You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.
In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas. But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.
After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.
Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.
Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.
I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics.
As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.
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