Not Everything Has To Be A Fucking Hustle
So, today, YouTube announced that they were raising the threshold for the YouTube Partner Program (y'know, the thing that allows you to monetize stuff and use monetization features) for people not already in the program (as of February 2017) to 8000 hours of watch time (or 20 million views over 90 days if you're going for Shorts).
In a rare show of mercy, it was announced that if you're already in the program, you'll be grandfathered in under the old rules, which is 4000 watch hours (with 3000 unlocking SOME of the monetization functionality, like superchats I believe). But 1.I don't trust YouTube to remain merciful forever, and they'll either stop honoring this or find some weird criteria to begin forcing grandfathered people out, and 2. This doesn't help the person struggling to hit that 4000 hour milestone and maintain it, either.
It's pretty much YouTube saying "last chopper out of 'nam is in January 2027, and if you can't grab onto the rails and hang on for dear life, you're utterly and totally fucked."
But I don't want to spend this piece talking about YouTube doing dumb shit, as they do somewhat often. Rather, I want to talk about the discourse in the wake of this announcement (and also in the wake of the last announcement, because it was much the same thing).
That discourse being from people who have successful channels rolling in good amounts of money (who usually becomes slaves to the algorithm, YouTube analytics, and all that fun crap) looking at the small channels saying "Why should you care? A person under 8000 hours of watch time wasn't making enough to earn a living anyway. They won't miss it."
This made me...fairly angry. Because this thinking is fucking everywhere. This thinking that if you aren't making a living from a hobby, if you aren't monetizing it to the teeth, it isn't worth your time and effort and you should do something better with your life.
Which leads to what I said in the title: Not everything has to be a fucking hustle. Not everything has to make you money and pay your bills and be your full time job. And to be clear, for those who have made the leap to YouTube as their full time job and are making it? More power to you! Get that bag if you enjoy it!
But generally, those people aren't the ones being insufferable dicks online to those of us who don't see everything as a hustle.
Sometimes, when I do something, it's just because I like it. When I write here, it's because I have something on my mind that I just want to get out there. I don't expect to make money off this, nor do I want to. Because at that point, it becomes work.
I just want to do things for the love of the game, with no expectation that said things have to pay my bills. Because it brings some whimsy into a life that really needs more of it. Moreover, I enjoy it without it feeling like working at a job I don't want to be at.
That's also why I feel so strongly about YouTube hanging the whole Adpocalypse mess on small channels and utterly fucking us over back in 2018. While I'm no mega millions YouTuber who makes crispy Netflix-grade content, I simply made the content I like to watch, said content mostly hailing from the pre-2012 days when content felt more made by regular people with day jobs treating this as a hobby. When things felt more down-to-earth.
That content would net me a cool $100 or so every 3-4 months. Given my current financial situation, that extra $100 was very nice to get every so often. It could pay bills. But now since I'm more into retro computing, that $100 could easily be an eBay slush fund to buy cool shit to do videos on. It could buy equipment. Hell, that would be a good chunk of parts from Mouser, even.
But yet, some asshat with 100k subscribers looks at my plight, laughs at me, and says that I wasn't even making enough to make a living anyway, why am I so mad? That $100 is chump change! And usually they'll add a nice cherry on the top by saying that if I just worked harder and tried to make my content more algorithm-friendly and SEO it to hell and back, that I wouldn't be getting kicked out of the YPP.
Which again, comes back to "if I'm having to upload a shitload of videos/grind out slop content meant to please the algorithm, that makes this hobby feel like work and the drive to do it disappears as I'm no longer getting fun out of it."
It was just nice to do something I took pleasure in, and get a wee bit of something in return for doing so.
But again, Big YouTubers (or people with the Big YouTube mindset) don't understand someone not wanting to chase algorithmic trends. They don't understand someone who just wants to make shit and let it fly without obsessing over analytics. They don't understand that people just want to do something for the love of the game and don't want to make something their living/career.
It's fucking exhausting.