Ask Adam: How does YouTube money work (or not)? (PODCAST E23)

Ask Adam: How does YouTube money work (or not)? (PODCAST E23)

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it's the Adam regusia podcast episode 23. normally we talk about food here but today we're going to be talking about bread hey Adam Matt sitting in National City California right now um I thought you're going to work just finished one of your podcasts and I can't help but Wonder wanting to know the financial side I'm an accountant by profession uh of your rise in YouTube uh I always appreciate how grateful you are for your position and how you've you made it and you're very grateful for your listeners I would love to know more about how much of your income comes from YouTube how much of your income comes from sponsorship uh just you know the economics of what do you get from a video that makes a million views or a video that doesn't or from your podcast and loved and all those things I get it we're in the United States where we don't talk about wages and salaries and incomes all that much so be as divulging as you'd like to be I certainly understand your curiosity Matt and I doubt that you are alone in being curious about such things so I'm going to try to give you the most thorough answer that I can while still being somewhat tactful at the very least being too specific about numbers could put my business representative Colin the best West in a somewhat compromised position when negotiating deals on my behalf so I'm not going to spill all the beans but I am going to spill some of them and I'll start with some really basic stuff that I reckon a lot of people listening already know but I want to get everybody in on the ground floor so back in the Paleolithic era of 2005-2006 the first years of YouTube's existence there was no Channel monetization at least none that operated through YouTube I suppose somebody could have done their own deal with an Advertiser to do a paid message in a video that they posted to YouTube I'd be curious to know who was the first person to do that that seems like an answerable question but it's important to remember that early YouTube had very little original content on it and therefore selling ads against early YouTube content would have been legally fraught to say the least generally people do not like it when you steal their content put it on the internet sell ads against it and keep the money for yourself early YouTube was illegal uploads of the Saturday Night Live Lazy Sunday music video by The Lonely Island guys where Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about going to eat cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery in the West Village lower Manhattan the early days of the boutique cupcake boom that was I'm so glad that boom eventually busted cupcakes are massively overrated IMHO it's cake but way harder to eat I will say Lauren my wife was working at oh my now wife was working at Columbia University that summer and I went to visit her and she was like hey there's this cupcake place you gotta try and legit Magnolia cupcakes were really good I understand the hype around that place but I still consider cupcakes to be a lower form of cake if you want a small cake get a pedophore which actually fits in your mouth and will not smear frosting on your nose anywho as people rapidly started making high quality popular original content to post on YouTube and as YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 the YouTube Partner program came to be in 2007 and here's how the partner program works today you a person who makes videos you upload stuff to YouTube and you gain an audience you got to work hard for free for a while until you've reached 1 000 subscribers and people have watched your videos for at least 4 000 hours collectively within a single calendar year once you've done that you can apply to have your Channel monetized lots of people criticize this minimal threshold policy it's like if you were to go down to McDonald's and work for several months for free before they start paying you and when they do if they do they don't give you back pay for all of the burgers you've already flipped that would be pretty messed up if that happened right but it's not a Perfect Analogy because when you work at McDonald's you are directly generating revenue for the company that's less so the case when you are posting videos to YouTube outside of the partner program in theory YouTube does not play ads before during or after videos that are not posted by someone in the partner program with one notable exception and that is content that some other copyright holder has claimed YouTube has this system Content ID that automatically finds and flags content posted by people who might not actually own it for example I can go into my YouTube Creator interface right now and look at all of the people who have re-uploaded my videos or parts of my videos and if I want I can press a copyright claim against any of those people and if they don't dispute my claim of ownership I essentially become YouTube's partner for those videos even though they're not on my channel YouTube positions ads around those videos and I get the money or my share of the money YouTube keeps their share I have almost never done that by the way most people who use my vids on their channel are doing things that I consider to be fair use even if I think their fair use is stupid doesn't have to be smart to be fair but uh that's a topic for another day anyway unless it's a situation like that videos that a non-partner posts to YouTube theoretically do not directly make money for YouTube because YouTube theoretically does not position ads against such videos therefore it's not like they are denying you your share there is nothing to share again in theory obviously unpartnered creators indirectly make a ton of money for YouTube because anything that brings people to the site makes money for YouTube also just because an individual McDonald's franchise is unprofitable doesn't mean the owner can just not pay the employees because theoretically there's no money to share from they still got to pay their people but anyway I think if I were in YouTube's position I would still have some kind of minimal view or popularity threshold requirement in place for people to apply to the partner program I think that makes sense or it's more that I just can't think of any system better than that you have to narrow the field of potential partner program applicants because an actual human employee at YouTube has to do the next step in the process which is to review your channel you the Creator you achieve your minimum View and subscriber account you apply to join the partner program and a human being at YouTube has to look at your channel and make sure that YouTube really wants to sell ads against your Channel they've got to make sure that you're not just uploading content that doesn't belong to you they got to make sure that you're not just uploading blatant incitements of violence or all that kind of stuff they say this review process takes about a month and it took about a month in my case I think that they need to have a minimal view threshold to keep the workload of reviewing those partner program applications manageable if humans don't do it they'll have to write a computer program to do it and nefarious people will find ways to manipulate such a system they'll write computer programs that make literally a million new channels a day and populate them with pirated or otherwise illicit content and each channel will probably only get a handful of views but if they're all monetized you have millions of channels that will make you a little bit of money and that would add up that's a situation that would not be great so I think I support the minimum views and subscribers threshold for monetization only because I can't think of a better system if someone can think of a better idea I am ready and willing to support that but anyway you wait a month for a human to review your channel and when they do and they approve you for the partner program YouTube will start positioning ads around your videos and giving you your cut of the proceeds you retain a pretty high level of control over where ADS can go in or around your videos if a Creator you follow ever complains that they don't like how many ads YouTube puts in their videos you should call BS on that Creator because the Creator really has a lot of control there I can individually authorize or not authorize YouTube to play ads before my video after my video or during my video I have individual power over each of those three scenarios I can individually authorize or not authorize those overlaid banner ads skippable versus non-skippable ads all of that I can I can even block a specific Advertiser from advertising on my channel if I want I should probably do that more often whenever I see an ad that really concerns me I generally allow all ads except for the mid-roll ads the YouTube ads that come in the middle of the video I find those particularly disruptive and given that my channel has gotten quite successful and I don't have to scramble for every penny I usually just don't allow the mid-roll ads I will say YouTube did a thing about a year ago where they went back and automatically turned on mid-roll ads for a bunch of my old videos and a lot of other people's old videos and I have not found a way to globally turn that off I just need to go back and do it manually for each one and I will do that at some point so anyway YouTube sells space to advertisers and positions Those ads against your videos and gives you a cut the revenue split is reportedly 45.55 YouTube gets 45 you the creator of the video gets 55 of the ad Revenue I will say I have never seen that number attributed to the primary source which would be YouTube slash Google I've only ever seen that number in secondary sources like in news reports I don't know if it's real I went looking in the partner program policies document just now to find this number and I could not Perhaps it is buried in some giant terms of use contract that I sign without reading I'm not trying to accuse YouTube of anything I'm just telling you that I tried to verify that 45-55 split number with the primary source and I could not I'm not sure it's real but it sounds plausible is it reasonable people argue over that a lot if you figure that YouTube is acting as your agent in these advertising deals they're acting as your talent representative right a 45 cut for an agent is a gigantic cut compared to other older Industries like if you're an author and you have an agent who Brokers your book deals with your Publishers if you're an actor and you have an agent who books roles for you if you're a model and you have an agent who books fashion shows and photo shoots for you those agents generally take somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of your earnings assuming that you're not being totally hosed by your agent or manager the way lots of musicians were in the early days of rock and roll for example don't worry Little Richard yes you're only 19 years old and uneducated and you grew up in a shotgun shack on the backside of Pleasant Hill in Macon Georgia you're a young queer black man in the Jim Crow South and your father was just murdered and you have 12 brothers and sisters and you're the oldest who isn't away fighting in Korea and you're currently washing dishes for a living at the Greyhound bus station downtown where you wrote your first hits as you scrubbed burned beans from the bottom of pots and you're a racist white boss yelled at you don't worry Richard even though you have absolutely no power in this situation I a white record company owner named art Roop I'm gonna take good care of you Little Richard just sign on the line and I'll take all your publishing rights for Tutti Frutti forever guys like Little Richard got bad deals good deal with an agent or a manager generally you pay that person 10 to 20 percent of what you make depending on the industry so compared to those historic roles the 45 cut YouTube is purported to take that seems unjustifiably huge but again I'm not sure it's a perfect analogy if you're the talent YouTube isn't just your agent they're also the venue where you're singing your songs right they own the stage and they're promoting your concert too via their algorithm again going with the music industry analogy YouTube is your agent the promoter and the venue all rolled into one those roles have historically been kept separate in the entertainment industry for a reason probably not great for one entity to have all of that power but uh anyway in my opinion YouTube's 45 cut is it's fine I guess assuming that is what it is they own the whole shebang they host my videos they promote my videos they sell ads against my videos that involves having a massive sales team that handles all the contracts and deals with difficult clients with unreasonable expectations and all of that and then they physically position the ads around my videos I don't have to do a single thing it's not like in the olden days of TV and radio where you would actually have to make room for the commercials in your show build the whole show around the commercial breaks and then you'd have to have a master control center staffed 24 7 where people load up the commercials and hit the button at just the right time to roll the ad it's not like that anymore I do absolutely nothing they just roll the ads whenever you click on the videos and several weeks later YouTube transfers money into the bank account of yellowhouse media LLC the company that Lauren and I own if 45 is excessive somebody else should come along and beat YouTube at their game and take a smaller cut thereby attracting better creators I'm not actually that naive about uh market capitalism by the way I understand that YouTube slash Google is probably a monopoly at this point and one of the biggest flaws of true free market capitalism is its inability to deal with monopolies I believe in market economies balanced by strong Regulatory and welfare states that basic model has clearly proven itself to be the best at providing the most prosperity to the most people all the places where people want to live do basically that including arguably the United States even though neither extreme of the U.S political

Spectrum would like to admit that the U.S is a market economy balanced by relatively strong Regulatory and welfare states but I think it is with some of the aspects of the state were a little stronger and some of them are a little weaker I don't know that's what I think about that if anyone cares what Adam believes about such things which you probably shouldn't I'm just a monkey with a microphone anyway that's the basic way that you make money from YouTube there are other ways which I will talk about in detail soon this is a single topic episode of the podcast by the way I'm just talking about money for an hour but sticking with the YouTube Partner program for a moment everybody wants to know how much money do you make from a video with a million views that's a big hit on YouTube it's not a a 10 times platinum record but it's it's a gold record it's a bona fide hit how much money do you make from a video with a million views well unfortunately it really depends it depends on how how many views exactly how long the video is how long people actually watch it the extent to which you have a channel that advertisers actually want to be on which probably hinges on your viewer demographics more than anything else do people with disposable incomes watch your Channel it depends on the season YouTube Partner program income is highly seasonal right now late summer this is the doldrums views are down money is down I think in part this is just because now is when all the people who buy and sell ads are on vacation or they're thinking about going on their vacation or they're getting back into the swing of things after their vacation but anyway the amount of money that you make from a million views whatever it is it's probably a lot less than you would imagine it's not a perfect example because it doesn't have a million views yet but it's a recent example so let's go with it my video from Monday about weight lifting and cooking and the epistemological and rhetorical problems common to both of those areas of human endeavor that was a different kind of vid for me bit of a risk but for whatever reason people seem to really want to click on it and it was my biggest hit in several months as of this recording it's been up for five days it has 634 000 views the trajectory always flattens out a lot after the first couple of days so it's going to be a few months before it hits a million but it'll get there that video is almost 19 minutes it's on the longer side for me for sure average view duration is about seven minutes some people watch it all the way through some people bail after the first 10 seconds they all average out to seven minutes actual view time per person total view time on the video is 76 000 hours collectively spent by people all around the world watching this single video of mine seventy six thousand hours that's higher than usual for me about 30 000 higher than a typical vid for Maine and how much have I made from this hit video so far from the YouTube Partner program I've made about two thousand dollars now that may sound like a lot or a little to you I don't know what your situation is I have to take a second to remind myself how much money that is back when I was full-time University faculty my take-home pay after taxes and health insurance and all that was about three thousand a month so for me to spend two and a half days making one video that's made two-thirds of what I used to make in a whole month of full-time labor that's pretty freaking amazing of course that's an apples to oranges comparison because I do still have to pay taxes on that 2000 and good Lord do I pay a lot of taxes now and it's so much worse because it's not like back when I worked for the University and they would withhold my estimated taxes every month right that's generally what happens when you work for a large employer they withhold your estimated taxes every month so you never even see that money and then at the end of the year you file your taxes and usually you get a little bit of money back because you usually overpay a little that's how it is for most people with normal jobs in the United States Tax Day is actually a good day because that's when you get the money back now because I own my own company there's no one withholding my earnings to pay my taxes we actually sit down and write checks to state and federal governments big checks and when you do that it feels like you are cutting meat straight out of your own beating heart I I will reiterate that my bigger brain is quite happy to pay taxes I am broadly supportive of the project of government etc etc but it still hurts to write those checks and I do still have to buy health insurance for my entire family on the individual market now I'm not on the University's Health Plan anymore our health insurance costs well over I think twelve hundred dollars a month for Bare Bones coverage for two adults and two kids because of this country's trash can Health Care System we still pay out of pocket for nearly all of our health care the insurance is really just in case one of us gets really sick or badly injured again that's what we pay twelve hundred dollars a month for and it was more back when we lived in Georgia I think it was a thousand five hundred a month so now that two thousand dollars for a hit video is sounding like not so much money right most of that just goes to health insurance but the best thing about the YouTube economy is that when you make a video you don't just get paid one time for it as long as people keep watching that vid it keeps paying you and if you make a video or two or three every week like I do and if you make quality content that people will want to watch for years to come as hopefully I do all of those little ittyb numbers start to add up to some big ones right at this point I've got more than 400 videos in my catalog and they're all making a little money for me all the time to the point where our Collective net worth me and Lauren our net worth did recently cross over into seven figures if you include our home equity and other non-liquid assets like that stuff other than cash in the bank we are now technically barely millionaires going from a net worth of basically zero four years ago when I first started youtubing seriously that is freaking amazing amazing and I thank you all so much for that and if this ever happens to you I'll be excited for you but I also want to tell you to take a moment and Curb Your Enthusiasm it's maybe not as awesome as it seems because it is very very fragile any business is fragile when it relies on personal popularity highly unstable that is people love you one sec they hate you the next or even worse they just forget about you and they move on to the next person who captures their attention it's also highly unstable to have a business that relies entirely on another business especially one as Giant and consequently indifferent to your individual needs as Google is that's not an indictment of Google in particular that's just the nature of any giant company all it takes is for one Google executive to change one policy or one Google engineer to tweak a single line of code and all of a sudden nobody sees my videos in their feed anymore and my livelihood vanishes overnight and I would have absolutely no recourse in that event all it takes is for the next thing to come along and displace YouTube just as YouTube displaced the TV that's already happening to some extent right I don't think the tick tock style short form fad is just a fad I think it's here to stay for a while and YouTube is in on that Revolution but it's not at the center of that Revolution Tick Tock is working as a YouTuber is not like working for the Port Authority or whatever I can't count on being able to do this until I retire at which point I get a pension now I have to go super hard while I can save every penny I can and then invest those pennies wisely I've had to start learning about investing even though I find the topic somewhat unappealing but to be a responsible Breadwinner for a family I have had to learn about this stuff I got your basic retirement and college accounts going but it's good to diversify in case stocks tank which has definitely been the case so far this year thus I have been intrigued to learn about the sponsor of this episode Masterworks Masterworks is a company that allows individual investors like me to invest in the Contemporary Art Market a market that is remarkably stable and relatively independent of stocks and bonds with a correlation of less than 0.3 to other major asset classes and unlike crypto or nonsense nfts or whatever Masterworks deals in pieces that have actual value not just aesthetic value but as a financial tool in fact according to UBS two-thirds of millionaires and billionaires invest in art already as a means to diversify and hedge against inflation problem with the Art Market is that someone like me does not have tens of 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appreciated more than gold the s p real estate last time inflation was this high of course past performance is no indication of future results but Masterworks is legit look them up check them out it's almost unheard of to see 29 returns over so short a time frame especially in a market as volatile as this one see if this might be the right diversification option for you go to Masterworks dot art slash regusia that's in the show notes or in the description if you're watching this on YouTube Masterworks dot art slash regusia thank you Masterworks so that was an ad from a sponsor that I'm very grateful to have ads that I read are different from the ads that YouTube plays around my videos let's talk now about how all of that works and firstly why I do it the YouTube Partner program has been very good to me so far but there are many problems with it when I was first getting started when my popularity on YouTube first exploded out of nowhere I was getting great views on videos but as we've just discussed you don't get a lot of money for great views on a few videos I was getting checks of two or three hundred bucks a month which I should say was life-changing at the time we were really really struggling we had two tiny children some serious medical expenses a mortgage my university job and the random freelance journalism jobs that I picked up here and there that was not quite cutting it we were starting to finish our months in the red and a couple of hundred bucks from YouTube every month stopped the bleeding the feeling of relief was overwhelming but I was also totally killing myself trying to make two YouTube videos a week and work my full-time university job and that could not last I saw a better brighter future for myself on YouTube so I wanted to see how much I could maximize my income from there and the money was growing every month YouTube money is all about building that cumulative catalog of videos that all make a little bit of money for you every day it was growing but it still wasn't enough and that is when Colin the best West found me the thing about success on any social media is that it's totally public success there are websites like socialblade that Aggregates publicly available data about who's getting a lot of clicks on the internet and so when you start getting a lot of clicks people know and they start trying to find you and most of those people are blood sucking parasites and you should run far far far far away from them people come to you with all kinds of deals and promises that I can only imagine how badly I would have been duped by had this happen to me in my teens instead of in my late 30s which is when it did happen to me but Colin was neither evil nor stupid and I liked his accent he's super Scottish and super Canadian all at the same time and Colin said that he could get me some in-video sponsorship deals and this appealed to me for many reasons beyond the obvious one these were flat deals I would get paid X dollars for doing the ad in the video it's a one-time payment I get paid the same whether or not the video is a hit so it's a kind of income that is very different from partner program income and it is therefore highly complementary to the partner program income in periods when my partner income is down my sponsor income is the same as a person who is older and has serious responsibilities that kind of stability was and is very important to me it's also more stable because we ink these sponsorship deals months in advance sometimes a year in advance I know what's coming on my sponsorship schedule and while all of that income depends on my delivering views on YouTube it does not come from or through YouTube Collins company solaro management does the deals handles the paperwork collects the money wires me my share and their share is considerably more reasonable than YouTube's 45 percent three or four years ago there weren't that many companies wanting to do that kind of advertising with people like me it was really just a handful of sponsors and me and Colin did a couple such deals every month but it was enough that I was now at that point making more money youtubing than I was teaching in college and the money was about split evenly between in-video sponsorships versus partner program income and that continues to be the basic split to this day I get about half of my money from the partner program half of my money through Colin that's where we were it was still kind of modest three and a half years ago but the trend lines were pointing up and that's when I decided to quit my day job summer 2019 I believe it was I was still under contract to teach the coming Academic Year uh Mercer University was super cool and they only made me teach in the fall semester that was the most stressful few months of my life but I got through it and since 2020 I have been doing this and only this and all the while the list of companies who want to do sponsorship deals with someone like me that list of companies started to grow and grow and grow there was a brief moment when kovid first hit when the market faltered we had some Brands cancel their spots we got a little scared for like two seconds but then it it rapidly became clear that as god-awful as the pandemic was for everyone collectively it was actually quite a boon for many of the kinds of companies that place ads in videos like mine companies that sell stuff over the internet people were trying to stay home and not go out to stores and expose themselves to the virus or expose others to the virus and that was good and they started to buy way more stuff online instead and companies that sell stuff online needed to advertise their products somewhere and some of them came to people like me there are challenges to doing ads inside your videos the first being that you have to make them I have to make good interesting fun to watch persuasive commercials in addition to making fun and informative videos that's a lot of extra work also if you're going to stop in the middle of your video and do a commercial for 60 seconds you have to earn it you have to give people a video that's long enough and more importantly substantial enough to where the ad feels proportionally reasonable reasonably small as much as everybody loves Tick Tock style short form vids these days they are very hard to monetize because they aren't big enough to earn a commercial audiences will not tolerate a one minute ad in a two-minute video nor should they so I've had to make sure that all of my videos are pretty big and meaty and that gets exhausting sometimes actually it's exhausting all the time I am so so tired right now so tired you might say hey Adam you've got a successful thing going you're making great money just hire some people hire some people to help you hire some editors and researchers and then you won't be up recording podcasts at 12 30 on a Friday night like you're doing right now well maybe I will hire some help one day but I have been hesitant to because I remember M.C hammer Behind the Music on VH1 MC Hammer got real popular all at once he figured the good times would roll on forever and because he was a man of generous Spirit he hired all of his friends some for real jobs some for largely theoretical jobs and he built himself a giant golden mansion on a hill and then came the second half of that particular episode of VH1 Behind the Music if your livelihood is based on lots of people liking you you have to think of yourself like a professional athlete yeah you might be making real good money but you cannot play football forever the way that you can work at a bank for 40 years and then retire you can play football for maybe 10 years and then your body will be spent you have to make and save a ton of extra money in those 10 years because you have no idea what comes next I suppose maybe youtubing is a little bit more like being an actor in Hollywood you can act for 40 or 50 years it's just unlikely especially if you're a woman unfortunately but this is why Screen Actor is unionized and fought so hard for residuals actors get paid a share of the money that continues to be generated when people continue to watch that movie that they made decades ago on the one hand that system seems unfair it seems unfair that the actor gets some residuals while like the lighting person or the sound person doesn't get residuals they just got paid a flat fee but if you're a good lighting person and you're not a jerk and people like working with you you can probably count on a long and fruitful career an actor cannot most can only act as long as they stay young and pretty which isn't long so residuals there's a lot of people in retirement communities around Southern California who will tell you thank God for residuals the fact that my old videos continue to make money for me on YouTube is kinda like residuals it is great it gives me hope for our future but still even when I just take a week off for summer vacation like I did in July I see my monthly check from YouTube dive so much of my income is driven by the new videos I pump out I think the new videos play a crucial role in leading people to the old videos if and when I stop making videos entirely I won't be surprised if income from the back catalog is virtually gone dried up within months the algorithm God must be appeased with an offering of new content I don't want to hire someone because I don't want to be responsible for another person's livelihood when what I do is so inherently unstable and I want to keep as much of the money for myself as possible because I need to save it and in the scheme of things it's not that much money getting a million views on YouTube is not like MC Hammer selling a million records selling a million records made a lot more money because people paid for records gather around the fire kids let old man ragusia tell you a story people used to walk into stores and pay for music fifteen dollars for a compact disc containing only a dozen songs or so when M.C hammer sold a million records that meant 15 million dollars he didn't get all 15 million as I understand it a good artist deal at that time in the 90s would maybe result in the artist getting a dollar a record but that's still more than a million bucks for MC Hammer for two gold records and he had more than two in contrast a million views on YouTube only makes me a few thousand dollars a few more thousand dollars when you add in the in video sponsorship that Colin brought in that's great that's awesome it's so much better than a real job I know I've held several but it's comparatively modest money and I'm not about to start making it rain in the club like someone who's very very popular in the movies right it's not that kind of Fame it's not that kind of success I'm certainly not about to hire half of my buddies from high school I really really really worry about young YouTubers I see out there who have clearly hired half their buddies from high school I wish that I could make these young people watch some old VH1 Behind the Music episodes I'm sure the MC Hammer one is on YouTube you should watch it but maybe that's my generational trauma talking I am an elder Millennial I've seen some bad times economically and I started out in music a once proud and lucrative industry all but wiped out in a few years then I worked in journalism a once proud and lucrative industry all but wiped out in a few short years I'm like a depression baby I'm like Grandma ragusia who literally lived through the depression I still have the coffee can full of pennies she saved wheat pennies U.S pennies our lowest value coin they

used to have two heads of wheat on the back to symbolize the agricultural abundance of this great land old pennies are wheat pennies Grandma regusia collected wheat pennies on the assumption that they would be worth slightly more than one cent as collector items and she had them in a giant coffee can that is now on one of my bookshelves and she never threw anything away because she lived through some seriously rough times I've lived through some not so rough but still kind of rough times and I am therefore totally convinced that all of this will collapse at any minute so I keep pushing and I keep trying to diversify my income and that's part of why I'm doing the podcast at this particular instant yes the podcast is on YouTube but a growing number of people are listening to it on podcast apps and thus I now have a tiny teeny tiny little income stream that is completely independent of YouTube and that is very important to me and podcasts are long way longer than YouTube videos so I can earn the right to have more than one sponsor per episode such as Trade coffee also a sponsor of this episode man has Trade coffee gotten me through some absolutely exhausting late nights editing stuff like the late night editing session that I'm about to begin in about 15 minutes when I go to start editing what I'm shooting right now as I continue to grind and grind in the sheer Terror that all of the audience and sponsorships I've built over the last four years will crumble overnight trade has stuck with me for a while both as a supporter of my content and as a provider of my coffee I wasn't a coffee drinker until pretty recently and it has brought so much new joy to my life it's never too late to get into this wonderful magical Elixir called coffee but you may need a guide if you're new to coffee and trade is here to hold your hand as they held mind you go on their website you take their quiz you tell them how you take your coffee you tell them what kind of flavors you like it's okay if you don't really know trade will select stuff for you not stuff that's like down in some Warehouse of surplus coffee that they bought for no money and they're just trying to move the product that's not what trade does at all trade goes out and finds the best most exciting independent coffee roasters out there and they partner with those Roasters and then they have one of those Roasters send you a bag with something top quality Super Fresh and totally right for your tastes my trade subscription helped me learn that I like really light roasts low temperature roasts because they preserve a lot more of the character of The Bean and roast level has nothing to do with strength you can still brew an extremely strong cup of coffee with a light roast and I intend to in about 14 minutes and I like brighter more acidic coffees which is kind of unusual but I'm not alone in that and so trade worked with me to create a collection Adam rigucia's tart faves that's the name of the collection if you want you can just subscribe to my collection at drinktrade.com Adam show it's pretty awesome I must say or browse other people's collections if you're more into dark toasty coffee or sweet nutty coffee or whatever you do you or you can just take their coffee quiz and they'll basically make the you collection they'll send you what you like expertly matched they have a whole team of professional tasters so if you want to support small businesses and Brew the best cup of coffee you've ever made at home it's time to try Trade coffee right now trade is offering my listeners a total of thirty dollars off your first order plus free shipping at drinktrade.com Adam show that's drinktrade.com Adam show

link is in the show notes video description thank you trade coffee and I think that you dear listener should take a moment to thank every sponsor every individual contributor every person who makes your favorite content possible people who make the things you consume need to be paid and if you're young if you say under 30 you might not have had the experience that all of us Elder Millennial and gen xers have had where we had things that we loved music novels comic books TV shows movies magazines newspapers things that brought us so much joy things that helped us make sense of our world and endure our world things that made our lives worth living and then we watched as the economies that supported these things broke like waves against the Cliffs of the internet some people can still make a living in music but not many and almost no one can make a living making records touring is really the only way now there were people who just used to make records making records was their whole job recording artists they were called and engineers there aren't many of them anymore and yeah I'll say it records aren't as good anymore it should come as little surprise people got to get paid to do good things and no one should have to apologize for demanding that they be paid for making things the collapse of the music industry is what breaks my heart the most but I think the collapse of the journalism industry is what matters the most we still have National and international reportage that's not going anywhere I do not weep for the disembowelment of Newsweek and other Publications that pretty much duplicated the work of a hundred other National or International Publications I weep for local newspapers small town local papers they are gone and people have been able to duplicate some of the functions of local newspapers pretty well with social media like there's this scandal going on in my neighborhood right now where somebody cut down a bunch of trees that they weren't supposed to cut down and everybody is up in arms about it and without the help of any local journalist I've gotten a pretty good sense of like what's going on with these stupid trees who's responsible why it matters or why it doesn't matter and what's probably going to happen next I've got all of that since simply by reading the drama in the neighborhood Facebook page some of the old functions of local papers people have managed to do on their own better than I would have predicted at least in those neighborhoods prosperous and politically connected enough to be able to keep themselves informed but the thing that absolutely terrifies me is all of the county commissions and city councils and state legislatures conducting the people's business day in day out with no reporter in the room not a single one where there used to be a whole line of reporters and if there's no reporter in the room bad things happen when there is a reporter in the room these days it's usually a child and I say that with love to all of the children I helped train in journalism when I taught journalism for many years y'all were great but you all know that you were no replacement for the reporters who used to cover those meetings in the olden days decently paid respected professionals who had every incentive to stay in their jobs for 30 40 years covering the same damn State Legislature year after year session after session getting to know all the players getting to know how the game is played often knowing the game better than the legislators actually playing it those people those reporters are just gone and now God knows what all of those legislators and City councilors and County Commissioners are doing without a reporter in the room to keep them on their toes it's just a tragedy and I still hurt from having to watch that proud industry burn to the ground how many quote unquote retirement parties I attended for reporters at places like the make and Telegraph how much smaller each party was compared to the last and how eventually we just stopped having parties people about my age and older we watch so much of what we love and value just fall to the ground and shatter into a million pieces because the supporting economies vanished I tell you this because I want you to join me in being grateful for the economics that currently supports the things that we love and value now I want you to join me in getting a warm feeling of comfort and security when I have to wait through two ads before I can watch the video I clicked on that wait is so much better than the alternative which is no video the YouTube economy has a lot of problems it does not work for everyone it does not work for smaller creators people with subscribers in say the tens of thousands there needs to be extra money in the system to support creators at that level of their development because as I've just laid out for you there's surprisingly little money in that level of viewership I want a YouTube that rewards and develops talented people who don't have the outside resources necessary to bankroll their earlier years on the platform I'm tired of hearing from such people I want to hear from everyone else the YouTube economy does not work for people who make content that is subject to capricious or otherwise unjust demonetization I'm really lucky that I just happened to get big on YouTube with food content because food content is pretty safe but even then I've had videos demonetized I made a video about a year ago one of my favorites I've ever done that was about the very very old Southern United States practice of eating white dirt they call it kaolin kale and Clay this Pure White Clay used in Pharmaceuticals and cosmetics people have eaten chaolin in the American South for Generations mostly poor rural women mostly black scientists has speculated that this might be a craving resulting from mineral deficiencies in poor diets particularly during and after pregnancy there are corresponding Earth eating practices documented in Africa among other places I made a video that talked about all of that talked about eating kaolin and I ate some kaolin in the video and YouTube demonetized the video because it's supposedly advocated a dangerous or unhealthy practice never mind that I went in into some detail on the health risks associated with eating kaolin it tears up your teeth over time it potentially causes intestinal blockages over time I talked about that and never mind that plenty of the foods in the grocery store are probably just as hazardous to your health over time some underpaid functionary at YouTube with a set of totally reasonable standards to enforce look at my video and made the wrong snap decision and I made zero dollars from that video zero dollars from the partner program I should say I did have an in-video sponsorship and that is another reason why I do those other people on YouTube make good and important content that gets unjustly demonetized far more frequently and the YouTube economy does not work for them it does not work for people who make videos about music people analyzing music criticizing music talking about music history doesn't work for them because the content ID system allows record label Bots to just steal your money even if what you're doing fits squarely within even the narrowest definition of fair use the YouTube economy does not work so well for those kinds of creators but in general the YouTube economy is a pretty robust organism the ecosystem it supports is pretty exciting to me not just because I live in it there are so many people doing really outstanding things on YouTube these days stuff that is way smarter way weirder way nerdier way more Niche than anything TV ever would have paid for the YouTube economy is paying for that in the early days of podcasting 10 or 15 years ago I listened as my friends from Radio started making really cool shows stuff that was way smarter and Freer and more fun than anything anyone would ever let them put on the radio and I just thought it was a lark but then one day somebody had an actual ad in their podcast a real company paid real US dollars to place a message in a podcast slowly slowly I kept hearing more of those and every time I did I pumped my fist every ad was a victory even though I wasn't getting any of that money I was just so excited to hear ads in podcasts because it meant that podcasts could continue to exist ads pay for Content so that you don't have to rejoice in that knowledge Rejoice knowing that people who make things you love are getting paid appreciate it because it will not last forever just as this episode of the Adam regusia podcast will not last forever in fact it will end as soon as I get done saying that you can send a question or a comment for a future app to ask Adam questions at gmail ask Adam questions at gmail if you send a video or audio file I am far more likely to actually use it next episode we'll get back to talking about food and talked about people other than me I promise I'll be at you on Monday on YouTube with a vid about fig wasps fig wasps are big on the internet again at the moment every couple of years or so somebody on the internet says hey did you realize that figs all have tiny dead little wasps inside them and everybody freaks out good news is that isn't quite true #not all figs talk to you next time

2022-08-29 13:56

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