Today, I received an email from YouTube with the message below. As you can see, my entire YT account will be demonetized within 30 days, unless I meet the new criteria set.

YouTubeAccountDemonitized

The new criteria is 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. I have more than sufficient watchtime, but didn’t build up enough subscribers.

I’m so sad, I want to cry. Just kidding.

I saw it coming

Being a famous or big YouTuber wasn’t my goal, so being demonetized is not a big deal to me.These days, people do all kinds of crazy, and/or dangerous stuff just to get more subscribers.

There’s enough of those content out there already, so I wanted to create things that are helpful.

Last year in 2017, the AdPocalypse happened. It was blamed on YouTuber PewDiePie for uploading a controversial video, the issue came to front because some news channel jumped onto the opportunity for sensationalizing a story.

Having being online for a while, I’m not surprised.

You should not be surprised too. Things like this happen all the time, when you build on other people’s platform. It just does.

Websites, platforms, apps come and go. Even when things were going well, things can still change. Besides, online platforms change their Terms of Service all the time.

With over 400 hours of video uploaded every minute, controlling the platform becomes harder when you take into consideration the types of videos being uploaded. The good, the bad, and the really ugly.

If you were YouTube, you’d probably do the same. After all, they are looking at protecting their business, and advertisers who pay them to advertise on YouTube.

Key takeaway

If there is one lesson you can take from this is to never to rely on such platforms to be the core of the businesses.

The core of your business is something you have to control. I wrote about this quite a while back.

Sometime last year, I was offered a licensing fee to put a course I created onto YouTube. I declined to do so because of what I saw, plus it means giving up control.

Better options

There are lots of other ways to earn income from YouTube indirectly. One is to use YouTube to generate leads to sell your own products, or services. There’s affiliate income, sale of t-shirts and mug.

So, if YouTube demonetized your channel, don’t be upset. You probably weren’t making that much off of Adsense anyway.