Thoughts on YouTube's Partner Program Changes

Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) for Thursday, January 18. It's, minus six Celsius. Feels like minus 11, but apparently, it's going up to five degrees Celsius in the positive today. So it's actually a really annoying winter weather.

You'd think everybody would be excited that we're, you know, it's it's getting warmer, which it is. It's nice, but well, if it unless it's gonna stick around for until spring, which it won't, never does, then, it's annoying because the snow melts and then it goes back to being really freezing cold, but you can't do any of the fun winter stuff. The ice rinks are all a mess. The you can't go sledding on the hills with the kids. You can't just play in the backyard and sled down our deck stairs like the kids do or whatever.

It's just cold and brown and gross, and so dirty gross because the grass is all dead, obviously, and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, we'll see. Hopefully, it snows again, I guess. It feels weird to wish for more snow, but such is life. This is not a weather podcast, as you know.

It's complaining about the weather podcast maybe. I just wanted to record some thoughts on, the YouTube there. They, just recently, yesterday, announced some changes to their partner program. A partner program is where you can basically be allowed to, make a little bit of money off your channel, off the videos people watch. You if you allow advertisers, if you allow pop ups, if you allow whatever amount of invasiveness on your videos, you, can get a bit of cash in return for that because YouTube throws some ads on that, and then they give you a percentage of that.

Nothing fancy, nothing amazing about that. For the longest time, they've had eligibility to apply for it, and it I forgot what the minimum requirements were to be a part of it. It wasn't that that's, hard to be a part of it, but it wasn't just like your channel was automatically approved. I'm sure I I think way back in the day, it basically was as long as you were, a bit verified and, like, maybe you just have to check your email or whatever. But, yeah, in January here, yeah, on the sixteenth, a couple days ago, they announced new eligibility requirements for the YouTube Partner Program.

And, basically, what amounts to the two requirement changes are you have to have 4,000 watch hours in the previous twelve months on your channel. So across all your videos, four thousand hours of watch time. So it could be one video that gets watched an hour long video that gets watched 4,000 times, I guess, could work. But, yeah, in the previous twelve months and also have 1,000 subscribers that whole time or more in the last twelve months. And so what this basically does is a lot of smaller YouTube channels, myself included, get kicked out of a program that they were otherwise in before.

And I I'm not under any illusion that either I was making a lot of money for myself or making a lot of money for YouTube. So I know they're not too worried about ditching me from a business sense, and people like me, channels like mine. But it kinda sucks just as a creative person, you know, you're sort of aspiring to maybe use this as possibly to make a bit of money to help fund a hobby or see where it goes. And that's kinda what I was doing, and and it wasn't anything that I was putting my all my eggs in this YouTube basket by any means, but, it was just kinda like, let's see where this goes, and it's kinda fun if all of sudden it takes off. A video goes viral for a while and you or not viral necessarily, but gets way more views than anything else.

You're kinda like excited and seeing where it's going. And now it's kind of raised the bar to a point that's it eliminates a lot of the hobbyist just for fun and experimenting with this platform idea. And again, from a business sense, I it probably makes sense for YouTube to limit how many people are are even, attempting to sort of run their business off YouTube and, make a living that way and trying to, you know, have the cream rise to the crop and all that kind of stuff. Just to give you a bit of perspective or understand where things are at exactly on a personal level, like so Lemon Productions channel has a 144 subscribers to it. That's the one where I upload a lot of my videos on how to use different tech stuff or, you know, WordPress web stuff.

Good stuff, our podcasting channel has, 62 subscribers, and the my Minecraft, adding through Minecraft channel that I haven't really uploaded videos to for a while, but it has two two hundred twenty eight subscribers. And each of those respectively, I guess, I don't have the stats for the lemon one, but the good stuff one has a 100 just over a hundred thousand minutes watched over the last year, which is around seventeen hundred hours. So that one, I guess, could sort of be the closest in terms of watch hours, but has very low subscribers, which, again, Kyle and I aren't losing any sleep over. It's just kind of a place to archive our videos and see where that goes. The Minecraft one has 228 subscribers, like I said, but a lifetime of hours, like, over the last five years has, only 833 of watch time.

And so it's also, like, way below any sort of chance of getting a part of that. And so with the Minecraft one, I think I've I had just made enough in the Partner Program with the ads and stuff that were running on the videos that kids were watching and people were watching how to use Minecraft to pay for my initial purchase of the Minecraft game, basically 30 some dollars or so. And I think I'll still get that. I don't know. I haven't looked into it too much.

I can't remember if I got paid out for that or not already, but it just kind of like limits that little extra, like, fun. It doesn't mean the stuff that I create is any less valuable, obviously, or any less important as far as I'm concerned, whether I'm getting paid for it or not. But it does kinda basically set that. It moves the goalpost just as you were kinda, like, feeling not that I was that close to it, but it moves the goalpost even further down the field, and, you feel that much further away from anything, any sort of reward that way. What they've said they're trying to do with this change is to effectively raise the bar higher for people to make money on YouTube.

And the goal is then for YouTube to be able to review applications to the Partner Program with humans rather than just relying on algorithms and computers. But what I think it does is it kinda just delays the inevitable process of YouTube having to decide if they're actually gonna get rid of all the evil, vile video channels that promote hate or allow them to continue to live on their platform because it gets them views and advertisers, and, that's sort of what got them into this mess in the first place here where, you know, someone like BMW doesn't appreciate their ad for a fancy new car being shown alongside a Nazi propaganda video and getting a whole bunch of views because there's hateful people in the world who wanna watch that kind of stuff. So the Nazis, racist, misogynist, whatever, another lowlife that are on YouTube to spread hate, I think they'll still be able to reach four thousand watch hours and a thousand subscribers. So then what? YouTube still has to decide if they're gonna let them access partner program features or not just like they could do right now.

They could go through, stomp out anybody that's promoting hate. And if there's anybody in the gray space of like, you're not sure, well, then you don't exclude them just like you'll have to decide down the road when they get to 4,000 watch hours, a thousand subscribers. It'll kinda just narrow it might narrow those people, you know, maybe they'll work together to get their hateful video channel up to 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers, but it doesn't seem like a thing that's that far off if you know how to either gain the system, you know how to use bots, you know how to use all the kind of stuff to basically kind of get your hate message out there. And if you're motivated by trying to shout out, shout down, and promote hate in the world, I think they'll find a way to get past that mark. And so, basically, it kinda means a lot of the indie smaller creators such as myself, but I think more importantly, other folks who are actually, you know, maybe they're they're doing stuff like crafting tutorials or showing how they make t shirts or whatever they're doing, and this was kind of like a way that they're gonna also promote their hobby.

I think it sort of stomps on that more than it stomps on anybody who is using the YouTube platform inappropriately. I think it'd be a great time for service like twitchtwitch.tv to step up, and with Amazon's backing, they have Amazon has a bit of, knowledge in the storage space. They they do the s three thing for, s three storage for half the Internet, I'm sure, and allow videos to live beyond sixty days on on the Twitch platform and become the new home for indie creative videos of all types and not just video game streamers and stuff like that. And you can see it already that they're there on Twitch's directory with creative streamers like painting, drawing, photography, music, cosplay, etcetera. But the videos that you upload or stream to Twitch then disappear off Twitch and so that everybody basically uploads it.

Twitch has a tool built in to upload it to YouTube once it's done. And it's it's not hard to see a day coming where Twitch is like, why are we sending traffic to YouTube regardless of their stance or opinion of YouTube's opinion stance on creative videos or or money or whatever. But why are we sending all this traffic over to YouTube when we could keep that all that traffic here? And they have this the infrastructure in place already for it's just that it seems like they're slowly building it out where, you can upload your own videos to Twitch that you've made. And, obviously, why would you do that if it's gonna disappear in sixty days unless they have some plan down the road for videos to stay, indefinitely on Twitch.

And same thing like I said with anything you've streamed, so any good stuff show that we stream out to Twitch, then we it disappears after thirty or sixty days, off Twitch. And unless we export it right to YouTube from there, it's gone forever. And so obviously that's what we're doing. We're using YouTube as the archive, a library archive of all the backup recordings and stuff like that. So I really hope and and it it'll be interesting to watch and see what happens in this space because there are gonna be a lot of people who otherwise would would have been using YouTube that are gonna be looking for another platform potentially, and Twitch has tons of stuff built in for monetization that has nothing to do with advertisers and everything to do with viewers being able to just pay a couple pennies or a dollar or whatever back to a a channel that they like or wanna support either on like a per video basis or supporting them on a monthly basis built right into the platform.

So we'll see what happens. It's also an interesting time for, sites sites like Patreon. Again, once again to step up and and be a support site that you would use instead of relying on YouTube advertising. So again, YouTube is kinda like shunting that all off elsewhere, letting other people deal with it. So the Patreon has, their own policies obviously on hate and using their platform to raise money for what they deem inappropriate kind of stuff.

So that's that'll hopefully still be in place and clamp down on some of this stuff. But also, any creative type can use Patreon then to make their money through or raise funds through, and there's other services like Patreon, so whatever you happen to use. But one of the things that the YouTube did disallows now if you're not a Partner Program member is the ability to link to outside sites like Patreon or like a a store page or like like maybe sell shirts for your YouTube channel or whatever. You're not able to link to that anymore outside of YouTube. And so again, it just kinda cuts off any sort of little revenue possibility for a smaller channel to grow, when they're not making a bunch of money off ads or anything like that, which they weren't ever gonna really do in the first place, but it was gonna help.

And so now it they're kind of 100% relying on outside services like Patreon and hoping that folks will type the address in instead of clicking a box to go there. So interesting times in the creative space. Once again, a good reminder to not put all your money building eggs in any other corporation's basket, and, it's something that we consider here at Good Stuff with even just relying on Patreon as we saw, you know, with Patreon potentially making changes last late last year. They backed down, but, you know, we are we're not relying on it for our business and livelihoods, but, it does help with, raising funds to support just this as a hobby and as a fun place to create podcasts. So we'll see.

We'll see what we do. We've got our we have our Patreon campaign in 99% draft mode ready to go and just kinda getting a little bit of cold feet even with some of this kind of stuff and whether we drive people there or drive people to our own thing and and how that might all play out and what's best and what's manageable and what we can actually upkeep and all that kind of stuff. So if you've got thoughts and comments, feel free to tweet at me. I'm I Chris on Twitter. Chris at good stuff dot a fam is my email address.

And be sure to sign up and subscribe to my YouTube channel, of course. It's like I can get from, 144 subscribers to a thousand. I'm sure that'll happen anytime now over on the, YouTubes. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a great day.