YouTube monetisation pending review-600x300

YouTube – The Faceless Rule-Changing Giant

June 3, 2018 profitpants

In late 2017 YouTube announced that they would soon change their rules on monetisation. If there was ever a time to argue the need to ensure that you are not relying on a single revenue stream, then this was the time …at least according to Profit Pants.

What started out in 2005 as a site to upload amateur home videos to share with friends was bought by Google in October of 2006 and began to transform. Smartphones and faster Internet connections combined to show consumers that maybe this whole “video on the Internet” thing might actually end up being quite powerful.

The home videos on shaky Sony Handicams with crackling audio slowly began to disappear and what replaced them were high resolution semi-professional productions, lapel microphones were not uncommon and the quality has never really taken a step back since. People could see that there was a place where they could promote their videos, themselves, without the old-school constraints of traditional media which rely on professional production houses, business connections and a lot of money being required in order to see a video creation reach an audience. We can’t forget the professionals either, including big name music artists who are trying to determine if streaming on Spotify and YouTube will kill off their traditional album sales.

When advertisements using the Google Adsense platform hit YouTube the creators realised that it wasn’t just a case of being able to spend a small amount of capital in order to reach an audience, it was now a case of videos being a revenue stream.

A long time has passed since those early days, but as is often the case, those who have remained consistent from the early days of YouTube were often greatly rewarded, with the benefit of attracting those early audiences who had very few creators to choose from when it came time to Like, Subscribe and Comment. Once you are big on YouTube it is then naturally easier to attract even more followers. People follow those who are followed.

And after that tangent I will segue you back to late 2017, with YouTube announcing that they were changing their monetisation. For a while the “rule” had been that you were required to have 10,000 lifetime views on your channel before YouTube would allow you to monetise. Even this 10,000 view rule hadn’t been around all that long, I remember a few years ago, maybe it was around 2014, anyone could apply to monetise.

The 10,000 view rule I saw to be a fair one. Spend a few months building an audience, or have a single semi-viral hit and you are giving the option of partaking in the sweet YouTube pool of money. Whenever we talk about pools of money I like to think back to 1990’s Duck Tales cartoon intro where they dived into the pool of gold. That vault filled to the brim with money became my side hustle dream. Anyway, the 10,000 view rule worked for deterring people from creating a brand new account and spamming out low quality content in order to make quick cash before running. 10,000 views isn’t really that many at all and in monetisation terms, while it varies and is hard to pinpoint exactly, we are realistically talking around somewhere in the realm of $5-30 that 10,000 views would pay out on any given video should they have been monetised from the start. Considering that many Google AdSense payout thresholds are somewhere around $100, it wasn’t as though you would have received a payout immediately anyway, you were only at best 1/3 of the way there.

I thought the system worked. I suspect that most creators thought the same too, as while many people would still create videos for fun even if they had one billion dollars, it’s nice to see a tiny slice of the pie trickle into your bank account to keep the motivation running high.

A whole raft of criticism revolving around advertisements from large companies running on “controversial” channels in 2017 was one of the reasons given for the need to more strictly control channels and who can run videos. I get that, it is fair enough.

Now let’s talk about my favourite subject, me. One of my channels had been running since 2014, and monetised since 2014 too. My relationship with YouTube was a happy one, the revenue came through and my views counts continued to rise. I had never received a strike on my channel and audience feedback was always positive. I was in the How-To category. The sorts of videos that people will search for, watch and like, but they had no reason to come back again as they were looking to satisfy a specific need, they needed to quickly learn how to perform a single task. My channel had well over 10,000 views with hundreds, if not thousands, of Likes as they were reasonably high quality videos that gave the viewer exactly what they needed at the time they needed it.

So bring on the new rules, and suddenly it was 4,000 hours worth of viewing over the past 12 months. That is 240,000 minutes. Imagine that you are only making short 2 minute videos, that means you will need 120,000 views in the last 12 months. The bar has suddenly been lifted from 10,000 lifetime views to 120,000 views over 12 months. That is a huge change. In any event, I was still well above this guideline so it wasn’t a problem for me.

It was the second rule though that caused me pain, the requirement to have 1000 subscribers. Yes, it is not many for a lot of people. But if you are in the How-To space where you are creating high quality single-serve videos then it is a problem.

Let’s imagine for a second that you run a website that stores instruction manuals available for every Sony videocamera that has ever been made. If you have lost your instruction manual and need one in a pinch then this website is going to be the most valuable thing in the world to you, they have delivered exactly what you need at that moment, but are you really going to be subscribing to find out what videocamera manuals are released by the website next week? Of course not, you only own one videocamera and you now have your manual. The Sony videocamera manual website may receive masses of traffic, but very few of those, bordering none, will be repeat customers coming back every single week. This is the life for many in the How-To category of YouTube.

Now, you know what, I was even THAT angry about this change. You see, I had been on YouTube for a few years and my channel was gaining in popularity, I calculated that I would be less than 150 subscribers away from the 1000 limit by the time of the late February 2018 implementation of these new rules. I calculated that by late March I would hit 1000 subscribers and I could then be re-added to the monetisation program, also keeping in mind that my videos had been monetised for the best part of 4 years already.

So late February hits and suddenly my channel goes from making some pocket money, to not making any pocket money. A note here that as my YouTube Adsense revenue was rolled in with my other Google Adsense revenue streams (from website ads) I received payouts every month up until February. The whole Adsense thing is only a side project for me, so I can afford to miss out on a bit of a extra pocket money, it was just annoying more than anything that I would be losing out on a couple of hundred dollars of video advertising revenue while I waited to hit 1000 subscribers and YouTube continued to run advertisements on my videos …and did I mention that advertisements had already been running on this same channel for 4 years up until this point!

Late March, or maybe it was early April, I can’t remember, comes around and I hit the glorious 1000 subscribers. I was now worthy of YouTube’s money. I click into the YouTube Creator Studio and to my delight confirm in the channel settings that I have successfully met the new thresholds, keeping in mind that my viewing hours were always well above the 4000 hour target, and I wait. There was now however a message that there was a backlog of reviews and that they weren’t expecting to get through them until late April. Just great, another few weeks of no YouTube payments for my videos which are still running ads.

I wait until late April and then there is a new announcement. The review time has changed again. This time the estimated date to get through the reviews is late June. Yet another 2 months.

So, let’s get this straight, my channel which had been earning revenue for the best part of 4 years, a channel without a single strike, will now not be monetised for 4 months. Well, that is 4 months until the “review” is completed. This is 4 months where the advertisements have still been rolling on my channel, the only difference is that the ad revenue has been kept by YouTube and not shared with me. I’ll miss out on a few hundred dollars over this period, but from what I have read on various Internet forums there are creators with 100x the views of mine who are also going through similar situations.

Multiply my hundreds of dollars of revenue that I am missing out on over these 4 months by tens of thousands of others who are in the same situation and you are talking about big money. Potentially there may be millions of dollars, maybe a lot more, of YouTube ad revenue that will now sit in the coffers of YouTube/Google instead of being shared with creators while these “channel reviews” continue.

Communication back from YouTube has been close to nil. I don’t believe that the review of small channels is a priority for them whatsoever. The YouTube platform has changed greatly in recent times. I feel as though they want to be the next Netflix or Hollywood production studio. But it all just feels a bit dirty.

How long does it really take to review a channel to determine if provides suitable videos for serving advertisements? I’m sure that my lost revenue could be put towards doing at least a few channel reviews. I hazard a guess that the review process would entail a single low paid worker clicking around your channel for a few minutes at most before coming up with a decision on your financial fate.

But what incentive do YouTube really have to finish their reviews? The process has been handled extremely poorly. To be honest I thought that they should have grandfathered in existing monetised channels who didn’t meet the new thresholds. They could still receive a content review somewhere along the track too, if required, to ensure that they weren’t running any suspicious content.

Taking control of your revenue streams is critical. Without control you are powerless. In situations where you don’t have control over the stream it is important to diversify. Always create multiple revenue streams so that if one does unexpectedly and drastically drop, as is the case for YouTube here, at least you are not going back to zero.

I’m sure that I will be monetised again within the next 6 months. But for now, it is all just a little bit shit. It might be easier, and more profitable, to just go and hunt pythons in the Everglades.

UPDATE 27-June: So with 3 days remaining until the “end of June” deadline I am once again monetised! I am still sceptical of the whole review process, both the time taken as well as the motives behind it. 4 months of lost YouTube revenue has cost me in the hundreds, and I am just an extremely small player in the game. At least now that once again money will be coming through I can shift back to video content creation, a process which I hadn’t bothered to touch over the last few months as I didn’t know whether or not I would ever be monetised again. Complete end-to-end control of your revenue streams, kids, the less you need to rely on others to guarantee your earnings the better!

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