I’m a huge YouTube fan.
I love to watch but most of all I love to create new exciting and interesting stuff for you guys, the community.
The main platform at the moment is of course YouTube.
However a lot is going on.

Because it’s the largest platform everyone loves to earn some money, often over the back of others.
YouTube has an option to earn money on videos, don’t think to much about it by the way, I’m happy if we earn 100-200 euros a month, seeing the ammount of work we put into our channel that is of course peanuts, that’s actually what makes it even more frustating what I’m typing now.

The first thing that happenend started a few years ago. I always used Quicktracks for creating music under the videos, this is of course a package I bought and the music I used was 100% legal. Still on almost every video we got a claim from company X-Y or whatever that the music was theirs, so YT stopped paying you and the money went to that company. Of course we always fought this claim and the weird thing is that within often 2 hours we would get a message that the company didn’t respond within 24 hours so the video was released again….. weird…. maybe YT lives in another dimension where time goes much faster. At one point we just had a copy paste text ready and every day we had app 2-3 videos that were claimed on bad weeks, sometimes none for weeks and than it started again.

Now for us it’s not a lot of money we lose of course, maybe cents, but add this all together and you can earn a nice income if creators don’t object. For us it was a matter of principle. Now we actually use music that is supplied by YT themselves or their partners and now we are free of these claims, but I can’t use my bought solution anymore 🙁

Now this is a third party that annoys the creators, and that’s “ok” (well it’s not but at least YT can’t really be blamed for people trying) however the last few months it’s happening over and over that my videos are (without any reason) demonitized, meaning you can’t earn money from them, and this is not a 3rd party… it’s YT itself that does this. The problem is….. you can ONLY complain when your video hit the 1000 views mark in 7 days which for some of my videos is not happening. We have videos that hit 1000 in 1 day but we also have videos like the vlog that are watched that ammount after a month, and that’s understandble being it’s a vlog. So in other words we can’t complain untill we hit that mark… the weird thing again is that SOMETIMES YT does seem to look and change the status again to approved. Now if I knew WHY and how to prevent this I would be happy, but most of my videos use the same keywords so it’s not that, in other words you’re in the hands of YT.

Now of course people tell me…”leave YT, go somewhere else”
And that’s why I post this blogpost.
In all honesty there are NO alternatives.
Of course you have Vimeo but let’s look at it.

YT is the standard, this means the largest audience, it works on every device from Playstation to smartTV to streamer etc. in fact when you ask someone about video platforms most don’t even know about vimeo. As a creator the most important thing is range, and in that case we are STUCK with YouTube, there is NO alternative. Of course I change to Vimeo but that would mean doing a boat load of work for a much smaller audience. Taking into account that sponsors, viewers etc. are only interested in content (the viewers) and numbers (the sponsors) it’s only logical to choose the platform with the biggest audience, how frustating that is. The money we lose due to YT’s strange behaviours doesn’t even come close to the viewers we would lose if we changed platforms.

It’s a very very frustating situation, but for now it’s the only way.
YT delivers the best platform (although the trending videos are a bit weird), it delivers the best options for us creators with apps able to stream on the road and do live streams like digital classroom, but is also frustates the HECK out of the creators like me. We are a relativly young/growing channel with “only” 22.000 subs (growing every day) so I don’t have the impact that someone like Casey Neistat has (YT seems to listen to him very quickly). But we do poor a lot of love into our channel and the videos we create for you guys, so it’s incredibly frustating that the platform that earns money over the backs of the creators is actually frustating it’s creators.

If I leave YT nothing will happen, in fact it will only impact my own succes, I’m just afraid that if people with much larger channels leave YT, YT could very well be in REAL trouble.
What do you think?

Oh and do us a favor, subscribe to http://www.youtube.com/frankdoorhof we REALLY appriciate it.