Welcome to Wide Open World
This channel is all about entrepreneurship. It's about starting your own business and charting your own path in life. Today, for our first video, we're going to talk about the bright side of YouTube's recent demonetization spree.
There are a lot of content creators on YouTube right now that are very upset because their videos are being demonetized. That is, they used to be able to collect money for letting YouTube put ads in them and now they're not. Reasons vary but generally it comes down to YouTube saying that these videos are not friendly for the advertisers, aren't compatible with the brands, etc.
Now, let's put things into perspective here. If you were to start your own website and shoot your own videos for them, you'd have to upload them to a server. You'd need hosting and that costs money. I mean it's not cheap - especially when they're big files. You know these 4k videos that people are shooting now? They're huge files and they're expensive to host, especially if you're getting a lot of traffic to them. Facilitating that traffic costs money so it's a miracle that YouTube is providing this service for free in the first place and the fact that they're willing to sometimes pay people a bit for the advertising that they inject is just a bonus. I think content creators have gotten kind of lazy because normally, if you're producing a show, it's up to you to monetize it yourself. You have to go and find brands to partner with, make phone calls, send out emails, and organize these deals for yourself in order to earn any money. YouTube's doing it for people and now everyone seems to just expect it. They feel entitled to it and a lot of people are citing censorship and that it's an infringement of freedom of speech and things like that when YouTube removes the monetization... but it's not. It belongs to YouTube. It's private property and they're nice enough to let us use it for free. We're guests in their house. What they want to let us do in their house is up to them and if we don't like it we can go somewhere else. We have no right to their property and we have no right to force them to use it in ways that they don't want to so I think we need to step back, get a little perspective here, and see this as the opportunity that it is. It's an opportunity to reevaluate our business models. If you're a content creator, it's time to learn how to organize your own deals. YouTube doesn't pay that well anyway and if you want to score some really good deals, you're gonna have to go out and organize them yourself.
This is our first video on Wide Open World so we don't have the subscriber base or the traffic to justify charging a lot of money for ad space here so we have to just start small and keep at it. Everyone knows a business owner of some kind, right? Just offer to promote their brand on your channel for ten bucks. Start small and just get the ball rolling. As you accumulate more traffic and more subscribers, you'll be able to raise your prices and start making more money but you have to actually start. You're not going to make a lot right away but just start. It snowballs, trust me, just get the ball rolling and it'll take care of itself over time but you gotta do the work not just sit back expecting YouTube to do everything for you because those days are fading away and it's up to us to take charge of our own destinies.
For any YouTube creators that're watching this, here's your challenge: You can do this tomorrow. One day, that's all it takes. Find a business that caters to the audience that you target and tell them what you're doing. Say that you're just starting to offer advertising slots and you're offering a really low introductory price right now. Just offer to feature their brand on your show. It's not going to take long for someone to say yes and then you're just going to inject that brand into your next video, like YouTube does. We'll do it too in the next video that we produce here at Wide Open World. We'll have a brand lined up and an ad ready to go so be sure to subscribe and check back in when our next video comes up to see what it looks like and if you've done it too, you can tell us about it in the comments below. Tell us about your business, your channel, and the deal you lined up. I'd wish you luck but, if you do the work, you don't need it.
