The downfall of Jason Lanier - Removed as Sony Artisan of Imagery
Jason Lanier is a photography gear Youtuber, who built up his career with the help of Sony and their Alpha series of mirrorless cameras. At the same time he greatly helped building up Sony's name in the online hobbyist photography community, and probably helped to sell an enormous amounts of their overly expensive Sony Alpha cameras. His click-baity videos coupled with his arrogant persona often went viral on YouTube and gave Sony immense exposure. Lanier and his antics against Canon and Nikon DSLRs became a known name in the photography gear review community, and was a few years ago one of the top channels. This all changed in 2018.
Analysis of Jason Lanier's Youtube channel
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If we go on Lanier's website to his "Who is Jason Lanier" page, the name Sony is mentioned 5 times. The most notable paragraph is this one (as of May 29):
Jason is a member of the Sony Artisan of Imagery Program, the Worldwide Ambassador for Rotolight, Sponsored Pro for Interfit, and an Affiliate with ThinkTank Camera Bags, Adorama, and Spiderholster.
As it turns out, this information is outdated, because for some unknown reason a few days ago...
Jason Lanier was removed as Sony Artisan of Imagery
This was first spotted by another popular Youtube photography gear review channel called "The Angry Photographer". This is what he posted on his Instagram:
The information turned out to be true. If you google "Jason Lanier Sony Artisan" today, you can still find a lot of cached results, but all links to Sony's websites lead to "the page has been taken down" notices. A few days later Sony's Youtube channel set all Jason Lanier videos to private, as the Angry Photographer noticed, and posted a screen grab on his Instagram channel:
What is going on with Jason Lanier?
I believe brands are never acting illogically. There must be a solid reason as to why Sony has removed one of their artisans from all of their websites and social media. Something big must have happened. Did Lanier do something bad? Did he start with another brand? I have no idea. But the result must be devastating for Lanier, who unlike other Youtubers put all eggs into one basket. Let us see his most recent videos, a screen grab from Youtube (source):
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Compared to his old videos from a few years ago, some of which had way over 100,000 views, his latest are barely seen by anyone: On average it's 2000 to 10,000 views per video with one exception: A Sony video had nearly 50,000 views recently - how ironic. I don't know whether Sony removed Lanier because of his lesser irrelevance among online photography influencers (Lanier made it barely into the Top 20 in 2018), or whether there was something else, but this is kind of a first in the industry. I don't ever recall Nikon or Canon removing any of their ambassadors like this. Knowing Japanese corporate culture, I can only suspect that something really really bad had happened, something that brought great shame to Sony. I do wonder what Lanier will do now, when the brand that made his channel turned their back on him.
Exclusive: Ken Wheeler aka “The Angry Photographer” on Sony firing Jason Lanier as Ambassador of Light pic.twitter.com/GtzYVsiZjD— TAIPEI GEEK (@TaipeiGeek) June 23, 2018
The downfall of Jason Lanier - Removed as Sony Artisan of Imagery
Reviewed by penulis
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