Don’t spit out your coffee like YouTube does

Thank you for having your coffee with me! To all my patrons, sitting for 2 hours a month with me for 2 hours of caffeine every month. I’m better spent than an afternoon in Starbucks (Even though I love Starbucks and I love their logo).

I gotta tell you something - I had a fight with YouTube very recently - and they wrote to me and made me an offer...

What you probably don’t realize is, many creators (not just me) on YouTube started an exodus 3 years ago. YouTube started “Demonizing” our accounts. I just learned about this term due to my recent fight with them.

In a bid to “protect advertisers” they started de-monitizing accounts on the basis of any content that could be construed explicit. This was down to some complaint that advertisers were deemed to be supporting channels that were targeting children, or appearing to be pornographic. So what did YouTube do? They ran their “skin detection” and keyword algorithms over all content and used an AI to detect skin, and body parts and shapes. Meaning anyone in a bathing suit is now classed as explicit - automatically.

This action was referred to as “Demonizing” creators, and I certainly felt it. I went from $100 dollars a month of monetized support to less than $5. I had a job at the time and all monies made on YouTube was simply going towards the cost of making the videos. When that stopped. I stopped. I have a hobby I want to share, but when it gets demonized and marked as explicit and adult and innapropriate I FEEL DEMONIZED. I feel accused of perpetrating some offensive intent. It’s not nice to have your beautiful hobby ruined by a big Corp that’s making billions and sets the rules.

So I stopped. YouTube became a constant source of pain to me and added to the insults on my mental health. I’m pretty sure many yoga creators felt the same. Well, because I’ve started posting clips on that channel again (with closed comments so I don’t have to suffer the keyboard trolls) I got one of those automated explicit notices again. This time I went ballistic.

There was an opportunity there to appeal - so I did. Well, within 48 hours YouTube wrote back to me to say they had manually approved my account, and one step further - invited me to paygate my channel. (In place of lost advertiser sponsorship - to collect membership fees and post exclusive content behind a paywall)

THAT WAS A BIT LATE WASN’T IT? This printed me to Google a bit about this membership deal that was offered to me, which usually only kicks in after about 30k subscribers. Turns out, YouTube felt the pinch when content creators working on their bodies moved over to Patreon.

I’m going to paygate my YouTube channel in the near future, and will only apply to exclusive future content, but you don’t have to subscribe over there because I post everything on Patreon. Patreon also offers me a better deal - as YouTube takes a huge 30% cut, whereas Patreon really only takes the equivalent of a management fee of 10% and transaction fees.