Ad Test, Upcoming Thanksgiving Video (Patreon)

Hi!

I'm almost done with a new video. It's about crescent rolls, so pick up a tube of those if you want to play along.

But here is a notice!

I'm currently running an ad revenue test on my channel.

To the 326 of you supporting me at the $1 level that reads "You won't see ads on any of my work. Neither will anyone else, but now you can feel good about supporting free content," I will be updating the wording on this.

I'll go more into detail once the test is complete and I have some more data, but I've started enjoying making videos again and I'd like to keep it that way, so I'm looking into the realistic possibilities for making this be a thing I do as more than an occasional hobby but less than an all-consuming career.

I know I'm long past due updating my policy on ads. I can be an extreme person. I don't like ads, therefore I will never have anything to do with any ads of any kind. If I were going to try to make money with ads, I might as well go full out and advertise my own products so I can capture all the value instead of getting a sliver of it. If I were going to try and make money at all, I might as well go full business and make millions off of a Vi Hart empire.

But a lot has changed on youtube, and in my life, since I made those decisions.

For one, I've learned that I really am not interested in building a Vi Hart business empire, so that's not even a theoretical option to compare ads against. I see how other creators who started around when I did have since grown their channels into full-on businesses, with employees and products and partnerships and a dozen revenue streams, in support of their goals as creators. And I'm capable of it. I didn't have the business skills when I first started my channel, but I sure do now.

But my goals are different.

It's also possible to make ad revenue without actually forcing ads on anyone, these days. There's a paid subscription option that didn't exist before. Ad blockers are free and getting better every day. And there's a bunch of different ad options to choose from. "Enabling Ads" doesn't have to mean unskippable mid-roll ads popping up in the middle of Twelve Tones. That would be unforgivable. But these days you can enable only pre-roll ads you can click "skip" on.

I know I'm long past any logical reason to not even consider enabling ads. It's pure stubbornness. It's a projection of my own annoyance at other people's ads, even though the kind of ads I'm annoyed at are the in-video sponsorship breaks by whatever predatory advertisers I won't even name because I don't want you to think I'm calling out any particular creators who do need to fund an entire business with employees.

I don't even have to see the other kinds of ads, because I subscribe to youtube premium and also use an ad blocker where appropriate, just as I think all reasonable people should do. That's the kind of behavior I can and do encourage, rather than thinking my stubbornness does anything except hurt myself.

My last reason to hold on to stubbornness was that ad revenue isn't really all that much anyway. At least not compared to other things I could be doing, like sponsorships, selling products, or actually promoting this patreon and collecting money from it more than twice a year.

And that's testable, so I decided to test it for a few quiet days where my channel isn't getting many views anyway, just to see what the CPM is like for my content. I thought maybe it'd be real bad and I could stop the test and give up and continue as normal.

But I forget sometimes that even if my new and infrequent videos don't perform super well, I still have twelve years of videos that still get views, and it adds up. From the initial numbers, if I'd had just skippable pre-roll ads enabled on my videos all year (minus a few videos I really don't want to monetize), I would've made significantly more than this patreon has made.

I could be seeking out sponsorships for things like crescent rolls, planning even short videos months ahead of time, and efficiently capitalizing on my own content. And the more content I make, the better all my content performs, so the more I work the more efficiently I can capitalize on my work.

I like efficiency.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that efficiency is not actually in and of itself a moral good.

I think I might like doing this half time. A video a month, or thereabouts. I don't know yet, so I'm experimenting. Imagine: doing a thing without doing ALL the thing. This might be character growth. We'll see. But right now it's looking likely I'll keep the skippable pre-rolls, and also that I'll be making more videos.

TLDR This is your notice that if you are here on this patreon purely out of ad-spite, and I really don't blame you if you are, now's a perfectly guilt-free time to unsubscribe. Thank you for supporting ad-less videos for as long as you have. I think it would be possible for this Patreon to offset ad revenue if I advertised it more, but, I honestly would rather have youtube pre-rolls in front of my videos than embed my own ads for me inside my videos. I no longer care what's more efficient, I care what I like. I like my videos being complete self-contained art. And I like it being small and quiet over here. I really don't want my art to be my entire business career life. But I want it to still be a part of my life. So I think we all did good and we'll all keep doing good and everything is good.

That was probably an unnecessary amount of explaining, but don't worry! I'll probably do even more unnecessary explaining once I make a plan for 2024. Unnecessary explaining is my speciality and I wouldn't have it any other way.

🐌,

Vi