YouTube

As some of you reading this may know, I (occasionally) post videos on YouTube.  Most of them are quick Cubase sessions, running through how particular features work, or tips on techniques that you may have missed.

What you may not realise is that these videos take a long time to produce.  I’d say that a typical 5-10 minute video takes a couple of hours in total to plan, run through, record, sync up, edit, render, check and upload.  Typically what happens is that I’ll do a batch of four or five videos on an afternoon, which will start at lunchtime and finish at bedtime.  I’ve tried to do this once a month (to allow a weekly video to be kept running), but it’s simply not always possible to do this as there are considerable demands on my time.

It’s something that I’ve enjoyed doing (for the most part!), and which has grown out of my teaching in person – often it’s useful to be able to run through something with it being shown on screen, and students have commented in the past that it’s useful to be able to stop, rewind, etc.

Anyway, you probably know that YouTube pays creators for their efforts.  It’s not a lot (around $2 per 1000 views) for a channel like mine – certainly not enough to make it worthwhile on an hourly basis.  But at the end of the year I’ve typically got about $100 to spend, which I do on a plugin or two, as it seems ‘right’ to put things back into the studio.

This week Google has announced that they are changing the way this system works – in short, you won’t get anything if you have under 1,000 subscribers and under 4,000 hours of viewing in the past year.   My channel is above these limits, but only just (1,300 and 4,000 respectively).  So, please do keep watching and stay subscribed – it’s not a big earner for me, but these are demanding times, and I’d find it a little harder to justify spending the time on the videos if there’s nothing coming back from them – particularly as I suspect that YouTube will run adverts on them regardless of whether creators are being paid.