- Hi guys, welcome back to the DrCliffAuD vlog.
This is vlog number 68
and today I'm going to be talking about a variety of things
but the first thing that I'm going to start talking about
is the monetization of my YouTube channel.
Now, if you go back several months,
I actually made a post about how
YouTube is forcing ads on creators' channels
that are not monetized.
And now when I talk about monetization on YouTube,
it means that you actually have
like a certain amount of subscribers,
you have a certain amount of views,
or a certain amount of hours watched of your content.
Now, I basically had the requirements to monetize my channel
about three years ago.
So six to eight months into my time creating video content.
I had enough in order to turn on monetization
which would have actually activated ads
that you see in either pre-roll or mid-roll
or at the very end of a video
on a particular individual's YouTube channel.
And I made a specific concerned decision
not to monetize my channel.
And I was happy with that,
I knew I was giving up, you know,
hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue
that would be generated from the YouTube channel.
But I didn't want to have ads
because I didn't want individuals
to be deterred from actually watching the video content.
And, you know, because sometimes you see an ad
and you're like, ah, I don't want to sit through an ad.
I'm just going to skip to another video
or something like that.
And I just didn't like to be associated
with that type of thing.
But as of a couple months ago
and you probably saw a post from me a couple months ago
talking about how YouTube is forcing creators now
to have ads on their channel, even if you're not monetized.
And at that point I'm like, okay, well
you know, we'll see what happens
and a lot of people were like,
Cliff just go ahead and monetize the channel,
we don't mind, you know,
there's a lot of people who watch my channel
who are YouTube premium subscribers,
so they don't have to see ads anyway,
there are individuals who have ad blockers up,
so if the ad ever does come up,
it basically blocks that ad from playing,
and which is great, I didn't know that even existed
until not too long ago,
but, you know, I
the main reason that that bothered me
was not the fact that now I have to make money off of it,
the thing that bothered me is that,
if you don't monetize your channel,
you have no control of who can advertise on it.
And I even had colleagues of mine,
Lindsay Cobble you know who you are,
she reached out to me and said,
Cliff I just saw one of your videos,
I had to chuckle because an ad came up for one of these
$69 online hearing aids that are basically a scam
came up on pre-roll on your channel,
I'm like, you've gotta be kidding me.
So at least now that I have my channel monetized
so I basically made that decision two weeks ago
to monetize the channel,
so I could go and block
certain companies from advertising on my channel.
And I missed a couple.
And so it's always this constant battle of now,
trying to figure out which company
is trying to promote their crappy product on my channel.
And it drives me crazy,
but I only have 500 slots or 500 domains
that I can block from advertising on my channel,
and I have probably about 50 of those used already.
So it's kind of like whack-a-mole,
every time you block one another one pops up,
I'm just going to keep playing that whack-a-mole game
over and over and over again
and we'll see what ultimately happens.
But you know, if you've noticed
here in the past couple of weeks,
the channel has a different feel.
I mean, even when I'm in the clinic and
I'm trying to test out a patient's Bluetooth streaming
or telecoil,
I am actually going to my phone, or their phone,
and I'm going to my YouTube channel
to play one of my videos.
Well, now I have to wait for what 7, 8 seconds, 10 seconds,
I don't know how long those videos are,
because I'm a YouTube premium subscriber,
but the point is, is that
I have to sit there and wait for eight seconds
for this stupid ad to run before they can actually see
if the sound is coming through correctly through my video.
And I just know that it's to some degree it's,
I don't know, it just kind of ruins the experience I think,
I don't like having my channel monetized
and yes, financially speaking,
it's a good thing for me financially
to have the ads running
and, you know does it really harm anybody
to have ads on there?
Probably not, but if it bothers you that much,
I would recommend that you go and you get YouTube premium.
I don't think I get any kind of commissions off of that
by me recommending that to you, I don't care,
but I pay for it,
I think it's like 10 bucks a month or something like that.
And I can tell you,
with as much YouTube as I actually consume
'cause you know, every morning before I go to work,
every night before I go to bed,
I'm watching at least a couple of YouTube videos.
It's really nice not to have to watch ads
to be honest with you.
And to be honest, if every single person
who watched videos on my channel had YouTube premium,
I think I get a few cents per view or something,
I don't know what it is,
but it's worth it to me, I don't really care.
I mean, all that money could go away
and I wouldn't care at all.
I've got enough other, you know, things going on
to help support my lifestyle and my family,
and it's just, I don't know,
it's just kind of a weird thing though
to have the channel monetized and you know,
it does make some, some good money at this point,
but I kind of miss the days of where there were no ads
and I could be proud of that and talk about it,
and I have talked about it in other videos,
and that was a source of pride for me
knowing that I was not in it to make revenue
from monetization,
and I hear creators, you know that I watch on YouTube
talking about, oh I'm just trying to hit that mark,
so I can monetize my channel and start making money,
and I'm just like, it's kind of like,
if that's your goal of creating YouTube content,
I think that you're just kind of off base
and it's kind of tacky and distasteful to do that.
It is what it is.
It's not that bad of a thing,
I just wanted to kind of, you know,
you guys have and seeing those ads running,
there's probably a pre-roll ad for this video,
there's probably going to be an ad like right about now,
the videos are still the same, nothing changes, right?
You just have to deal with a couple of ads,
if you don't have these ad blockers on.
That being said,
the thing I want to kind of transition into now is
my kind of like experimentation with Instagram.
I've been posting some different Instagram stories.
Now, Instagram stories stick around for 24 hours.
So if you're not checking in on your Instagram
or checking in on my Instagram every day,
you're probably missing an Instagram story because I've,
I don't know, posted maybe four or five of those last week.
And I posted it I think even a couple today or yesterday,
I guess depending on when you're seeing this,
but I posted a couple of on there
and they only stick around for 24 hours,
and they're giving you a little bit more of a glimpse
into my actual real life because let's face it,
this is not my real life, even though
90% of my free time I'm doing this stuff,
so I guess technically it is my real life,
but most of my real life is me, you know,
working out, exercising,
hanging out with my wife and with my dog
and hopefully more of that will be hanging out with family
as this whole COVID thing starts to kind of settle down.
And I don't even know if I can say that word
without getting this demonetized,
but at the end of the day
I really don't care if this particular video is monetized
as long as ads don't play on it I'm or,
as long as bad ads don't play on it,
I'm totally okay with that.
But that being said,
Instagram is up and it's rocking and rolling,
I've also been doing some YouTube Shorts,
I've also been doing some YouTube,
what do you call it, YouTube Stories?
The YouTube Stories stay on for a whole week.
So if you're scrolling down on your mobile device
or scrolling down on your laptop or whatever,
you might see my face on there under the YouTube Shorts
and the YouTube Stories,
which is all kind of fun.
I'm just trying to do a little bit more
like not rehearsed stuff, not scripted stuff,
kind of like this, it's more free talking
but they're usually, they have to be really quick
because the YouTube Shorts have to be
less than a minute long,
and then the YouTube Stories have to be literally
15 seconds or less, which is a really short amount of time.
As you guys know, I'm a long-winded talker,
so it's really hard for me
to condense something into 15 seconds, but you know,
all that said, it's been kind of fun,
kind of experimenting with different ways
to kind of give you guys a little bit more behind the scenes
of me and my life, if you're into that,
which I wouldn't blame you if you're not.
But the other thing I want to talk to you about is
really my inability to speak to the female demographic
or to appeal to females in general.
Now this is something that I've had to deal with
since basically high school,
I've not really been an appealing individual to females
and that's totally okay.
But one thing that I feel like I don't do well
is giving information that
females would be particularly interested in.
I definitely gear more of my content more towards like,
the male, like engineer mindset type person
and I do have a strong following of females on my channel
but when you just look at my YouTube analytics
it is heavily skewed towards males and not females.
And I really, you know,
I like to think that I'm not discriminating against females
in any way,
I just feel like the way that I talk about things
is probably more appealing to a male audience
than to a female audience.
So I'm really trying to do things to kind of
make sure that I'm, you know, helping individuals
who aren't necessarily the people that I'm always helping,
if that makes sense.
I don't like this idea that
there's a whole group of individuals who feel like
my content is not suitable for them
based on how I talk about things.
And so I really want to make a shift,
not a complete shift,
I'm going to still focus on my core of being
really technical in my videos,
trying to be as unbiased as possible, doing device reviews
you know, giving my opinions
on the importance of best practice care
and things like that,
but I really feel like I need to start creating
some more content that is more appealing
to the female demographic.
And so I've been working
with some other individuals in my profession,
some females in my profession to truly
try to get some understanding of the type of things
that females are interested in
and then kind of augmenting some of my videos
to be more geared towards those individuals.
Because here's the thing,
when you look at it, I'm a very niche, you know, individual,
I'm talking about hearing loss specifically and that's it.
But when you look at the size of my channel,
I mean I think at the time of this recording,
I've what, like 130 some thousand subscribers at this point
and the majority of them are male.
But when you look at it
from the perspective of the global impact of hearing loss,
I mean there are hundreds of millions of individuals
with hearing loss,
and to be quite honest with you,
I'm not doing that good of a job
of getting my information out there.
Now, the subscriber count's one thing,
there is a completely different aspect of view count.
So the view count, there are,
you know a million views a month,
but still when you start to look at it
in the grand scheme of how many people have hearing loss,
I'm just making a tiny, tiny, tiny little dent
in educating individuals with hearing loss,
and I need to make sure that I have my content done in a way
that appeals to more individuals,
appeals to more individuals,
but doesn't just cater to what they want to hear.
Like they have to hear legitimate, truthful information.
I can't just, you know, create content that isn't true
just to try to get people, to watch my content.
I don't want to make my content comical.
I mean, to some degree, I think that comedy is okay
to incorporate in these things,
but I don't want to make a joke out of what I'm trying to do
just to gain more followers and subscribers and viewers.
But I do feel like I need to change things
around a little bit
to where I am educating a bigger group of people.
And we'll see, we'll see what happens.
I mean, I just want you guys to be aware of that.
If you have any ideas on that, you know,
and I know that you're watching this,
I've probably appealed to you to some degree at this point
but if you have any ideas of things that,
you know topics I need to talk about,
in order to reach a broader audience with hearing loss
and help educate a broader audience with hearing loss
I would like to hear your opinions
to be quite honest with you.
And, you know, if you want to put,
you know that into the comments section,
I would be very grateful for that.
And that way it gives me some kind of understanding
because I view the world through my own lens,
and my lens that I see the world
is not how everybody else sees the world,
and I need a little bit more insight into that.
All that being said, it's been an interesting week.
If you did not see my Instagram posts from yesterday,
they're probably going to be up for a little while longer
through my YouTube Stories, because
I did a, I think at like an 18 mile trail run.
And I took a quick little, you know minute long video
that had some pretty nice views.
I ran up to the top of a radio tower.
So if you want to see that,
make sure that you go over to my Instagram
and take a look at my Instagram Stories,
but that is all for this week guys.
I know this is kind of a video
or a vlog that was just kind of all over the place,
but that's just some stuff
that I kind of wanted to get out there
and let you guys know some of the things I'm struggling with
and some of the things that have changed
with the channel here in the last couple of weeks.
I always appreciate your support.
I appreciate your comments.
I appreciate your thumbs up on my videos.
And as always guys, I'll see you next week.
(upbeat music)