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Why I'm Kind Of Stuck Running Youtube Advertising
🕑 Added 2017-01-19 22:06:37 +0000 UTC TL;DW: They're a monopoly and I expect them to quietly blacklist and suppress anybody NOT running Youtube Advertising.As you might imagine, on YouTube this video is known as 'Why To Run Youtube Ads'. Follow along with my reasoning in the video, and you might come to the same conclusion: you've got to put across the appearances of somebody who's naive and available to be exploited by YouTube's promises, so you can piggyback on it by trying to do work that's realistic (and be paid in ways that are more practical, like Patreon).
So if you wonder why the change… for one, you're apparently not ad-blocking, and I think that's a mistake. You should be blocking, and I don't want you to turn it off in order to 'support' me in some way, because that's what my Patreon is for. Much like Kagi before them, Patreon has paid me and (mostly) not jerked me around, and that's what I'd ask you to support, for those of you who are well-off enough that you have a credit card that can stand twelve bucks a year in charges. I don't trust YouTube to pay me, much less pay me honorably, and I'm not trying to get people to shut off their blockers. On the contrary: do as I do.
But, also do as I do with this. I'm convinced the algorithms already weight things using this, and there's no reason to believe it will get better and every reason to expect the pressure to get more intense. If you're trying to reach an audience through YouTube (or any 'free' service), you must play along and put across the appearances that you want to make money the way they want you to make money. It's a scam, because these things follow a power-law distribution and even PewDiePie is unhappy with YouTube (and he's at the peak of it), but you've got to pretend for the algorithms that you're a true believer.
Or they will find someone who is.
Welcome to 2017! I promised I'd do 'starving artist' posts, and this is the first one. Be sure and engage with these huge, algorithm-bound entities in a way they can understand, because you cannot piss off a non-human gatekeeper and expect to skate by on the strength of your personality… or even your content! Find ways to recognize the world you're really in, while making it plain what your expectations are. Mine's this: I hope everybody has sense enough to block, and hope people understand what I mean by all this. You can't communicate without a network, and you don't own the network, and virality is an illusion: something is deciding what catches on, same as it ever was. Don't get needlessly filtered out. :)
