Something Went Wrong: Last Night’s Partial YouTube Outage

On Tuesday afternoon around 5pm Pacific time I had wrapped up laptop work and was going to watch YouTube on my phone.

As some of you know, I couldn’t.

“Something went wrong.”

I saw other posts on LinkedIn that also reported on outage, as well as other online accounts from foreign and domestic sources. I shared some of these on my Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn page.

However, the only news from these sources was that hundreds of thousands of people were reporting the issue to Downdetector.

Downdetector, 5:15 pm PST yesterday.

However, the site wasn’t COMPLETELY down. If you had a direct link to a YouTube video, you could still watch it. I confirmed this by watching the YouTube version of one of my Bredemarket promotional videos.

Remember Tactical Goal 2C?

Then, a little over an hour later, YouTube was fully operational again.

After the fact, Google revealed the cause:

“An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids).”

Since recommendations appear almost everywhere, just about everything was affected. Because YouTube, like most other social services, can’t just show “the site”; it has to show what it thinks you should see.

Think about it. What would YouTube look like if it couldn’t recommend anything?

Now we know.

With no recommendations.

The “Repurposing a Blog Post On YouTube via NotebookLM” Experiment

This is definitely an experiment. When I started, I had no idea how it would turn out. In the end I’m fairly satisfied with how NotebookLM repurposed my blog post as a YouTube video, but there were definitely some lessons learned to apply in future repurposing.

Ahref’s best way to get your product listed on LLMs

As we all know, there has been a partial shift from search engine optimization to answer engine optimization. The short version is that content performs well when it answers a question that someone proposes to a large language model (LLM) such as Google Gemini or ChatGPT.

So how do we optimize our content for LLMs?

Yes, I know I could have asked an LLM that question, but I still do some old school things and attended a webinar instead.

I live-blogged Wednesday’s webinar, hosted by the Content Marketing Institute and sponsored by Ahrefs. The speaker was Ahref’s Ryan Law, the company’s Director of Content Marketing. As is usual with such affairs, the webinar provided some helpful information…which is even more helpful if you use Ahref’s tools. (Funny how that always happens. The same thing happens with Bredemarket’s white papers.)

One of the many topics Law addressed was the TYPE of content that resonates most with LLM inquirers. Law’s slide 20 answered this question.

“LLMs LOVE YOUTUBE”

Law then threw some statistics at us.

“YouTube has fast-become the most cited domain in AI search:

1 in AI Overviews

1 in AI Mode

2 in ChatGPT

2 in Gemini

2 in Copilot

2 in Perplexity”

So even if it isn’t number 1 on some of the engines themselves, it’s obviously high, and very attractive to inquirers.

But what of people like me who prefer the portability of text? It’s easier to quote from text than it is to take a short snippet of a video.

YouTube covers that also, since it automatically creates a transcript of every word spoken in a YouTube video.

But…

Bredemarket’s problem

…most of the videos that Bredemarket has created have zero or few spoken words, which kinda sorta makes it tough to create a transcript.

For example, the “Landscape (Biometric Product Marketing Expert)” video that I frequently share on the Bredemarket blog for some odd reason is not only on WordPress, but also on YouTube. However, it has zero spoken words, so therefore no transcript.

This video (actually a short) DOES have a transcript.

“Yo, I’m the outlaw of this country sound, dropping rhymes that shake the ground.”

But I do have some YouTube videos with more extensive transcripts. And one of them suggests a possible solution to my desire to provide YouTube videos to LLMs.

Using Google’s NotebookLM to create videos from non-copyrighted material

A still from Bredemarket’s movie “Inside the EBTS.” Are you jealous, Stefan Gladbach?

Last November, I uploaded material to Google’s NotebookLM and asked the service to create a movie from it.

The material wasn’t authored by me, but by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Which meant that it wasn’t copyrighted.)

What was it?

Version 11.3 of the Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification (EBTS).

A few of you are already laughing.

For those who aren’t, the EBTS is a fairly detailed standard dictating how biometric and biographic data is exchanged between the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system and other federal, state, and local automated biometric identification systems.

As a standard, it’s not as riveting as a Stephen King novel.

But NotebookLM made a movie out of it anyway.

Inside the FBI’s EBTS.

And once I uploaded the movie to YouTube, YouTube created a transcript.

First 21 seconds of the YouTube transcript of the video above.

So this potentially helps Bredemarket to be visible.

And if I want to follow Ryan Law’s advice and repurpose my content for YouTube, NoteBookLM provides a method to do it.

Using Google’s NotebookLM to create videos from MY copyrighted material

Time for an experiment, the goal of which is to convert a Bredemarket blog post into a video with a minimum amount of effort.

NotebookLM can use either files or web links as source material for videos, so the easiest method to create my video is as follows:

  • Paste the web link to the blog post into NotebookLM.
  • Instruct NotebookLM to create a “Video Overview” from this single piece of content.

My blog post of choice is my post from earlier today, “Government Anti-Fraud Efforts: They’re Still Siloed.” The post contains a Gemini AI image of silos on the National Mall in Washington DC (inaccurately displaying the U.S. Capitol as NORTH of the Washington Monument). It also includes my text as well as links to outside sources such as the initial draft of H.R. 7270.

So let’s see what NotebookLM gives us.

The first thing that we get is Google’s summary of the content at the link.

NotebookLM’s summary of the web link I provided.

“1 source

The provided text examines the fragmented nature of U.S. anti-fraud efforts, arguing that current strategies lack a unified, government-wide approach. While the Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Bill seeks to modernize identity verification through Treasury Department grants to states, the author contends that the proposal is too narrow. The legislative focus on mobile driver’s licenses and digital infrastructure fails to consolidate the many overlapping responsibilities held by the FBI, Secret Service, and FTC. This bureaucratic separation creates siloed operations where different agencies and state governments often work independently rather than as a cohesive front. Ultimately, the source suggests that despite new legislative attempts, the American response to identity theft remains decentralized and inefficient.”

But that’s just text. Time to create the video overview.

After I cklicked the “Video Overview” button in the upper right.

A while later…

Even with relatively minimal content, video creation isn’t immediate. It has to shape the content into a narrative video, after all. Sadly I forgot to time the result, but I received this video, “A Tale of Two Threats,” within a half hour.

A Tale of Two Threats (WordPress version). Created by Google NotebookLM based upon “Government Anti-Fraud Efforts: They’re Still Siloed.”

As is par for the course with NotebookLM, the narration is self-generated in a viewer-friendly form (“let’s pop the hood”). And it used my source material as a basis to narrate the tale of the U.S. Government’s responses to the “two threats” of terrorism and fraud. As my original blog post noted, the two responses have been quite different.

The video then takes portions of the blog post, including the list of agencies that are NOT part of H.R. 7270, as well as my example of what could happen if the Secret Service’s mission is compromised because of what some other agency is doing.

But it DOESN’T take other portions of my blog post, such as the potential shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, my reference to “evil Commie Chinese facial recognition algorithms,” or my graphic of silos on the Mall. NotebookLM generated its own cartoon graphics instead.

This image didn’t make the video, even though Google created it.

The final step

The first place where I uploaded the video was WordPress, so I could include it in this blog post. I’ll probably upload it to other places, but the second target is YouTube.

A Tale of Two Threats (YouTube version). Created by Google NotebookLM based upon “Government Anti-Fraud Efforts: They’re Still Siloed.”

And yes, there is a transcript. Although it took a few minutes to generate. So now the bot’s text is out there for the LLMs to find.

First 24 seconds of the YouTube transcript of the video above.

Grading the experiment

I’ll give the experiment a B. It’s not really MY video, but it encapsulates some of my views.

NotebookLM users need to remember that when it creates audio and video content, it doesn’t simply parrot the source, but reshapes it. You may remember the NotebookLM 20-minute “Career Detective” podcast of my resume, in which a male and female bot talked about how great I am. My blog post was processed similarly.

If I want something that better promotes Bredemarket to LLM users, I need to shape the blog post to do the following:

  • Address some question that the LLM user asks.
  • Include text that promotes Bredemarket as the solution to the inquirer’s problems.

Anyway, I’ll keep these tips in mind when writing…and repurposing…future blog posts.

Conceptualization of the Planet Bredemarket and Its Rings

Inspired by the Constant Contact session I attended at the Small Business Expo, I wanted to conceptualize the Bredemarket online presence, and decided to adopt a “planet with rings” model.

Think of Bredemarket as a planet. Like Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter, the planet Bredemarket is surrounded by rings.

Google Gemini.

The closest ring to the planet is the Bredemarket mailing list (MailChimp).

The next closest ring is the Bredemarket website (WordPress).

Moving outward, we find the following rings:

  • Search engines and generative AI tools, including Bing, ChatGPT, Google, Grok, Perplexity, and others.
  • The Bredemarket Facebook page and associated groups.
  • The Bredemarket LinkedIn page and associated showcase pages.
  • A variety of social platforms, including Bluesky, Instagram, Substack, and Threads.
  • Additional social platforms, including TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube.

While this conceptualization is really only useful to me, I thought a few of you may be interested in some of the “inner rings.”

And if you’re wondering why your favorite way cool platform is banished to the outer edges…well, that’s because it doesn’t make Bredemarket any money. I’ve got a business to run here, and TikTok doesn’t help me pay the bills…

Is Information Easier to Find Today…Or Not?

I grew up in a time when phones were attached to the wall and not to us.

When something called a “card catalog” was an essential research tool.

And when the best way to learn the lyrics to your favorite song was to go to the drug store and buy the monthly magazine that listed all the song lyrics.

Imagen 4.

Not that this was necessary for ALL songs. You could pretty much figure out the lyrics to “53 Miles West of Venus.”

Imagen 4.

But for some songs you definitely needed the lyric magazines. Because the lyrics may not be on the record, and probably wouldn’t be on the cassette. And in those innocent days in which we didn’t yet do ourselves a favor by unplugging the jukebox—and we certainly didn’t hang the deejay—the guy behind the turntables didn’t know them either.

Imagen 4.

Of course it’s a lot different today. The phone, no longer attached to the wall, displays lyrics from websites such as Genius, music streaming services such as Spotify, and lyric videos posted on sites such as YouTube.

From Genius.

But is information easier to find today?

Only that information that can be digitized.

If it isn’t easily digitized, then it is lost…like the analog imperfections from a “33.” (A vinyl record.)

From the Bredemarket Instagram account.

Did I Subconsciously Inject Emotion in My “Impede” Reel?

Remember my “In the Distance” Bredemarket blog post from Saturday?

I embedded a reel in that post with the following text:

If their focus is elsewhere

My focus won’t impede

Since I had created the reel anyway, I repurposed it by sharing it on Bredemarket’s social media channels.

Including YouTube. You can see the YouTube short here:

Now when I shared it on YouTube, I did so with no context whatsoever. The caption simply read “In the Distance.” Without the words I wrote in the original blog post (I’ll get to two particular words later).

Yet by Monday morning the short had over 1,000 views. For Bredemarket’s YouTube channel, that’s a lot. Only three shorts have attained higher views: two about Tropical Storm Hilary, and one about squirrels.

But why?

Why?

The relative popularity of this short on YouTube is a mystery. Other than its brevity, it includes none of the elements of a successful video:

  • It does not use trending audio.
  • It does not use trending key words or hashtags.
  • Its message is obscure, if not downright cryptic.
  • Its visuals do not appeal to a mass audience.

Perhaps…

I have a theory that probably isn’t correct, but I’m going to entertain it anyway.

If this didn’t immediately occur to you, the reel subconsciously incorporates emotion. Emotion at the loss of my “former friends” as mentioned in the blog (but not on YouTube). Yes, some of the same former friends who forgot my birthday long ago. 

So my wild theory is that the sense of loss, resignation, and renewed determination (I won’t impede on them) permeated the reel and subconsciously increased interest.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps there are just more wombat fans than I realized.

In the Distance.

Regardless of the unexpected popularity of this YouTube short, it illustrates why emotions are now the seventh of the seven questions that a content creator should ask you.

I (always) need to improve my INTENTIONAL injection of emotions into my content.

And yours.

Royals

Here’s a song.

The listed artist for this song is Royalty Free Music Background.

The song title is “Future Electronic (Upbeat Music).”

I had been using an AI music generator in Canva, but since that is now restricted to non-commercial use I switched to another music app within Canva for Bredemarket’s videos.

Taking great care to select videos that are royalty free.

Since I liked this particular song, I used it in two videos, the first of which was only 8 seconds long, the second 64 seconds long.

And then I merrily uploaded both videos to the Bredemarket blog, LinkedIn, various Meta properties, and Bluesky with no problem.

Until I got to YouTube.

The 8 second video uploaded fine, but the 64 second version was blocked worldwide because of a copyright violation.

On a band called Royalty Free Music Background.

Social media is fun.

Feeding My Niche

(AI image Imagen 3/Google Gemini)

My interests are admittedly niche (I created a YouTube video about it that most people won’t watch), but I’m still devoted to feeding the few who are also interested in this niche.

So if you’re interested in identity and technology content, ensure you’re following the Bredemarket blog and current social channels. They’ve changed since my original list and the May 2024 contraction, but…

in addition to the Bredemarket website, you can currently search for Bredemarket on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, the aforementioned YouTube, a well-known site that may or may not disappear in the next three weeks, and other places.

Subject to change.

Who Will Tell Your Stories, the YouTube Version

There was once an old storyteller who sat by the fire near the beach, sharing his stories with the young.

Then one day the storyteller was rightsized in a move to generate efficiencies and optimize outcomes.

This is not fiction. 

Who will tell your stories? Bredemarket can try (learn about my content-proposal-analysis services here), but in the end I will probably be forced to construct new ones that lack the depth of the old ones.

From https://youtube.com/shorts/_89Jtq6AKno?si=KmcdeuSRCAA6KC9a

If the World is Flat

(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

(August 1, 2025: image img_2522-1.jpg and video flat2412a-1_mp4_hd_1080p.original.jpg?h=1378 removed by request)

(also deleted related content on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok personal, and YouTube)

If the world is flat…

…there’s no need to look beyond the horizon.

…only the current quarter counts.

If you want to survive…

…think beyond the current quarter.

…invest in the long term.

…invest in product marketing.

…invest in a product marketer.

John E. Bredehoft on LinkedIn: LINK

I’m seeking a Senior Product Marketing Manager role in software (biometrics, government IDs, geolocation, identity and access management, cybersecurity, health) as an individual contributor on a collaborative team.

Key Accomplishments

  • Product launches (Confidential software product, Know Your Business offering, Morpho Video Investigator, MorphoBIS Cloud, Printrak BIS, Omnitrak).
  • Multiple enablement, competitive analysis, and strategy efforts.
  • Exploration of growth markets.

Multiple technologies.

Multiple industries.

Over 22 types of content.

Currently available for full-time employment or consulting work (Bredemarket).

More details on the latter at Bredemarket’s “CPA” page.