Hello everyone! Just wanted to provide an update to tell everyone about a little “experiment” we just concluded on our internet content, specifically our Youtube videos and the HopeGirl Blog.
In the 4+ years since we started our blogs and Youtube channel, we had never collected any money from Google Ads. Then about 4 months ago we decided to take the plunge and test it out and decided to start an Adsense account and allow ads to run on the HopeGirl blog and on our Youtube channel to collect some additional income.
We have just under 6,000 subscribers on our Youtube channel which is about 5 years old. And our blogs get around 25,000 visitors a month. When we got our Adsense account up and connected, we had to wait a month to collect money from Ads running on our videos and our blog.
Then we made $150 in the first month total for all the ads combined on both platforms.
Then we made $120 the second month.
Then the third month, Youtube made up its own new rule and decided that about $80 worth of our traffic they suddenly wouldn’t consider “valid”. Nothing had changed on our end for over a year… so yeah, Youtube makes up the rules as they go and they just took the money.
Then they decided that after taking that money that we did not have enough money left in our balance to justify paying us, so we would have to wait another month to get paid… so we made nothing the third month.
Then the fourth month (which just ended at the time of writing this) we made nothing again. Again nothing has changed on our end. Please note that we work extremely hard to create and promote lots of new relevant original content that is published on an almost daily basis. However, we did notice changes on Youtube’s end.
From the day we started running Adsense on Youtube, our normal amount of views plummeted. We are convinced this is because of Youtubes COMPLETELY RIGGED algorithms.
Then there’s Youtubes “content ID” Bullsh*@t program. You know, the one that tells you that you can register all your copyrights at once so that no one will steal your work. Well we tried to do that. And we have hundreds of videos that are 100% original content. Youtube basically wrote back and said that we didn’t qualify for it because we were not “big enough”(or not important enough really). I guess you have to be Sony or Virgin records or some big corporate superstar in order to qualify.
And then today we got the straw that broke the camels back so to speak. I woke up with a deluge of copyright claim notices on videos of mine that were 4 years old. They had claimed copyright on ROYALTY FREE STOCK MUSIC SONGS THAT I HAD PURCHASED FOR USE IN OUR FILMS. They just went in there and took ownership over my content and told me that the fraction of a penny that I might have made in advertising on that video will now be going to some one else. Now I could spend weeks of my life and thousands of dollars trying to fight it, but I’ve got better things to do with my time.
So my conclusion is this: Ad revenue doesn’t work for us. I shut down my ad revenue account and pulled the ads from our blogs. If you see ad’s on our Youtube videos that’s because someone else put them there and we can’t control it. But we most certainly are not making any money on any of it, nor will we in the future.
This feels good. It feels cleaner actually. I always kind of felt like that ad money was “dirty money” anyway.
