In some of my other articles I’ve mentioned that Youtube should never be used as the main income source. It can be used as an income stream, but don’t go for making Youtube your business, especially if you don’t already have an established Youtube channel. I mean, you can, I don’t want to dissuade anyone from doing anything, do whatever you want, but you should want to build something you own, not earn somewhere where overnight they can change the rules on you and fuck you.
Anyway, I received this email the other day:
Okay, thank you very much Youtube. Killing the little guy. I mean, it’s fine on the watch hours, but 1,000 subscribers in the past 12 months? Ridiculous. Too high.
Personally on my Youtube channel I have over 8,500+ hours of watchtime in the past 12 months, but I only have 600+ Subscribers. Which means that I have about 20 more days to get 400+ new subscribers, or lose my monetization. I could just buy them, or buy them, but I’m not sure if that will work. I’m unsure what the vetting process/algorithm/human checking will Youtube do to allow monetization. If they check and see subs are bought, they may or may not allow me to monetize. I’m still undecided whether to buy the subscribers I need or not…
If I buy them and I lose my monetization anyway, I’ve lost the money. Well, not really, as now I’ll have more subscribers and look bigger, that will help future promotion and growth. But if I get to keep the monetization, the way I’m earning now, it will take me a Year to earn back the money I’ll spend to buy the subs. Yes, it’s passive income. But what if Youtube changes the rules again in a month? But I could upload more videos, get more viewers to my videos, earn more money from the ads.
So you see, I’m undecided on how to proceed, sleeping on it. Another idea I had was checking out Freedom.tm to monetize with them, but I’m unsure if they also have the same requirements now. I guess it’s something to consider if Adsense doesn’t work out.
You can read more about the situation here: Youtube Killing Small Channels | Blackhatworld
Anyway, I’ll try to update this article in the future to write what I did and whether I lost or kept my monetization.