Recently money has been a topic of interest for me. And for the majority of my time having a YouTube channel I have never enabled ads of my own choosing. Most ads currently present on my channel are due to Content ID matches, or simply because I used a copyrighted song in a video. I'm sure some people who have checked websites like Social Blade to see my channel's potential would be surprised. But, there is some limiting reasons for it. So, this comes back full circle, and prompted an interesting question that some people over the years may have been curious about:
Why doesn't Barolb enabled ads on his videos?
YouTube for me has resulted in over 28 million videos views and over 10,000 subscribers, as of the time of writing. Given my regular view counts of over 130,000 a month, I should be able to make decent money off of that. The problem? It's a lot more complicated than you would think.
I have rejected probably 30 YouTube network partnerships over the years and have even been invited out to talk partnerships in-person at PAX East. So of course there were offers and interest. Less interest in myself and more interest in all those numbers my channel continues to crank out without me even doing anything though. And those sorts of things are what a lot of networks look for. They want easy money from high viewing channels with lots of viewer interactions. But what they don't like to look for are channels that could be coupled with legal issues such as mine.
This is mainly due to policies by Nintendo on content creation using their IPs in recent years. As they outline in their policies, they don't like people making gameplay only videos and cashing in on them. I'm also quite the bad speaker (I'm ok, but not that great), so commentaries are things that while I could do, I don't think I would do well. This is something a lot of people would expect better of because of the professionalism YouTube has turned towards. And on top of that I find that unless commentaries are insightful, they don't provide much to the user. So, let's put all this together.
You have a channel from a person who sucks at commentaries and doesn't do them, and has tons of gameplay-only videos from Nintendo games And those gameplay-only videos are largely what would bring in the revenue for his channel. So going the network route means that any old videos would need to be excluded when considering channel worth, so my actual channel's worth is inflated. And I wouldn't be able to make money off of the old videos without ending up in potential legal issues and content matching with Nintendo. Even if there were no legal hurdles, Nintendo could still claim the ad revenue I would make anyways.
I could begin doing videos again on other games, but it is important to understand the audience that has subscribed to my channel and the people that supported me years ago. It was all largely based around my channel being a Nintendo channel, with some Call of Duty and fps action. Some came from Animal Crossing, some from Wii Sports Resort, and some from Call of Duty. So it is understandable that introducing more variance might lead to fragmentation of interest. If the interest is not with me, but with the channel, then that is the sort of dilemma that this causes. It creates this weird scenario where I could have one day 50,000 subscribers, but have maybe 8,000 views a video, assuming all are active subscribers.
YouTubers whom have a following, or their YouTube persona, are the ones who are more versatile in doing these sorts of things. The interest in their activities are what drive the interest to view the video rather than someone like myself where the interest is in the videos I do, and not in the person (me). It's a strange way to put it, but such is the way in considering interest from an audience. I could be underestimating myself, and truth be told I probably am a little bit, but I do believe that there is more interest in the channel than that of the person when it comes to video games, unless you market yourself beyond that spectrum. And to me, this applies very heavily both due to inactivity and the way I posted videos.
So, at the end of the day the result is my channel maintaining homeostasis in the abyss. It's there, but not active, It gets views, subscribers and comments, but there is no momentary gain to it from networks or YouTube. A party that makes small amounts of money from it are Nintendo. From myself, there is the inability to set aside time to make videos, and I don't have a proper setup to record anything anymore, due to various circumstances that I'll maybe explain another time.
Maybe in the future I will consider posting videos again, and those videos, might have ads enabled. But that is something to decide at a later late. For now, all I can say is that something like 98% of all videos I have done previously are not something I could capitalize on with enabling ads. The other two percent? Sure, but they don't get views anyways. So, there's pretty much no point! It does sound sad to write it out like that, but while there is no gain, there is no loss either.
