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Tuesday, February 20, 2018

The End of a Paystream

Today is the day YouTube plans to cut me off. No more banana money for Bow.



After over nine years and and 1,968 video uploads, with  44,183  minutes that my videos were watched last month and monthly views of 30,424, I am going to lose my revenue stream for bananas, because I do not have one thousand subscribers. Today is the cutoff date.



They gave me a month, and I spent that month trying to get more subscribers. In the process, I seem to have alienated some of my most loyal viewers -- who are not now and never were subscribers!

Toward the end of last month, I was making around $40.00 per month. It has come down as I added commercials for myself and my channel to try to drum up subscribers. But my viewers are not my fans. They are not my friends. They are just people who like specific videos for reasons of their own. And if YouTube cared about its revenue as much as I care about mine, they would not have made this ridiculous rule about the thousand subscribers -- an impossible goal for someone who has a valuable product to sell, but is not herself popular.

Yes, my friends have subscribed. But I haven't got a thousand friends. And to tell you the truth, my subscribers do not watch my videos all that much. My own mother has better things to do than sit around all day watching my videos. My friends wish me well, but most of them have not seen most of my videos, because they have lives of their own. My real viewers are the nameless, faceless people who put food on our table, but will never, ever subscribe. My thanks go to them, even though I do not know who they are. And I understand why they do not wish to reveal their identity by subscribing.

Maybe someday YouTube will catch on.


4 comments:

  1. I am hoping YouTube rethinks their decision.

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    1. It would be nice if they did, but I think we will have a thousand subscribers sooner than they will change their minds. We were hoping Google would rethink the panda update, and they never have. It seems you have to be big, or you have to work as an employee for someone else who is big. They do not like small and independent.

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  2. This frustrates me knowing that only a few months later you now have 926 subscribers. How silly. Meanwhile, 'monkeyboo' has over 2 million...as his owner smokes up his earnings. I am pretty sure it's mostly children who make up a big percentage of the subscribers. Sometimes I wish I had the naivete of a child still.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Amy. I am a bit frustrated, too, but hopefully I will have my 1000 subscribers in time for Christmas.I still wonder why this measure of success is so important to YouTube. You would think views and minutes watched would cover all the bases.

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