Screw Youtube (Patreon)

Obligatory photo of Puddles

Hey everyone!

Well it's almost a week since the CM Punk video came out and I've finally caught up on some sleep, videogames, TV, and all that good shit I generally miss out on when I'm neck deep in Steven Seagal remixes and whatnot. So just wanted to do my usual post video debriefing now that I've got some time on my hands.

I had no idea how the video would be received to be brutally honest. I wasn't sure if all the WWE talk would alienate MMA fans, or if all the UFC talk would alienate wrestling fans. But it seems to have found a nice happy medium between the two fanbases! Punk fans seem happy that I actually tried to put a bit of respect on his name for trying something so blindingly fucking stupid as making a run at an MMA career at age 37 with zero training 😂 And people who dislike Punk are happy enough that I spent 58 minutes making jokes about him, so everyone wins! I think the best description of the video I got was one comment that called it "a feel good story where everyone loses". 

Beautiful 😂

The eagle eared among you may have noticed some of the music in the Youtube version is different than the Patreon version. Surprise surprise, this is because of Youtube's copyright. So the opening and closing tracks were both claimed by the record labels. I changed them for the Youtube upload as a kind of experiment. And I'll give you all a peek behind the Youtube copyright curtain here so you can see how utterly fucking lunkheaded it is. 

The Punk video is the first video I ever made that got ZERO copyright notices for video footage. I was super careful, as the WWE are absolutely notorious for blocking videos that use their footage, worse even than the UFC. So I had to stick to the golden rule: 

10 seconds of footage, and you're safe. 

Anything over 10 seconds, and Vince McMahon will billy strut into your house and cockslap you. Or sexually harrass you and then pay you off when you get pregnant *ALLEGEDLY*. So once you hit 10 seconds, splice in a still photo, or a different clip, and you're okay.

Anyway, I stuck to the 10 second rule, and everything was looking great! I might finally be able to make youtube revenue off this sucker!! And then the video got copyright notices for the 2 songs. 

Shite!

Copyright notices mean the video will still be online, but any money made gets paid to the copyright holder. So I said screw it, I'll replace the songs with lesser known music and see how it goes. And it passed! Full monetization baby! for the first time ever!!

And the video was doing well, for like, 2 days. Shit, I even started making some money off it!

Then, on Monday, 2 days after upload, YT decided my video isn't friendly for advertisers, said a big fat fuck you, and "limited" monetization (meaning It can make money if people with youtube premium hit the "thanks" button, but other than that, you get nothing). This was annoying, but honestly, not shocking. I said fuck it, that's that experiment over. Whatever, I tried. 

But what was more annoying was  that as soon as monetization was knocked off, views for the video got absolutely decimated. Like instantly. It went from 10k views per day, to maybe 2k. Now its a few hundred a day. This always happens, but way more gradually, over the space of a week, maybe 2, the views trail off. You can see here, the red circle is when monetization was disabled, and then the falloff immediately:

At this stage It's barely worth trying to make a video that pleases whatever bloody unknowable criteria the content oracles deem you must adhere to. If I tried to actually get monetized, I'd have to change up my style drastically in order to hope any video is deemed "safe" enough for Youtube to run Ads on. And fuck that. So don't worry, you wont see me doing youtube moneyshot face in the thumbnail and slapping big red arrows pointing to something totally obvious, and crapping out some completely bland reaction videos or whatever popular garbage that currently stinks up the trending section just to try and chase that youtube cheddar.  

So I just have to say thank you to you guys again. If it wasn't for you guys, I'd literally be making nothing from these videos. And I've seen channels with much bigger subscriber counts than mine that get barely any patrons at all. So honestly I am honored that you guys are here. And while it fucking sucks that the videos reach seems to have been absolutely kneecapped by YouTube, I'm honestly just glad you guys enjoyed it. Its had 48k views, which is almost my entire subscriber count, so i like to think that even if it isn't getting a lot of attention from YouTube,  at least my subscribers all watched it! 

Sorry for the rant, that shit has just been annoying me for the last few days. But hey that's the doom and gloom out of the way!

If everything keeps going according to plan, i should hit 50K subscribers this weekend!!

Unbelievable!!! It's only just a little over a year since I hit 1000 subscribers! I remember thinking I'd peaked at 1000 and that was as high as it'd go!

I'm still thinking about what's next. I haven't settled on a topic for the next video yet, tho I have a few ideas. One I've been kicking around since even before the Pride videos, is a rise and fall of TUF. How it went from saviour of the UFC to completely forgettable bland AF fight pass fodder. I dunno, I'll have a think. If you have ideas, please feel free to chip in!

Oh shit! Its 1:20am and I have to be up for work in a few hours 😂

Thank you again everyone for your support!! 

JUST BLEED