With the storms that ripped across the Midwest, I had to relocate and hunker down until crews could start fixing some of the damage in my town. And while I was trying to deal with all of that, I found out that YouTube has just announced new guidelines that have put a massive ticking time clock on our attempts to make The A.L.I.C.E. Files self-sustaining. So if you want to help myself and Alice Liddell claw down a little piece of the sky, and actually keep telling stories to our audience, we really need your help before these new "guidelines" kick in!
Time really is of the essence on this one.
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!
The Changes (And How They're Going To Screw Creators)
Before I explain what's changing, I need to explain the base line of what YouTube requires, and how tough that already is for creators to deal with. So, let's start there! Because there are 2 levels of monetization that creators already have. Those are:
- 500 Subscribers and 3,000 Watch Hours: This opens things like super fans and smaller forms of monetization, but creators don't actually get any of the ad revenue their videos generate.
- 1,000 Subscribers and 4,000 Watch Hours: This opens up the final tier, allowing creators to make ad revenue off their channels.
To break those things down, the first requires you to get roughly 8 hours of watched content a day, every day, for an entire year. To get the second level, you need 11 hours a day, every day, for an entire year. And I make that for a year part explicit because if you go over that 365 day limit, it starts dropping off previously earned hours so you have to try to make them up.
Basically for a small creator to get monetized they need to have some kind of viral success. Because those watch hours? Those don't count if the viewer has a VPN, or they use an ad blocker, etc. So in reality you're going to need 2-3 times that traffic just to squeak by in the first place.
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| So how is YouTube gonna fuck this up? |
The recent announcement that YouTube put out, though, is they are doubling the requirements to earn ad revenue. So that's 8,000 watch hours (or 20 million short views, if that's your thing), which translates to something like 22 hours of people watching your content every, single day for 365 days in a row.
Details of the announcement, and how bad it is for creators, can be found here on Notebook Check.
We Need Your Help (And Here's How To Do It)
First and foremost, these changes go into effect at the end of January 2027, and according to YouTube those who are already partners with the program will be grandfathered in under the new rules. I am suspicious of this, but it gives us, essentially, 4 months to try to hit the current goals so we can get The A.L.I.C.E. Files monetized (which is going to be a necessity for Alice and I to keep it going, much less to expand our scope).
At time of writing, we have 346 subscribers, and we're just shy of 1,300 watch hours. So, essentially, we're about 1/3 of the way to where we need to be. So, the immediate triage that will help us is:
- Watch the episodes (preferably without a VPN or ad blocker to be sure your views count)
- Share the links on your social media channels
- Leave comments and upvotes to help boost engagement so more folks can see us
But what if you want to stop YouTube from putting these restrictions in place, and moving the goal posts for basically any small creator looking to actually become profitable? Well, you can also do some things to yell at YouTube to make it clear how disappointed you are in this announcement, and their proposed policy shift.
- Cancel your YouTube premium membership, and let the site know why
- Yell at them on Twitter (@TeamYouTube and @YTChannelTeam seem to be the best places)
It is, at the end of the day, unlikely that YouTube is going to back off on this, barring some massive backlash from its viewers and larger content creators (and I suggested Twitter because unless you're already a YouTube partner, you can't get hold of them directly). Worse, there aren't really any other places that you can go to make video content and monetize it. I've been looking, and aside from Rumble (which I can't recommend professionally OR politically) there really isn't a website that doesn't use a tip/subscription-based option for paying creators, and people are stretched to the absolute limit as it is.
This is corporate greed, plain and simple. And while I encourage people to raise their voices and yell at the company about it, it's also important to lift up and support the smaller creators who are going to get trampled under this oncoming boot.
So watch things. Subscribe to things. Leave comments, tell your friends, and help all of us out there who are trying to slide under that descending steel door before we're locked out of program eligibility forever... because we're doing our best out here, but most of us aren't going to be able to keep projects like this running if there's no hope that it will ever turn some kind of profit.
Support The Literary Mercenary
If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!
- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)
- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)
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 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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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