Tuesday, January 23, 2018

My YouTube

I’ve had my YouTube channel since March 2006. I posted videos from time to time. After a few years, I was eligible to post videos longer than 15 minutes. Then I verified my account in the background and the channel was eligible for monetization and I became a YouTube Partner.

The cool thing about these are that it allowed you to upload videos longer than 15 minutes. By verifying, it allowed you to upload custom thumbnails. By enabling monetization and becoming a YouTube Partner, I could schedule when my videos would be published.

I just uploaded random videos of vacations, karaoke, and building LEGO sets for fun. When I reached 100 subscribers, I was able to add a custom URL (http://www.Youtube.com/StupidSystemus).

There is no set theme for my channel, but I do like creating time lapse vids of me building LEGO sets. I’ve incorporated gaming videos when I learned how to do that for console. I still post random videos from time to time.

Last year, YouTube made a requirement for channels to have 10,000 lifetime views to be eligible for YouTube Partner Program. On January 16, 2018, with the recent problems plaguing YouTube (Adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0, Logan Paul), in response, YouTube sent emails to small time content creators informing them that unless they have 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers, they will lose all monetization tools and features within the YouTube Partner Program. They have until February 20, 2018 to surpass that threshold.

With my generous 250+ subscribers, my channel makes about $5-7/month. It’s peanuts compared to how much these other channels make, but it puts a smile to my face and keeps me making videos when I can. I don’t speak for all creators, but that small amount is probably what keeps them going and making videos as well. That small amount is enough to justify pouring your time effort to grow your channel.

YouTube’s response to the adpocalypse and their golden boy uploading a video of a dead body on Aokigahara is to punish tons of small time creators. They're just telling us they care about him and not about the rest of us cause he brings in a looooooooot of money. Can you imagine if websites that relied on page clicks get the same treatment? This just reinforces clickbait content and creating controversy to increase watch time from creators.

This whole thing sucks. It’s demoralizing.

At the same time, I never set out to make money on YouTube. I only enabled monetization because of the features that come with them. I hope they don’t go away. I love making videos.

I’m done.

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