. Spider-Man VS Batman that summer reached 10 million views. Spider-Man and Santa surprising a young boy at Christmas got on the news all over the world. A game of superhero street hockey was talked about on a Kevin Smith podcast, which means it went viral in the Comic-Con scene. My approach to these superhero Street prank videos was that they are epic battles spilled Out of the movies and comic books and onto the streets in front of people. I came up with the phrase real life superhero battle as the brand for this style of video, and started regularly racking up millions of views.
But anytime something is successful, you're going to see a lot of imitators trying to jump on the trend. I just found this article from 2018 when someone went digging into the Elsa gate phenomenon, and noticed that it all started with channels trying to capitalize on my success. At first, these imitators were just getting Halloween quality costumes and horsing around on a playground in the neighborhood to crank out as many videos using my keyword phrase as possible.
They started out doing a low quality version of my real life superhero battle Street prank format, but started introducing some really disturbing concepts and imagery, while at the same time creating thumbnails designed to get younger and younger viewers to click on them. So what ended up happening was a wave of small children clicking on videos about the Joker or Spider-Man disrobing and feeling up the Disney princesses, engaging in all manner of sexual and medical deviancy, or becoming the victim of graphic and disturbing violence. The ease with which these channels seemed to be racking up views by finding this loophole in YouTube's algorithm to get their content pushed to unsuspecting kids meant that imitators flooded the space by the thousands, these videos were easy to spot, because they all use the same style of thumbnail with the bright yellow or green background.
What they all hit upon as a winning formula was to pair up Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen, which led to the entire situation being dubbed Elsagate by the mainstream press when they started to report on the disturbing things children were being exposed to on YouTube.
The story got so big that YouTube corporate had to do something and their response was so Swift and drastic. Seriously, it was a matter of waking up one morning and going on YouTube to find that all of those channels that specialized in that type of content had been deleted under cover of night.
Additionally, YouTube introduced new policies around the monetization of content depicting violence, adult situations, or extreme language. So as much as I hate to see it, especially for the fact that many of my videos got demonetized in the process, I personally caused a YouTube ad apocalypse. Check out my channel the Sean Ward show to see the original videos that started this whole mess, as well as my take on huge moments in YouTube histo