Well today is the day. YouTube is dumping all partners who don't have 4000 watch hours per year.
We're at slightly more than 1/2 that and have a pretty successful channel with over 3000 subscribers and 500 videos.
A Reluctant Relocation
I was dragged over to the platform as Blip.tv was starting to crash back in the '00s, and didn't move on YT when Google bought them because I believed that Google would screw over the small creator at the first opportunity. Well, it took a few years longer than I thought, but here we are.
I remember being on the Videoblogging list (How friggin' amazing is that link!!!?) giving throaty populist speeches about how YT was going to screw us for the corporate cash and respectability and how Vimeo and Blip were the place to be as a content creator.
Home For A Few Years
Then came FB and their creepy algorithm, so I pushed all my video content onto YT. I liked it.
We did a Dog Training Web Series called Pawsitive Vybe, crowdfunded on IndieGogo.
We've dipped our toes into the YT Live space as well as experimented with YouTube's pay to play rental and purchasing space.
We never made much money. I was happy with our $70-100 per year ad revenue. It paid some hosting and app bills. It made me feel like giving away our training for free was kind of worth something; at least google throws me a few bones.
Feeling Taken Advantage Of
Now, YT is going to be putting their own ads on my videos that I purposefully created to be monetized and I'm going to get nothing out of it. It's really rather rude when you think about it. I have spent thousands of hours on my channel and the profits, as slim as they may be, are going to be stripped from me and my business. It is Ugly.
Me and millions of other users, the users who create the regular content that serves as the backbone of YT as a goto entity for humanity – the dog trainers, the mechanics, and essentially all people doing "How To" on anything but tech – we are going to get the shaft.
All that's going to be left are MSNBC and FOX News Snippets, VEVO, and self aggrandizing viral VJs.
Paving Paradise to Put Up a Parking Lot
I think this is a pretty collossal fuck up by a company who's motto used to be "Don't Be Evil". They have not thought it through. Like most top heavy metric based corporate "intelligence", it completely misses the forest for the trees.
They're screwing ALL the people who put up the purpose driven content that brings people to YouTube, specifically. All the mechanics, dog trainers, the people who do the tutorials on all the things. They're going to get the shaft. I'm betting they're as salty as me and will go somewhere else.
This is YTs bread a butter. It's what makes YT different from the other video sites kicking out viral and bombastic videos.
"Man, my fucking washer broke..."
"Did you check YouTube?"
I think that stuff is going to go away. I think Google pushed it away with this demonetization play.
Where To? DLive and D.tube?
I'm optimistic about both DLive and D.tube, but they're too clunky. They're not polished enough, stable enough, and don't have the feature set necessary to catch the people doing this work.
I'll do it with dogs here, as it's not being done yet and we can get some revenue in a week's time via the Steem rubric, but I'm not sure that my disc dog videos will do well here, and other how to and non-time sensitive videos I think will have the same problem.
Vimeo is a place I'm going to look into again. I've been a middle tier customer of vimeo for a long time. There's no ad revenue, but there are no ads either. Discovery is tough, however, so I still have to find a place to put them.
What About You?
Anyone else going through this? Have any idea where to go? Strategy tips?