the inevitable “future of youtube” post

…okay, so there are a few reasons as to why I am doing this. The main reason boils down to one key point though: I just do not feel comfortable earning money from YouTube, since it ruins my work/life balance.

To date, I have earned £1,840 in revenue on my channel [about $2,330~]. The vast majority of this revenue (over 90%) has come from two videos, these being the Poker Night documentaries*.

When I originally started this channel, I did actually have monetary gain in mind as a long-term end goal. While I was uncertain as to whether or not I could actually make a living out of YouTube, I did envision it as a potential method of supplementing my low student income at the time.

Before continuing, I want to go on the record and say that I wholeheartedly believe content creators should be paid fairly for their work. Currently I believe YouTube is not doing enough in the way of fairly remunerating content creators**.

I implore viewers to support their favourite content creators as and when they are able – whether it be through their Patreon, or even just turning off adblock for them. Small content creators looking to make a living on YouTube (or any such streaming site) and are working all alone need all the help they can get, especially right now. I cannot overstate this enough. 

The reason why I am turning off mid-roll is because I want to continue making videos, but I do NOT want to be a “content creator”. 

At least, not in the modern sense of the term. 

I just want to be a guy who makes videos about the games he likes in his spare time. That’s it. This distinction is very important to me, and is very important to attaining a healthy work/life balance.

Once you begin to monetise your hobbies, you essentially gain a second job. I do not want my YouTube channel to feel like a small start-up business…because I am not a business person. I just want to talk about the media I like, and that’s kind of it really. 

I have found that the introduction of ad revenue has limited my creative freedom exponentially. I should make it clear, however, that I don’t mean this in the ‘traditional’ sense (i.e. that I might not be able to cover games that might be difficult to monetise).

What I mean is it introduced yet another metric through which YouTube indirectly governed what I was making for the platform. I was making what I thought would be good for the algorithm and, by extension, what I thought would make me money. This way of thinking killed my passion for the videos. 

As I see it, YouTube’s current monetisation policy punishes brevity and risk-taking. In my own personal experience, YouTube is unwilling to push well researched short content, and is simultaneously demanding long-form masterpieces from all video essay channels on a regular basis.

With the rise of the video essay, there is far more long-form content on the site than ever before. This was great – that is until ‘content-mills’ began to quickly rise in popularity once YouTube recognised just how much insufferable mid-roll they could stuff into these videos. 

What’s especially weird is the kind of advertisers YouTube allows on the site. I am currently a YouTube Premium user (mainly for the sake of YouTube music, which I begrudgingly admit is kind of brilliant – I may discuss this another time). Personally, I don’t see any ads on the site itself. 

But those people who can’t afford (or can’t justify spending money on) a Premium membership are bombarded with adverts. Adverts marketing parasocial AI slop, get-rich-quick-schemes, misinformation, and even borderline porn in some cases. 

The worst part is that YouTube is demanding highly sanitised, advertiser friendly content from creators today – and yet the advertisers it allows on the platform are seemingly allowed to by-pass the YouTube guidelines. To be frank, it’s not acceptable. Google, you’re definitely not listening, but in the vain hope that you are – sort this out. 

I believe that in order to make a good living as a YouTube partner today, you must either:

a) use multiple revenue streams alongside the several YouTube already offers (e.g. patreon, ko-fi, external advertisers in your video, etc.)

b) have a team of people working on one channel to create a high quality video every single week, or month at a minimum (Tom Scott also makes this claim, I think) 

To maximise revenue, of course, you ought to have both. I have heard it said before that many ‘old-school’ YouTubers are quitting because they simply cannot make it alone anymore; that YouTube channels now require teams to be profitable.

If this is true, then I do not want to be profitable.

As hbomberguy has proven to us recently, content mills are bland uninspired plagiarising machines. This is a much wider, structural issue in my opinion – it is ultimately YouTube’s fault that plagiarism is happening at such a wide scale. They are fostering a platform where plagiarism is one of the most reliable means of attaining fame, status, and money. 

I am just one guy, and I like it that way. Everything I make on this channel is fully my own, for me. That is what YouTube is meant to be. I miss the old tagline: “broadcast yourself”.

As for how I will donate my remaining revenue – let me detail exactly what’s going on with this.

Until relatively recently, YouTube provided Partnered creators with a lot more ad controls. We were able to decide whether there was pre-roll, post-roll, on-site ads, etc. Now, however, we only have three options:

-Complete monetisation (with mid-roll)

-Partial monetisation (no mid-roll)

-No monetisation

My hope is that going the partial monetisation route will not be overly disruptive to people’s viewing experiences, whilst giving us a chance to use Google’s money in a productive way. I’m trying to make lemonade out of lemons, essentially, although I am not sure it will work. 

…I am worried that in the future the only options will be “complete monetisation” and “no monetisation”. If this happens I want to choose no monetisation, although this will depend on how the situation changes / what you guys are willing to put up with. Either way the revenues will be going to charity, I can guarantee that. 

Also, any “footnote” videos I make will not be monetised, so they will not have any pre-roll. Don’t worry, these don’t make much money anyway on account of them being unlisted. Some trivia – at the time of writing this video has made me £1.25, making it my lowest earning video to date! 

Some of you might be wondering why I have picked the Internet Archive as my charity. The answer is simple, if a little selfish: I use it a lot. It’s a really useful resource. I don’t want to live in a world without it. 

Little bit of meikkon lore for you – while I was working on the Poker Night 2 video, I was also working on my Master’s thesis in philosophy. I studied at the University of Sheffield, and had access to some of the best libraries in the entire country. 

And yet, I used the Internet Archive more than the dedicated humanities library. 

Why did I do this? Here’s a couple of reasons: 

-It was more user friendly; the login process for the Internet Archive is very straight-forward, while the logins for my university were notoriously long and drawn out

-It had access to books which were not in my library; this was a surprisingly common problem during the final parts of my paper, due in part to the niche nature of my research interests at the time. 

-It’s a proper online library. Next to JSTOR and (perhaps ironically) Google Scholar, the Internet Archive is not just one of the largest and most accessible research databases ever; it IS the largest and most accessible research database in my view.  

The biggest reason, however, is that my channel couldn’t even exist without the Wayback Machine, hosted by the Internet Archive. I use the Wayback Machine nearly every day for research purposes, and that’s not an exaggeration. I talk more about this here if you’re interested. 

Not to further plug my own stuff, but I also discuss the Internet Archive directly in my second footnote to the PN2 video. The essential headline is this: if the Internet Archive dies, then the Poker Night franchise dies with it…

…on a more serious note, though, the Internet Archive is currently engaged in a legal battle with Hachette, and I fear it will not be their last. While I am not a legal scholar, I do know what the prospective results of Hachette winning will be. A world with a weakened Internet Archive is one with:

-Reduced public access to important academic texts, making it substantially harder to engage in research activities

-Increased difficulty accessing education – not only for university students, but students of all ages. This is especially true for students who have a disability; the Internet Archive works with external providers to help prospective readers with print disabilities access texts. It’s also easier to log onto the Internet Archive than it is to go up and down a library when you have to deal with mobility issues. 

-Potential financial / legal threats to the Wayback Machine – the most comprehensive website archival tool to date could be lost forever if the Internet Archive can’t support itself financially. This would be a huge loss for the historians of the future – which in essence, would be a huge loss for the future generations of humankind. 

And I guess, without the Internet Archive…I wouldn’t exist. That’s maybe a bit too existential, but I can tell you that without that site I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and I wouldn’t have made the videos I work on now. It just so happens that they also fight for a worthy cause – free access to existing research and knowledge – which I strongly believe to be important. 

Before finishing this post, I want to signpost two important videos on this I think everyone should watch. First up is Ross Scott, who predicted pretty much all of this happening about 6 years ago.

And there’s also Adam Neely, who gives a perfect summary of how this whole situation contributes so heavily to creative burnout.

Also, this comic from Zen Pencils. Kind of unrelated, kind of not. The line about ‘excess and avarice’ feels especially fitting here, as is the one about being happy doing your own work. 

Like I said, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be making videos. They’ll take forever to make, and you might not want to watch a lot of them. That’s fine. I’ll still be here. 

I am determined to enjoy myself while making videos! And I’ll always be here when our interests do overlap. Until then, I’ll see you later. 

—

*side note: for those interested, the lifetime earning for my top three videos are as follows:

£1,249.05 – the 18th amendment: a poker night documentary

£469.24 – return to the inventory: a poker night 2 documentary

£48.01 – the halloween hack: a mini-documentary

the halloween hack video has about 25k~ views. so if I made a video every month of that length, and got 25k~ views each time, I would make £576~ per year. it might have been short, but the halloween hack video was not easy to make – I actually began working on it about 4-5 months before it was released.

**second side note: I do not have space to get into exactly why I believe this to be the case (not in this community post, at least). but suffice to say, youtube should not be taking a 30% cut of membership fees on channels. this number is far too high. I may talk about these issues more extensively on my personal blog in the future. I do not have any plans to make videos on them.