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I’m Thinking Twice About Becoming a YouTube Creator in 2023
There is a Serious Issue
I’ve recently found myself utilizing YouTube on a daily basis. I get my news and laughs primarily from this service now. The creators on there have become so creative and informative that I find myself getting sucked in for way too long!
Recently, I’ve been thinking about starting my own channel. But with all the issues I’ve seen creators dealing with on YouTube lately, I’m having some second thoughts.
Making money on YouTube comes from their AdSense program. Once your channel is “monetized” you can display ads and earn a cut of the money from those ads. To get monetized, your channel needed 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 watch hours or 10 million public shorts views over the past year. Some creators are seeing updated information on their channel that the requirements are 500 subscribers and 3 uploaded videos over 90 days, plus 3,000 watch hours or 3 million shorts views.
Hitting those goals takes a ton of work! You really have to connect with viewers and keep them engaged. But even after you put in all those hours creating content, YouTube still has control over running ads on your videos with the creator able to do some minimal changes such as where and how many ads to include in the video. But apparently that is changing as well.
Lately, a lot of creators, a lot, have been complaining that their revenue has plummeted. YouTube says it’s because their algorithm detected “invalid traffic” on videos. Things like bots or click farms watching videos to artificially boost views. To stop this, YouTube demonetizes videos or channels with suspicious traffic.
Go to youtube.com and search for “invalid traffic” and you will be surprised at how many videos are there. Looking through the long list, I’ve seen upticks on this issue from late November 2022 and another uptick over that last few months. Some of the people talking from that November are still having the same issue 11 months later.
The problem is creators don’t get details on what activity caused the invalid traffic. So they don’t know how to fix it! Without specifics, creators are left confused and unable to get their ads and revenue back. And since ads are most creators’ main…
