Joy and Anger

Green Bean Media is delighted to announce that we have received from YouTube the Creator Award of reaching 100,000 subscribers recently. Many thanks to all of your support. We started from scratch two months ago, and walked step by step, humbly but also proudly as Hongkongers.

Nevertheless, when there’s joy, there’s also anger.

As an independent media, Green Bean Media relies on the financial support of our audiences and readers to operate sustainably. Theoretically, we should be able to receive some revenue from YouTube through broadcasting programmes on our channel given we had already met the channel’s requirements for monetization a few days after we launched our first video. We opened a Google AdSense account on 12 July for the purpose of monetization, and later started adding YouTube advertisements to the videos. It was a shock to all of us that YouTube suddenly disabled our Google AdSense account in the early morning of 15 July without providing any reason. We appealed to YouTube, and in the appeal application, we were disturbed to be asked to self-assess the reason for the account closure!

How could we figure it out? We could only explain to YouTube that Green Bean Media, as a platform to record the stories of Hongkongers in the diaspora, had received immense support from Hong Kong people in Hong Kong and overseas. Our YouTube channel traffic has thus surged in a short period of time. If this triggered the YouTube system to detect unusual traffic, we could further explain. However, as users, we did not have any data for a self-reflection of any wrongdoing in this regard.

Our appeal to restart monetization received no response for weeks, and we and our audiences waited patiently. Finally, we received the award of 100,000 subscribers. We also received YouTube's reply rejecting our appeal of monetization, and again, without providing any data or explanation. How ironic this is!

Disabling Green Bean Media's monetization function on YouTube is groundless.

This kind of unreasonableness is no stranger to the Green Bean Media production team, our audiences and readers, and all Hongkongers. You are first convicted and you are asked to defend yourself; then you try to explain with everything that falls on deaf ears, and finally the original sentence is upheld. The brutality of hegemony.

In the face of Hong Kong's authoritarian governance and global hegemonic enterprises, Green Bean Media will strive to keep going. As a diaspora news information platform, we are still in infancy. Every cent counts to maintain our operation. We urge you to support us through either monthly subscription or one-off sponsorship by clicking here:

https://greenbean.media/支持綠豆/

Thank you.