I don’t want to conduct myself that way because I care about my audience,” Bartley says. “The channels that do well do two to three times better than me, because they claim to bet big money. So when that switched to 20 channels out there, I kind of bottomed out and leveled off.”Īlthough he’s still able to support his wife and child through his YouTube income, PayPal donations, and the gaming app affiliate codes he promotes on his channel, he’s not thrilled with the rigged competition. “When I first started, I was doing really well,” says Joshua Bartley, a full-time content creator from West Virginia who has 144,000 followers on his six-year-old coin-pushing channel. The coin-pushing vlog space has become very crowded in recent years. “You get these few bad apples who stage things, and then when the rest of us win prizes legitimately, we get questioned for it.” Crowded space “It ruins it for people who are trying to be honest,” says Matt Magnone, a 35-year-old full-time arcade vlogger from Pennsylvania who has three million followers across his YouTube and TikTok channels. These creators will in turn ask their followers to fund their “gambling” by donating to them on YouTube live streams or by joining their Patreons. Don’t go over there!’”Ĭritics allege that a number of popular coin-pushing vloggers are in fact operating out of their own homes, using their own coin pushers - without revealing the truth to their audiences. “Like, ‘Oh, if only I could find one of these mystery coin pushers out there in the world, I could pay off my mortgage.’”Ĭheri says she’s irked when she sees people gravitating toward coin-pusher videos advertising things like a “ $500,000 Buy in!” and “ TOTAL PROFIT.” “You want to tell them, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes,” she says. “They’re looking for that kind of escape,” he says. Unfortunately, their wholesome approach has also lost them some followers, who are drawn to the “fantasy” element other channels play up, according to John. Each month, their community donates to Operation Smile, a charity that provides children with free surgery for cleft palates. The couple also invite their followers to chat in their comment sections and consider their fans to be friends. Instead, they make their live streams interactive, offering small prizes like whoopee cushions to viewers who correctly predict the end results of their games. “We said, ‘No, we’re going to do something different,’” says John, a 40-year-old software engineer who has since found a new job in his field. John and Cheri’s channel is far more humble and far more believable: They do not claim to be winning big. For instance, there’s this credulity-straining video, which purportedly shows the creator winning $10.8 million on a $2 million buy-in machine: Some vloggers in the space tout huge “buy-ins,” the amount one supposedly needs to put in to play high-reward machines, and even bigger wins. That channel - We Play You Win, which has more than 11,000 subscribers - is one of many in YouTube’s coin-pushing niche, which can attract millions of views each week. So in August 2020, the couple decided to launch a YouTube channel to make their new hobby more exciting. And winning their own money over and over again got boring quickly. Owning their own coin pusher, of course, meant John and Cheri had to stock it themselves. Although the machines are legal under federal law, coin pushers that offer cash prizes are outlawed in a number of states. The aim is to set off a chain reaction that will push coins or prizes off a second, stationary platform and into a payout tray below. Players drop coins of their own into the machine and onto a platform that constantly moves backward and forward. Coin pushers are amusement games filled with coins and sometimes prizes (including cash).
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