Unus Annus - This Lasts for only One Year

We all take life for granted, comfortable in the idea of eternity. But nothing lasts forever. Eventually, things change. Birth, growth, death, these are all the natural progressive stages of life. But for a number of us, this isn't something to worry about. We wrapped ourselves in the security blanket that is that is the idea of "forever", because its not like our lives are in any danger, so we can go about it all carefree. That mindset changes, however, once we receive a time limit.

One Year.

One year is all the time we have, before this channel and all of its videos are deleted, lost forever.

"Unus Annus" is a new YouTube Channel launched by Markiplier and his friend Ethan. It seems to be something of a social experiment, as once a full year from now has past, they will delete this channel and its videos as stated previously. However, they will not delete their channels, and still plan to upload videos after this is over. I'm honestly wondering if anyone will archive this?

Also other than the preview I linked above, they also released the actual first video of this journey. And if it's meant to be a sign of things to come...HOO BOY is this going to be something! (Not linking it here because it's potential NSFW. Except not really. It's hard to explain.)

I feel like this is all building up to a hilarious Joke once the year passes

Yeah people are going to archive this; nothing can be removed from the internet permanently, especially when you’re declaring your intent to do so lol

the internet archivists are on it!

As the singer Louis Philippe once sang...

"Life is but a moment, a single grain of sand"
"That slips right through the hourglass, that slips right through your hand"
"You showed me how to make each moment count"
"and I know now what life's all about."

This must be the intent for Mark and Ethan in doing these videos for Unus Annus. To make each moment count and to show us how to as well. Though the channel will be gone in less than 350 days, the memories will still be there.

I honestly don't know how to feel about this. Part of this is because - as others have said - people are going to be archiving any videos they post, making this something of a failed exercise in practice.

But mainly, I think I'm going to give this a pass because this honestly doesn't sound like my kind of thing.

It basically looks like a channel where Mark and his friends can put all their challenge videos that they've been wanting to do but didn't want to take over his Let's plays.

Farming views through FOMO?

Does kinda sound like it, doesn't it? (Even if that's probably not what they intended. Though I still suspect the whole "no archiving" thing might not work out as well as they think.)

Edited by SlackerSpice on Dec 8th 2019 at 2:10:04 PM

I have already lost track of several Youtube videos from deleted channels, or videos that were simply blocked in my country. Permanently lost content is nothing new to me.

So I don't know how to feel about the theme here. Interesting idea I guess.

Edited by Soble on Dec 8th 2019 at 4:40:14 AM

Well, it looks like it's doing pretty well - 1.4 million subscribers.

Also, there is apparently going to be merchandise - website link is available in each video description, though they're still in the pre-order stage at this point.

Edited by SlackerSpice on Dec 8th 2019 at 6:18:35 AM

And just like that, it's gone. A year has passed and they deleted the channel at the end of a 12-hour live-stream, with no gimmicks, no meta-nonsense, no stalling. They kept to their word and deleted it the second the clock reached 000:00:00:00.

I just heard about this because it got trending on Twitter, and under normal circumstances I would check it out to see what the fuss was all about, but...

I have enough dead/vanished channels in my feed already. I don't know if this really did anything for me.

I only sporadically watched their videos, and only marathoned a few a couple days ago.

For the most part nothing noteworthy happened (except Mark breaking his nose in one video).

Mark said in one video though that they will send take down notices to anyone re-uploading their videos.

I was keeping up with it, but then I got to the video where they ate bugs and I just noped right out of that.

I did eventually watch that video, but I never got caught up after that. That video was fairly early in the run, so I missed most of the videos. Ah well.

The entire channel library is now archived in Archive.org.

Will this become a Streisand Effect? Because i really doubt Ethan and Mark can DMCA all the archives

They may not need to. Major publishers are suing the Internet Archive over how they handled their "online library", and if the Archive loses they'll probably owe more than they could possibly pay.