The Bright Side of YouTube's Demonetization Spree
Welcome to Wide Open World
This channel is all about entrepreneurship. It's about starting your own business and charting your own path in life. Today, for our first video, we're going to talk about the bright side of YouTube's recent demonetization spree.
There are a lot of content creators on YouTube right now that are very upset because their videos are being demonetized. That is, they used to be able to collect money for letting YouTube put ads in them and now they're not. Reasons vary but generally it comes down to YouTube saying that these videos are not friendly for the advertisers, aren't compatible with the brands, etc.
Now, let's put things into perspective here. If you were to start your own website and shoot your own videos for them, you'd have to upload them to a server. You'd need hosting and that costs money. I mean it's not cheap - especially when they're big files. You know these 4k videos that people are shooting now? They're huge files and they're expensive to host, especially if you're getting a lot of traffic to them. Facilitating that traffic costs money so it's a miracle that YouTube is providing this service for free in the first place and the fact that they're willing to sometimes pay people a bit for the advertising that they inject is just a bonus. I think content creators have gotten kind of lazy because normally, if you're producing a show, it's up to you to monetize it yourself. You have to go and find brands to partner with, make phone calls, send out emails, and organize these deals for yourself in order to earn any money. YouTube's doing it for people and now everyone seems to just expect it. They feel entitled to it and a lot of people are citing censorship and that it's an infringement of freedom of speech and things like that when YouTube removes the monetization... but it's not. It belongs to YouTube. It's private property and they're nice enough to let us use it for free. We're guests in their house. What they want to let us do in their house is up to them and if we don't like it we can go somewhere else. We have no right to their property and we have no right to force them to use it in ways that they don't want to so I think we need to step back, get a little perspective here, and see this as the opportunity that it is. It's an opportunity to reevaluate our business models. If you're a content creator, it's time to learn how to organize your own deals. YouTube doesn't pay that well anyway and if you want to score some really good deals, you're gonna have to go out and organize them yourself.
This is our first video on Wide Open World so we don't have the subscriber base or the traffic to justify charging a lot of money for ad space here so we have to just start small and keep at it. Everyone knows a business owner of some kind, right? Just offer to promote their brand on your channel for ten bucks. Start small and just get the ball rolling. As you accumulate more traffic and more subscribers, you'll be able to raise your prices and start making more money but you have to actually start. You're not going to make a lot right away but just start. It snowballs, trust me, just get the ball rolling and it'll take care of itself over time but you gotta do the work not just sit back expecting YouTube to do everything for you because those days are fading away and it's up to us to take charge of our own destinies.
For any YouTube creators that're watching this, here's your challenge: You can do this tomorrow. One day, that's all it takes. Find a business that caters to the audience that you target and tell them what you're doing. Say that you're just starting to offer advertising slots and you're offering a really low introductory price right now. Just offer to feature their brand on your show. It's not going to take long for someone to say yes and then you're just going to inject that brand into your next video, like YouTube does. We'll do it too in the next video that we produce here at Wide Open World. We'll have a brand lined up and an ad ready to go so be sure to subscribe and check back in when our next video comes up to see what it looks like and if you've done it too, you can tell us about it in the comments below. Tell us about your business, your channel, and the deal you lined up. I'd wish you luck but, if you do the work, you don't need it.
For some less naive outlooks on why advertisers are abandoning and boycotting youtube, Clif High's latest video is worth a listen:
They're leaving because of the way that YouTube automatic ally places their ads. If they could deliberately pick and choose where their ads appeared, they wouldn't have a problem. The approach I'm advocating ditches the automation and goes back to the old fashioned way of negotiating your own deals with brands and manually running the ads yourself rather than leaving it up to an algorithm to do it (badly) for you. There are other tools that can help as well, but I'll go into those in our next video (one of them is steemit, of course).
Respectfully, I think you're way off on this, and if you spend any amount of time trying to build a brand on YouTube you'll quickly understand. While it is their site, they also make you believe through their Terms of Services that everyone has a fair shake. The reality is that if for any reason they disagree with your content or your message, things start "happening" to your channel, and all your hard work can disappear overnight. And I guarantee you it's super hard work. Except for a few select "YouTube Partners" (such as "VEVO", where literally anything goes), for everyone else, it's clawing your way up every step of the way.
What YouTube really has (like facebook, twitter, ebay, etc) is access to huge distribution (otherwise why even complain? Just switch to a site like vidme.com and you're right back where you left off!) But it's still up to you to work your ass off to access that distribution (just like on steemit) and build your audience with quality content. And for whatever reason, it's not that easy to get followers on one platform to move over and follow you on another platform (ie. how many of your steemit followers are also with you on twitter or facebook?)
And even if you managed to build your channel up to bringing in thousands of dollars of revenue a month as we did (of which YouTube gets almost half that you know about), they won't hesitate to wreck one of their "partners" in a heartbeat if they disagree with their politics or whatever other social "agenda-du-jour" they're pursuing. But, like I said, until you've lived it...
My Story: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@alexpmorris/hollywood-s-become-the-bully-that-everyone-loves-to-hate-part-2
PJW: YouTube Censorship: The Ugly Truth:
You might have also noticed that we came to this conclusion back in 2011!
I'm very much up to speed on the situation and one doesn't have to do a thing themselves in order to comprehend it (no need to shoot yourself to know that it would hurt and damage you because there are plenty of other case studies out there to learn from, right?).
Yes, YouTube offers fantastic distribution and they host our content for free. Those are very good reasons to use it... but it doesn't entitle us to anything. They don't owe us anything at all and we have no right to make demands of them. This sort of entitlement mentality is very similar to a lot of the people on Steemit that joined early, made thousands of dollars per post, and then started complaining when the price tanked. I'm telling YouTubers exactly what I tell Steemians - go away, shop around for better alternatives, and when you come back, quit complaining about how you aren't getting enough free stuff. Relying on YouTube to automate your client acquisition process is just lazy and it makes you vulnerable to changes in the system. I'm advocating for people to take responsibility for their own business, establish their own business relationships, and quit expecting someone else to do the work for them.
Really? Demonetization a good thing? So the monetization must come from somewhere else or what happens to people's lives? Also the price for hosting is relatively cheap so what exactly does Youtube provide if not to help people monetize content?
Sure if Steemit can do better then that makes sense but? This is an opportunity to replace Youtube. Decentralized storage and hosting can exist. There is LivePeer which I heard about for instance.
Yes, rather than sitting back and letting the YouTube algorithm do all the work for us, we actually have to learn to market our own content. Pick up the phone, send out a blizzard or emails, and establish mutually-beneficial relationships with businesses that want to reach your audience. The entitlement people are showing on YouTube is very similar to the entitlement people are showing on Steemit lately. These free-to-use websites owe us absolutely nothing.
Our next video will explore some of the tools content creators can use to make their work much easier but it's important to start with the fundamentals and do some good old fashioned pitching in the beginning so that you understand and appreciate what's actually happening.
If they owe us nothing then we also owe them nothing. No loyalty required if we are rational.
True. We agree to their terms of use but besides that, we have no obligations to them whatsoever.
How about LBRY?
How can I watch an LRBY hosted video?
I think it's being released in April so not yet but it seems like it will be a cool platform. Here's a link to the site: https://lbry.io/
Definitely worth keeping an eye on.
You might like this post : https://steemit.com/anarchism/@lasseehlers/statism-anarchism-in-order-to-try-to-build-an-global-anarchistic-society-i-unfollowed-every-steemit-account-that-don-t-use-their
Youtube is like hitler.
Not really. An anarchist should be cool with people calling themselves whatever they want. If you want to be known as spunkmonkey732, that's your right and I would be way out of line to insist otherwise.
I guess if Hitler were a free video hosting company, you might be right about that last bit.
Yes you have that freedom, its just not easy to identify you if you don't use your real name.
Real names are in a way the state-slave name, but since we are so used to call other people (I am at least) by their name, it make most sense (again to me) to use a real name... so that it is possible to get to know people in different contexts and build relationships... I am personally not really cool with building relationship with the screen-name spunkmonkey732 ... but sure everyone can do as they like, as long as they follow the NAP.
Do you mind telling us, your reason for using a screen-name instead of your real name?
It's a sort of branding. You can already find me (Gabriel Scheare) on all the major social media platforms, where I chat more casually with friends, but here on Steemit, I decided to serve a specific purpose with this account. I have other accounts as well for other purposes.
Ok, in that case it make sense, I agree with you.