Friday 1 March 2013

Engage!

By which i mean, i waffle a lot on here and tend to engage in omphaloscopy.  Well, maybe i should stop, or rather, attempt to engage in some way.  Oh, incidentally there's also this:

Anyway, what i'm saying is this:  i posted loads of stuff on a home ed FB group yesterday including a link to this blog, so i should probably reward people for reading it, even though they won't and it's all delusion.  Now, this blog is called Minus2909 for other than obvious (except to me) reasons, but yer actual vanity URL is http://homeedandherbs.blogspot.co.uk/ , meaning that at some point lost in the mists of antiquity, it may actually have had a point to it.  It would be polite, if futile, to give it some point again i suppose.

In the meantime, here's today's actual video:

Click To Tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/iEmG5 . AdSense is good and you should monetize your videos, but not because they will make you any money directly.  Here's why.

YouTube and Google need to be able to afford the bandwidth, infrastructure and storage space required to run a site which, compared to most other sites, is huge and very demanding.  In order to do this, they have decided to use advertising.  In fact, i find it hard to imagine any other way they could've done this given that the global economy is capitalist - otherwise it would be a case of something like pay per view or a regular membership fee, and people would not be watching our videos.  We need them to make money to pay for our platform.  Therefore, we should all monetize our videos.  At the same time, Adsense may be a mirage, though this needn't matter.

I have three channels (one defunct).  This channel has 38 000 hidden views and currently around 30 000 views on the public counter, so clearly it's a tiny channel for which Adsense will never pay out.  The other one, however, currently has 476 470 views, has been monetized for ages, is in good standing, verified - all of that - and has never paid me a penny.  However, this is not a problem.

The main reason for doing anything shouldn't be money because if something's worth doing, it's worth doing for free, but if you want to make money from YouTube, Adsense is not the way to do it.  YouTube can act as a shop window, an audition space, a way of creating a good impression, a video CV or resume, or it can be used directly to sell merchandise.  All of these things have helped me and even though i don't constantly push things on here, i've already managed to make money even on my pittance of less than 100 000 views.

Advertising is questionable because unless you are really dedicated as a viewer to clicking on ads to support the YouTuber, chances are that if you click on a text ad it's because you find it more interesting than the video, and video ads use up attention and lose audience, so neither are ideal.

Nonetheless, you should use AdSense because YouTube are providing you with a platform, and the advertisers themselves are often also worth supporting.  As a small business owner, i believe in what i'm doing and so, i hope, do the advertisers you see on here, and they deserve your support.


Yes i know this is a bit 3216-licking but i actually believe some of that stuff and i think the bigger the omelette, the more eggs you'll have to break, and as a result you feed more people with it.  This relates to my planned 'Ethics Bloat' video but that's something for another time.

So yes, AdSense is for some reason a mirage to me for an unknown reason which may be soluble and um Gottes willen we need the money but to be honest there are other ways of making money, and a tenth of a penny per click-through isn't going to get me anywhere at this rate, particularly when one bears in mind that a click-through probably means my video has failed to engage.  

However, i can't currently shake the feeling that i would be going down a blind alley of self-deception by attempting to make this blog more popular, which would achieve nothing.  If i do decide to aim for it, though, i will stick materials in the same sort of vein as i put on Scribd.com on here too.  Once again, it won't derive an income, and to that extent is not worthwhile.  Then again, the inaction of others gets on my nerves and i don't want to be like that.

No tags again though.  No posting elsewhere either.

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