I'm sure a lot of you are here because of YouTube's decision to royally fuck us.
I mean, that's why I'm here at least.
Let me introduce myself a bit first. I am a singer and songwriter. I make most of my money by song placements in movies and TV shows. But as a creative, it's never smart to rely on only one thing, especially when that one thing still isn't enough to pay the bills.
As I continue to make music and music videos, I continue to find myself spending money to never make money, due to social media algorithms and ultimately, the lack of monetization options. My specific audience absolutely loves the simplicity of finding my content directly uploaded to their Facebook feeds, but Facebook doesn't offer any sort of payment option for the amount of views you get. And although I knew about Facebook's algorithm that prefers to hide outside YouTube links, I would still attempt to direct my Facebook audience to my YouTube page in order to try and make a couple dollars per video.
Now, I didn't have much success driving my Facebook audience to Youtube, but the small amount of success I did see gave me the drive to keep moving forward with YouTube content. That was until I received the email that YouTube was going to discontinue monetizing my original content.
So, like many of you, I felt defeated. As an artist, it felt like all odds were against me. Like "the man" really didn't want me to do what I do and that they had finally beat me.
Then I heard about Steemit. I found myself doing some crypto-research, looking into the variety of different currency out there. My google searches looked like "cryptocurrency for musicians" or "cypto... artists... actually get paid for busting your ass day and night," and all searches lead me here.
I am very excited to join this community, and not just for the opportunity to get paid. I feel as though we are all here for the same reason, which is to find content we love and to share the projects we are passionate about making.
There are people out there who don't want to see artists succeed, and I won't even begin to understand why. But places like this give me absolute hope that human connection to art and creativity is beginning to feel its heartbeat again.
Thank you.