Over the weekend I sent out a newsletter which opened with a short anecdote about my YouTube channel. The subject of the newsletter wasn’t actually about YouTube at all but I received an email back from one of my lovely subscribers asking what had happened with my YouTube journey. She said: It feels almost like we followed you on your journey then when you arrived at the Emerald City, you left us outside the gates.
I completely agreed. I’d stopped talking about YouTube once I reached monetisation. I’d shared a lot of what I was going through including my analytics and how close I was getting on my Instagram Stories - but then just didn’t carry that narrative on.
My YouTube journey has dominated my life for a year. I was thinking about it a lot; anxious that I would not reach the relevant requirements and then, when I did, I was worried about being rejected and monetisation would not be allowed for my channel.
So I thought I’d explore why I stopped talking about YouTube in this blog post, as well as looking at my YouTube journey so far.
the past year
Early in 2019 I decided I was going to pursue YouTube monetisation. I’d been making videos for a few years and enjoyed creating montages of my life with the chickens and ducks alongside the differences in the seasons for my Instagram Stories and the occasional YouTube video. But I wasn’t in any way consistent. I was just enjoying myself, teaching myself new skills and playing with this new addition to my creativity.
I loved making mini-films for my Instagram Stories. I created one at the beginning of every day and found it was a great way to get my creativity flowing. Far better than reading the news or mindlessly scrolling through social media first thing.
When I initially created a YouTube channel in 2016 the rules for monetisation were very different. Back then anyone could put adverts on their channel. I think I made a dollar plus change before YouTube altered the rules.
Now you need 1000 subscribers as well as 4000 hours of watch time in one year. That’s 240,000 minutes of my content that needed to be watched by people on the internet in order to qualify me to make money from my channel. It was a big hurdle to jump.
For a while I just created videos as and when I thought of them. Sometimes two per week but often one a week. I experimented with a writing vlog, I made cakes and cookies, I even made a Christmas Pudding.
It soon became apparent that the mini-montages were not going to grow my channel. Neither was my weekly writing vlog. I realised the people who enjoyed my Instagram were not necessarily going to watch my YouTube videos. I needed to attract a brand new audience. And for that I needed some sort of strategy.
I watched videos with YouTube tips. Through their advice to look at my analytics I found the videos that seemed to be getting the most views were ones about my novel writing journey or my notebooks. So I started to focus more on them. I was starting to ‘niche’ my channel.
I’ve been completely opposed to niching my online content. But all the advice was to ‘niche down’ in order to tell the algorithm you were an expert in a particular subject. So I did. After all what I was doing was an experiment. Why not play with the rules to see what happened?
What happened was my channel started to grow. I never got any big spikes in growth it was just frustratingly slow and steady. Mind you, could I have coped if my account suddenly took off and started growing by the minute? I very much doubt I could’ve done.
I hit 1000 subscribers at the beginning of October 2019. But I was still some way away from hitting the watch time. I think during October I was just over half way - just over 2000 hours of the 4000 required. There was a long way to go but I kept going. In the run up to Christmas I uploaded lots of videos and really made it my priority to hit the big milestone. I would check it every morning when the analytics re-set at 10am and work out how much further there was to go.
Yes, I was obsessed.
Then on Valentine’s Day 2020 I finally reached the watch time and my channel immediately went into review. It was a great moment. Now I had to wait. YouTube had to check my channel to make sure it abided by their rules and policies. If I cleared that then I would be monetised.
So I waited. And I waited. And whilst I was waiting the world was dealing with a virus. YouTube said it’d take up to 28 days to be reviewed. Well 28 days came and went and I’d still not heard anything. I was obsessed and kept checking my email notifications. Come on, Helen, I thought to myself. Be reasonable. There’s a pandemic going on, they’ll be dealing with that. And I was right. YouTube were manually checking videos that mentioned the virus to ensure that false information wasn’t being spread. Monetising my channel was not a priority for them. Quite right, too.
In my head though I’d been ignored. Forgotten about. I would scour YouTube looking for monetisation stories and get disheartened when I heard it’d only taken them ten days to be reviewed. My channel had now been in review for five weeks. My channel, I was sure, had done something wrong or fallen though a digital crack.
Then one Saturday morning I woke up and, (bad) habit as it is I checked my phone. I was still bleary eyed so when I saw a green dollar symbol next to my videos on the YouTube Studio app I didn’t really take it in. It was one of those comedy double take situations. Because I had kind of given up.
It was still early but I woke my husband up anyway. Great, he said with some relief. And promptly went back to sleep. He’d been listening to my wailing for months - he was probably exhausted by it. I went downstairs to grab my laptop and immediately started to play and add the adverts to my videos.
On my first day I made 55p.
So how long did it take from going into review to becoming monetised? Seven weeks and one day. I’m not complaining, I can’t stress that enough, please don’t think I am. We were in unprecedented times and life was put on hold. But it was tough going for my self-doubt and confidence. The negative voices were incredibly loud.
So, how did I celebrate? Well, I had a glass of fizz and clinked glasses with my husband and two children. I mentioned it briefly on Instagram and in one of my newsletters…but as I mentioned above at the beginning of this post - I then made no reference to it again…
Going quiet
It seems strange that I did that. I often shared my analytics on Instagram Stories and shared the process. So why didn’t I talk about it when I got there?
I think, firstly, it’s a bit like when athletes describe how it feels to win a gold medal. They’re in no mood to celebrate they just feel relief. An athlete’s sacrifice to be at the pinnacle of their career is certainly not quite the same as getting monetised on YouTube! - but it is something I devoted a lot of time and energy to. I had challenged myself to do it - yet at the same time I had no self-belief that I could do it. I honestly didn’t see it happening. The negative voices in my head were with me every single step of the way and they built up to quite a crescendo in the last couple of months. So yes, it was relief. Relief that I could meet a challenge I’d set myself. Relief that the negative voices in my head were wrong. Which begged the question - what else could they be wrong about?
Secondly we were in the middle of a pandemic. Death rates were dominating the headlines, jobs were being furloughed, people were worrying about buying food and toilet paper. It was a confusing, distressing time - why would I want to make a big deal over the fact I’ve been monetised? Plus I was going through some health issues of my own. My anxiety over that, as well as my specialist appointment being cancelled and worries about getting the right treatment, was in my thoughts.
Thirdly, I didn’t know if anyone would be interested. I would post about my YouTube journey on Instagram Stories but didn’t really get much in the way of interest. Which was the wrong way for me to think. I should know that by now. Don’t interpret silence as disinterest - that’s often not the case.
two months later
Well, I’ve been monetised for nearly two months. It’ll be two months on 4th June. My subscribers have continued to grow at a slow and steady rate - I currently have 1912 - and my watch hours are 5500 hours in the past year. A good 1500 more than I need to retain monetisation.
My videos are a bit hit and miss. Some of them barely scrape 300 views and some recent ones have galloped along. The ones with the most views are about notebooks funnily enough. I try and follow the advice about keywords and so on to get seen by the algorithm but sometimes it just takes time for a video to become popular. Or, it’s just one that doesn’t resonate. I love notebooks and talking about them but there’s only so much I can say or share on the subject.
As my husband pointed out on one of our dog walks yesterday - I’m at that point in the diagram where what I want to talk about isn’t necessarily what gets the YouTube views.
the maths
Not only has YouTube dominated my working and creative life for well over a year I’ve worked out that in a working week it can take up to two fifths of my time. The brainstorming, the planning, the script writing, the filming, the editing, the uploading and the promoting can take up to two working days.
And in terms of recompense? Well, in two months I’ve made the grand total of £33.01 or $39.45 (and that includes the dollar or so I made all those years ago before the rules changed!) Adsense - the company that does the paying - will only pay out once I’ve reached a certain threshold. I can’t swear to it but I think that might be £70. So there’s at least a couple more months before I have the cash in my pocket.
The video I uploaded last week made £0.88 on its first day. The cost per thousand (CPM) the unique payment rate each video you have on your channel has - is incredibly low. For that particular video it’s currently on £3.85 per thousand views. I understand the rates dropped significantly during the pandemic but even so my CPM is nowhere near what other channels are getting.
what happens next?
I’ve got some thinking to do. I know creativity is not all about the money. I’m well aware of that - I’ve been online now for thirteen years and I’m no millionaire. But a business has to make money to survive and if you aren’t striving for that then it’s just a hobby.
So - do I carry on uploading a video once a week to YouTube? Bearing in mind how long it takes me to put together (two days) and how much I get back (88p). YouTube was part of my creative business strategy - but if it’s not actually adding to our family income in any significant way is it worth spending two days a week putting one video together?
Part of me took on the challenge of becoming a YouTuber just to see if I could do it. But I am reminded over and over, by myself, that I am first and foremost a writer not a YouTuber. Writing should take up the majority of my creative time not creating videos.
Getting my book published has been a long dream of mine but always felt unobtainable. But then, so did becoming monetised on YouTube. And if I can do that despite all the self-doubt maybe, just maybe, I can become published, too.
And, for that realisation alone, it was worth it.
You can find my YouTube channel at youtube.com/helenredfern
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