A Backhand From YouTube, Just In Time For The Holidays

I recently had a confluence of events happen that got me really excited as a creator! You see, I've been working with the Azukail Games YouTube channel for several years now, trying to get them monetized. I even went into overdrive last year when YouTube announced they were changing their standards for monetization, requiring channels to have 500 subscribers instead of 1,000, and only 3,000 hours of watched content instead of 4,000 to get monetized.

Well, we crossed that line a couple of days ago. I was in the midst of celebrating when I looked around, and saw the goddamn goalposts had moved. So I wanted to share my experience this week, and hopefully ask all the folks in my audience to help me pull off something of a Christmas miracle before we see the end of 2024.

It's not a great situation, and I could use all the help I can get...

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

So... What The Hell Happened?

All right, let me set the scene for you. I started making videos for Azukail Games roughly three years ago at this point. They're one of my primary publishers, and they figured that video content would be a good way to promote the supplements we were making, and to diversify the content options our audience had. The goal was eventual monetization, but we had a long way to grow before we got there. We saw some steady growth over the first two years, and then last year YouTube announced their shifts in monetization policy. This lit a fire under me and Adrian (the fellow who runs the company and the channel), and we started working harder than ever to diversify the sorts of content we were making, to promote it in more places, and to try to get over that finish line. Even when the algorithm change hit in Fall 2023 and cratered our views, we built back, dusted ourselves off, and kept climbing.

Earlier last week we were at 2,980 hours, or thereabouts... roughly 20 hours away from that golden 3,000 hour mark we'd been told to shoot for by YouTube. Then my second World of Darkness video essay, The Problem With Pentex dropped, and had the closest thing we've managed to a viral success on the channel! In less than a week it racked up over 3,800 views, several hundred upvotes, nearly triple-digit comments, and it added close to 90 subscribers to our channel, which is a big damn deal for a channel our size.

So, in short, we blew past that 3,000 hour mark like a sprinter putting on a final burst of speed before they crossed that finish line!

So what's the problem? Shouldn't we be celebrating, and doing a victory lap after working for years to get to this point? Well yes, and we would be... if we'd actually achieved the goal we set out to achieve.

Because, you see, YouTube didn't actually change the requirements for getting ad revenue from your videos. In order to get a cut of that ad revenue, you still need to get 4,000 hours, and 1,000 subscribers. What they changed was that when you hit that 3K hours and 500 subs mark is that your viewers can now leave you tips, and choose to fund you via YT's version of Patreon. Things that are really helpful when you have tens of thousands of subs, but which are basically useless for a small channel, which we very definitely still are.

And that's the situation we're put in. We thought we'd finally achieved the goal we'd been working toward for years, only to find out that now we could accept tips straight through YT itself... something that's basically useless to us since Azukail Games already has a Patreon to fund the channel. And since we don't really do live broadcasts (it's just not the sort of content we make) none of those tools are any use to us either.

And while the above video did really well, blowing basically every video on the channel out of the water in terms of metrics, it hasn't blown up so big that it can single-handedly make up the extra 1,000 hours of watch time we need to hit that 4,000 hour mark and actually get our piece of the ad revenue... which is what we need in order to fund all the future endeavors we've been planning on.

What We Need From You!

While the latest World of Darkness video essay did really well, it really only added a few hundred extra view hours past the 3,000 hour mark. Realistically, we still need between 400 and 700 hours of additional watch time in order to get us over that hump, and to get our channel a cut of the ad revenue we generate. Revenue that Azukail Games can reinvest back into making new, better videos, as well as projects like the Chronicles of Darkness audio drama podcast Windy City Shadows, which is something I've been plotting out and trying to get ready for the day we finally get our piece of the pie (since big projects like that don't just appear out of thin air).

So, in short, we need everyone reading this to go to the Azukail Games YouTube channel, and watch some of our content! If you just have time for a single video, watch The Problem With Pentex, or my earlier video essay The Liminal Horror of Changeling: The Lost. But if you're willing to dedicate a little additional time to helping boost our signal, you could put on one of the following playlists instead!

- Spoken Word: This playlist contains all 50 of my audio dramas, and it's the second longest-running playlist on the entire channel! If you want a preview of what Windy City Shadows will be like, check this one out.

- Speaking of Sundara: This video series is where I talk about my fantasy RPG setting Sundara: Dawn of a New Age for both Pathfinder Classic and DND 5E. So if you're looking for a new setting to try out this holiday season, come and take a tour of my world!

- Discussions of Darkness: A series where I talk about the World and Chronicles of Darkness settings, and how to avoid so many of the pitfalls and bad decisions that can leave serious black marks on your chronicle.

- Tabletop Mercenary: In this series I pull back the curtain, and show folks how you can make a living writing tabletop RPGs. If you've been thinking about doing this as a full-time job, or just as a side hustle, this is definitely a show you should check out!

- Tactical Plastic Report: This is a collection of videos I'm making about my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic. So if you've wanted to get a tour of this game, and to listen to me talk about it as a creator, check this series out! It's the newest playlist on the channel, and you can currently get through all the videos on this list in a little under and hour.

There are only so many hours in a day, however, and YouTube tends to "revise" watch hours down if there are other videos playing on the same account, if too many videos are watching in too rapid a period of time, and so on, and so forth. So while I would definitely encourage folks to watch my videos as the primary means of helping, please consider doing the following as well:

- Sharing Videos On Your Social Media: You never know what is going to be the shout out that starts a genuine avalanche.

- Comment On Vides: Comments of at least 7 words shake the algorithm awake, and inform it that people are paying attention.

- Subscribe To The Channel: Subscribing makes a big difference to how the algorithm treats you as a creator. The more subs you have (and the more folks who hit the bell to get updates), the more the algorithm weights things in your favor.

At time of writing we have a little less than 2 weeks for us to hit this goal by the new year. So if you're someone who wants to help me end the year on a high note, getting the Azukail Games channel over this hump would be amazing. I have so many projects I want to pursue in partnership with my publisher, but it's really hard to justify putting together bigger, more expensive, time-consuming endeavors when the channel doesn't bring in any money to balance out that overhead cost.

Thank you in advance to everyone who takes a few hours of their time to help... your support of smaller publishers and creators is making a difference. Without you, we simply can't do what we do.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

500 Hours, Fae Noir, And How You Can Help!

I've talked a lot about numbers on this blog over the years, because even though authors work with letters and words, we live and die by numbers. Whether it's reads on our blogs, watches on our YouTube channels, or sales of our books, our success or failure is determined entirely by the cold, uncaring hand of math... a field most of us became writers to avoid actually having to deal with. But while I've covered this in Talking About Numbers Again (What Creators Actually Need To Survive) as well as in If 90,000 People Read This Article, I Can Pay My Bills This Month, there is something that I haven't really talked about that a lot of us deal with in the creative field, but can sometimes have trouble putting into words.

Because sometimes numbers feel so small, but at the same time so impossible to achieve that you feel like you're climbing a set of stairs in a dream; the closer you get, the further and further away the top actually seems to be.

And to illustrate my point, I want to talk about an ongoing struggle I'm having with a project.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

So Close, But So Far

The numbers-related issue I'm currently dealing with is related to the ongoing struggle I and Azukail Games have been dealing with when it comes to YouTube. Speaking of, if you haven't yet, please subscribe to the Azukail Games channel.

So, let's talk numbers, and bring everyone up to date.

For those who don't know, YouTube requires a channel to have 500 subscribers, and at least 3,000 watched hours of content in the past 365 days before it monetizes you. Until that happens, every ad that runs on your videos is going 100% into the company's pockets.

Now, that 365 days part is just as important as the 3,000 hours part. Because if your channel is more than a year old (as the Azukail Games channel is), that means every new day knocks off some of your old hours, and reduces your overall count. So every day you not only need to make up those hours you've lost, but you also need to get fresh, new hours to increase your overall count. And this can be extremely frustrating, particularly since the changes to website algorithms have drastically limited the reach of social media since November 2023, and this has led to a slow bleed on the progress I've made so far.

For harder numbers, going into May, the channel needed roughly 380 additional watch hours over and above what we'd earned up to that point to get monetized. Fast-forward to August, and we've dropped back down to needing another 500 hours to cross that finish line.

500 hours is, in the grand scheme of YouTube, not hard to get. But at the same time, it feels absolutely impossible.

Consider the above video, The Liminal Horror of Changeling: The Lost for just a moment. This video essay about the tabletop RPG Changeling: The Lost is about 24 minutes long, but we'll just go with a nice, round 20 for our count. That means every 3 watches of this video is 1 hour of watched content. So if we need 500 total hours, all it would take is 1,500 people watching this video.

That sounds like a lot... and it both is and isn't.

To begin with, the channel has over 1,160 subscribers. If every one of them took 20 minutes or so to watch this video, that would put us most of the way to our goal. I have over 700 people following my Facebook author page, and if all of those folks watched the video and shared it on their own pages, it would definitely hit the numbers that it needed to. I've shared this video in Chronicles of Darkness groups and subreddits with thousands of members, and if even a fraction of them watched and spread this video, we would smash past that goal and get the channel monetized.

But at time of writing, this video only has 421 views. It has an overall positive reaction, some good comments, and it keeps getting seen... but it's a very slow burn, indeed.

What makes this so frustrating is that view counts, signal spread, etc., typically have nothing to do with the quality of the content you've made, any more than the quality of a novel is directly reflected by its sales figures. It's often far more about advertising, keywords, whether the algorithm does or doesn't support your current efforts, how many subscribers a social media page or profile has, and most importantly, how many people are actually trying to boost something's signal.

Because if a majority of my friends list on Facebook all watched, left a heart, and shared this video, it would easily smash the channel past that 3,000 hour mark. If Onyx Path, the company that makes Changeling: The Lost, shared this video on their Twitter page with 15,000 followers, it very well might catch the attention of the community and push us up over that goal. Or if Changeling just started trending for some unfathomable reason, that could lead to this video (as well as the audio dramas I've made for the setting) getting huge views and exploding overnight for no apparent cause.

But if none of that happens, then you're left fighting the algorithm, and attempting to persuade people to give you a hand up. And while you get lucky sometimes, you roll a lot more 1s than you do 20s on these tries.

Fae Noir, And Why This Number Matters

But I told you that story so that I can tell you this story.

Because for a little over a year, now, I've wanted to start making bigger, more involved audio dramas set in the Chronicles of Darkness TTRPG setting. I've done all the research on the legalities, I've put together a rough plotline for 2 seasons, I've tapped interested voice talent, and I've spent the past several years telling short, snacky stories to give examples of how this project may sound (like this story, taken from the supplement 100 Gateways Into (And Out Of) The Hedge).

While I've talked about Windy City Shadows before (as well as giving an elevator pitch for the first season, titled Grimm Promises which I covered in "Windy City Shadows," A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal), something I've tried to emphasize is that this is a project I want to take on after the Azukail Games YouTube channel gets monetized.

The main reason for this is that taking on something this big isn't easy, and it's going to take a lot of work, time, energy... and money. So I want to make sure that one of the sources that could help fund this show (namely ad revenue from the channel) is in place and ready to go before I begin the undertaking. And the more discretionary budget Azukail Games has (again, they are my publisher, not my channel, nor my company), the more they'd be able to help me get this very hefty project off the ground.

Which brings us back to the matter of 500 hours.

The Back Door To Hell is only about 8 minutes and change. It's a very small story... but if it got 3,000 watches, that would be enough to get the channel over the goal. Again, a number that is both astonishingly high, and completely possible if the necessary elements were in place.

And that is the struggle I wanted to talk about this week, in addition to asking folks to help me make this project a reality. If it's something you're interested in, and would like more information about, then check out the recent post on my sister blog, Ask Me Anything About "Windy City Shadows" A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Writers on YouTube? Prepare For An Uphill Battle

Regular viewers know that something I like to do during Business weeks is to offer some advice on different platforms you can use to start earning money from the content you produce. One of the oldest recommendations I made was detailed in Make Money Writing (By Joining InfoBarrel), and it was joined by the more recent coverage on Want To Make Money Writing? Check Out Vocal! that I added earlier this year. Both of which are still solid examples for text-based income, by the by.

However, if you're an author who's been thinking about expanding your brand into the multimedia sphere, then you might be considering using YouTube as a way to boost your signal, and increase your earnings. After all, YouTube is free to join, gives you lots of tools, and it is accessible by huge numbers of people, so why wouldn't you want your work on it? While joining up as a content creator is not an inherently bad idea, per se, it is one that comes with a lot of strings attached. Strings that a lot of folks just don't think about.

Testing... testing...

What Does It Take To Make YouTube Work?

If you're taking your work to YouTube, whether you're creating audio books of your own work, writing skits, or doing a kind of full-cast drama, it's important to know what it is you're dealing with when it comes to this platform. Because YouTube is competitive, but even worse, they raised their bar for monetization earlier this year.

I actually help out on a YouTube channel titled Dungeon Keeper Radio, and we made an anniversary post detailing the requirements and changes to the platform that we (and all the other creators out there) now had to cope with. Give it a listen, and you'll understand why so many people are frustrated with YouTube.

Short version, for those who didn't give it a listen, is that until your channel has 1,000 subscribers on it, and a minimum of 4,000 hours of total run time over the previous 12 month period, you can't get your channel monetized. That means no ads, and no money, no matter how much work you put in, until you clear those hurdles. Given that it was only 10,000 views to get monetized (a significantly easier bar to clear) until the beginning of this year, that's a fairly major change.

So, before you get too involved in your project, ask how many videos you're willing to make before you can get ads on your channel so you can start getting paid. Because if you already have a fairly big following, and you know your work is popular, you might be able to get this sort of thing up and running within 6 months to a year. However, if you are starting from scratch and you don't have a catalog of popular work, any real fan base to speak of, etc., then you are going to find it is a lot harder getting people to hit that subscribe button than you think it would be.

That is, perhaps, the most important thing to keep in mind here. Because while a lot of platforms require you to get a big explosion of attention in order to make any real money, YouTube requires that kind of viral boom just to get the site to agree to pay you in the first place.

Better As A Supplement, Than A Main

The unvarnished facts are that if you want to make a living on YouTube then you need to have thousands of supporters, and you need hours upon hours of watched content every day. And unless you're a singing sensation, a do-it-yourself guru, or you stumble upon the next viral creepy pasta, you might find that it's tough to get enough views to even cut a check every month.

However, that doesn't mean you can't use YouTube as a supplementary platform for your work.

Which can reap benefits all its own.

For example, if you're using Patreon, then you could make audio book entries on YouTube as a way to give your audience some extra goodies, and reward those who give at a higher tier. If you're recording samples of a book that's for sale already, then you could use the popularity of the video to get a buy link in front of an audience to increase your sales. The same is true if you use YouTube to make promotional videos for your work; if they're successful enough to earn you ad revenue, then great, but if not they can still get you increased sales and visibility for your books.

Hell, you could even use YouTube as a way to talk directly to your fans, answer questions, and keep them up-to-date on your appearances, upcoming projects, and your life. As long as you're entertaining, it will help spread the word. John Green did this to massive success, for folks who've been by his channel.

If you've been thinking that YouTube is going to be that secret gold mine where your unknown work suddenly blows up and makes you an Internet millionaire, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it probably won't. Barring the usual zeitgeist that seems to select people at random, anyway. But if you want to make videos, audio, etc. as a way to supplement and boost your already existing platform, then you will probably see a lot more success. And even if your attempt at leveraging YouTube to your ends doesn't work out, well, you likely haven't lost much other than time and energy. Provided you didn't go overboard getting expensive film, sound, and editing equipment, anyway.

Speaking of YouTube, though, if you're a fan of tabletop games and fantasy, please head over to Dungeon Keeper Radio and check us out. We can use all the help we can get reaching our goals!

That's all for this installment of the Business of Writing! Hopefully some folks found it helpful. If you have questions about YouTube, and how you could use it for your brand, then leave them in the comments below. For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive. To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Lastly, if you want to help support me and my work, then you can Buy Me A Ko-Fi as a one-time tip, or go to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. Every little bit helps, and there's plenty of free stuff in it for you as a thank you!