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Open Letter to support YT presenters
Hi, everyone. I hope you’ll take five minutes to read this post – a request to all of you to help.
Although I’m not very active in this wonderful forum (in terms of writing comments), many of you know me peripherally. I co-developed Progressions and Euclidean with Paul of 4Pockets (and wrote two lengthy papers for each) as well as working with Alex Nadzarov on Sinusedo (and wrote the manual).
I’m not a YouTuber, nor will I ever have the knowledge or skill to be one. We already have a wonderful group of YouTubers that we benefit from every day.
Which is the subject of my post…
I follow the posts in this forum on a daily basis, and I’m extremely impressed at the huge amount of knowledge and experience from the members, and the willingness and kindness of members to help each other.
A large portion of these posts are written by and about various YouTubers who, on a regular basis, introduce us to new apps, offer wonderful tutorials, talk about updates and new gear, etc.
They depend on all of us for support, either directly or indirectly.
Some of you are already familiar with how these presenters are compensated by YouTube. It’s simple:
Ads.
Presenters receive a fraction of a cent every time you watch half the ad for a short ad, or at least 30 seconds of a longer ad. Many advertisers pay only when the ad link is clicked.
The longer we viewers watch an ad, and the more times we’re willing to click on an ad, the more revenue the presenter earns. If we do neither of these, the presenter makes nothing.
Most if not all of us hate watching ads. It seems like such a waste of time and mind pollution. But those tiny 15-30 seconds and a simple click on the ad is a simple, low-effort way to indirectly tell the YouTubers that you appreciate the enormous amount of time they have spent learning an app, creating a program with music and dialog, and the expense of even the most modest equipment necessary to create their videos.
For most of us, these are tough financial times. But to take a deep breath while an ad plays for 15-30 seconds and a quick click to the site cost nothing and, with enough people willing to do this, can significantly help the presenters.
In addition to a few seconds and a click, please seriously consider directly supporting several presenters monthly through PayPal, Venmo, Patreon, purchasing their merchandise, or other methods. If you’re unsure which method of support the presenter prefers, contact them. They will be honored that you’re taking the time to help them.
Most of us have an overload of app$, some of us think nothing of paying $5 for coffee. We indulge ourselves with new hardware. These are all wonderful, but please consider channeling just a bit of this to the presenters who are trying to help us and to make a living (or at least supplement their income).
Watching and clicking on ads, and directly supporting presenters is one of the kindest things you can do to show support and appreciation for all the time, effort, and knowledge they give to all of us.
Here’s a list of some of the presenters that are often referenced in this forum and/or participate. This is by no means a complete list, and you probably follow others regularly. Some of these presenters are iOS only, Mac/PC only, or both, as many of us have both platforms. The order here is alphabetical by first name:
• Amner Hunter
• Doug - The Sound Test Room
• Ed Talenti
• Ed the Outcast
• Gav - Gavinski’s Tutorials
• Jacob - Haq Attaq
• Jade Starr - How to App
• Jamie Mallender - Jamie TV
• Leo - SoundForMore Tutorials
• Nu-Trix - The Synth Guy
• Patrick - The GarageBand Guide
• Pete John’s - Studio Live Today
If you had the strength and interest to get this far, thank you for not clicking SKIP. Please consider joining me in a strong effort to support these presenters. Their continued success wholly depends on our generosity and thanks.
I wish all you the very best in health, success, creativity, and happiness.
David Collett
Seattle
Comments
I pay for YouTube Premium to just skip ads. I don’t know how my payment is reflected in the revenue of the YouTubers I watch
So whenever I watch a live stream I tip to compensate. I try and support a few Patreons and I tip inside apps that have that feature.
Bottom line… to make this a market that can support creatives we need to grow the base.
There’s a merge coming with laptops that will raise our prices and add touch to all mobile devices since the (relatively) large screens are available for professional mobile uses.
The days of the $5 app are numbered but the quality of offerings could go way up.
I'm signed up to almost all those on your list. Most of the gear I have is on recommendation from Pete Johns. My Arturia keystep 37 was bought on Jade's recommendation, and many of my apps after watching the miracle worker known as Doug do his thing. Some of them like Ben, Leo and Jade should have far more subscribers. Jade is an absolute lunatic but very knowledgeable!
Thnx Dave! This is a refreshing change from the posts about how to avoid ads on youtube. I've noticed that many ios youtubers are posting less and less content. Just yesterday, in fact, I took a dive into some of the main ios music channels and looked at their viewing figures on recent videos and how often they were posting. It didn't print a pretty picture.
The harsh fact is that the time involved mostly doesn't make it worth their while. Apart from the time spent researching apps and making videos, even the admin tasks like making thumbnails, writing blurb, making cards and posting to various social media platforms can take a few hours.
From time to time people suggest using another platform like Vimeo.
Unfortunately these platforms have pretty much zero traction. Patreon? Please.... Look at the paltry subscriber figures that people who have been on the scene for years have, like Doug and Jakob. Also patreon takes a pretty big cut. Super thanks on youtube? YouTube takes a 30% cut!
Does YouTube suck and is it in many ways a terrible influence on the culture? Yes. But in our niche videos are not just for entertainment, they're essential.
But until something better comes along, YT is the only feasible platform. I've been very transparent about the laughably small amount I make from YouTube, despite having some very popular videos on the platform and despite the huge amount of time involved in making some of them. My Aparillo video took about a week of full time work. The same with my Stria vid and many others. I no longer make such in depth videos. I just can't justify it, time wise.
When I first opened up about how hard it was to make any money off YouTube there was a flood of PayPal donations that made me think that community support would maybe make it financially viable. That dried up very quickly!
With the lack of demo versions for iOS apps and the increasing expense of apps, especially desktop ports, ios music youtubers have a more important role than ever. But without community support, more and more of these 'creators' will decide that it's not the best use of their time.
Thank you for posting this David!
Those are literally the only ones I let the ads play on, unless it’s a political ad
I've personally cut down watching Youtube quite a lot and spend that time doing other stuff...
...next step is to try and cut down the close to un-healthy amount of time I spend on forums sharing 'brain farts' to those who find that helpful. I won't go as far to say it's a 'forum addiction' but it's not that far off...
I don't believe in 'artificial fertilization' of a small niche-markets that are too small to strive on their own...
...it will be survival of the fittest wether we like it or not. Support buying every single app that pops up will just give a false sense of a 'market' that simply isn't there... (Even in the larger groups with +10k members it's true, even if everybody bought the app at $99 a pop it would sustain the app for maybe 1-2 years max and how many apps would they buy to 'support the cause'?).
The 'market' doesn't grown unless it's actively promoted 'outside' small 'cell groups' of 'zealots'.
Amen
Well said. Cheers.
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Totally agree the time to make videos is substantial vs the money likely to make from views, if you calculate hrs vs income im sure it is a fraction of minimum wage most of time.
I started my YouTube to support developers and iOS users like me to learn.
When I started the thresholds YouTube had to be able to monetize were lower but I chose at that time to not have people watch ads to see my videos. Subsequently Youtube started playing ads on all videos whether you monetize or not and vastly increased the threshold for creators to get any money from the ads they now played on all videos.
Now I am definitely in position where I am making less videos and don’t feel incentivized (that was never an issue for me until Youtube started showing ads and paying 0% which is disincentive)
I have over 150 videos, close to half million views, prob months of creation/editing time and I have made $zero because YouTube threshold to monetize is 4000 viewer hours watch time per year or 10 million (yes million) YT shorts views in last 90 days to be eligible for a share of ad revenue.
Like Gavinski said there are not really any viable alternatives for our little niche corner of music production world. I don’t really consider myself a Yt presenter as I am not on camera but hopefully what I do is useful when people choosing what to spend their money on.
Love iOS music production and will continue to make vids but just not at pace I used to for sure
The thing that really pisses me off is that on children’s content the ads are even worse … had Yo Gabba Gabba on for my son and he’s in his playpen watching it while I’m making him a bottle and I start hearing the f*cking governor here spreading his message of hate, and there’s a damn 45 minute political ad on there. Of course I hit skip but that’s a perfect example. Literally every 3-4 minutes there’s an ad.
I also hate seeing 30 seconds of ads just to get a video where there’s a paid sponsorship too… being forced to watch ads on stuff I don’t care about and then hear someone talk about shaving their balls for 5 minutes is just too much for a 10 minute video lol
You're getting videos about shaving balls on youtube? This must surely reflect your Google Chrome search history brother! 🤪
That sucks Stuart! Maybe make a playlist and post it here, ask people to run it in the background when they're not doing anything. Not particularly fair to advertisers, but it equally seems very unfair you're not getting a share of ad revenue. Yeah my prediction is that at this rate, fewer and fewer people will do ios YouTube, and the new ones who come along will quickly give up. It's very different from the days when the likes of Doug etc started, when they could make money from links to the app store. That ended years ago, maybe some people are not aware of this.
😂 Nah , was referring to YouTubers being sponsored by Manscape and literally spending the first part of the videos talking about shaving. I’m like , “dude I’m just trying to watch a movie review, not to hear a guy half my age talk about trimming his public hair” .
Public hair is ok; it's private hair that is iffy.
Well, YouTube has never shown me these vids, so I have something to be thankful for I guess 😂
🤣 Autocorrect is not my friend lol
I see a lot of movie and retro gaming channels get sponsored by them. And it’s not an ad before the video, it’s the actual person doing a video that does the ad. It’d be like if I was watching Doug all of a sudden quit playing patches and start talking about whatever product is sponsoring the video. Usually with music related stuff it’ll be Distrokid…considering how I feel about that company I’d rather it be Manscaped 😂
It’s to the point where if I start a video and I see a message pop up in the corner that says “includes paid promotion “ I almost always turn it off.
Does anyone know how YT Premium monthly fee gets factored into YouTubers’ revenue? I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube as I’ve had Premium for years.
It does get factored in, I forget the amount though you could Google it, but about half of it at least goes to 'content creators' (🤮) so you're doing good! I would get premium personally without a second thought but it is sadly not available in my region.
Thank you David. If everyone thought as deeply and had as big a heart as you, the world would be a truly beautiful place. I’ve been a full time musician most of my adult life and I’m 51 now. It’s not the job to take if you want financial security. That said, I gave up being a total nomad 18 years ago and have a settled family life. I’ve supported my little family just fine. We get by. I’ve found that to earn enough money as a musician to pay the bills, it’s important to be versatile, do lots of different jobs and be very careful what you put in the diary. If it doesn’t pay you don’t do it. Exposure points do not spend and passion projects are for semi-pros. I’d always wanted to do YouTube, but simply never had time to upload much. Then of course, lockdown happened and I had all the time in the world so, I did it. I’ve tried not to ever be click baity or try to have some kind of sensational viral video but instead to learn how it’s done and grow it organically. I wanted subscribers to be genuine so that this would be something that would work in the long term. I’m monetised and I’ve passed 2,500 subs. So it’s still very small, but comments and feedback are excellent, my analytics are extremely good - massively above average. And I love doing it. I’ve made so many friends and feel like I belong to a really special community. I would happily give up most of my other work and just do YouTube. The problem is, I spend all my free time making the videos. It’s an immense amount of work to make a good video and I currently earn on average, £10 per month from YouTube. From Patreon I receive just over £40 per month and donations are extremely rare. I have all the info there for people to donate if they wish. But almost everyone’s struggling so why would they donate to me? Every month I invest 100’s of hours in helping people make music through YouTube, in Facebook Groups, via messenger, private e-mail. People are usually grateful and sometimes remember to say thank you. This year I’ve had 2 donations, totalling about £35. I can’t afford to do international drop shipping merch at a reasonable price so it hardly sells. I did think that Patreon would be the answer. It makes so much sense. You can sign up for a tiny amount of money and in return get free codes, help with your mixes, have me play on your music - Patreon only videos and streams - tons of samples, presets - all kinds of stuff - photos and thoughts I don’t share anywhere else. But asking people to subscribe to pay £1 a month for all this, I’ve been accused of begging, and received lectures on the evils of subs. One guy joined for 1 month, a £1 Patron received £50 worth of app codes and left saying he couldn’t afford it. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he just took a shit up my back. I’m not sure. I knew that if I put myself out there as someone to go to for help, that most people would let me help them and never even think about contributing in any way. I never expected it would be so few that actually helped though. I really enjoyed live streaming and I think that helps build community and donations are more common in a stream but I had a lot of problems committing to a regular time slot. It makes me really sad but I’ve had to give that time over to guitar lessons because it pays. I’m too small for sponsored vids but believe me, if I could make a few quid by talking about what product I use to shave my ball hair I’d be doing it because I love doing YouTube and that might just make it viable to continue. How is it, that people can’t see that?
So, you have to invest a monumental amount of time into YouTube in order to start seeing any financial return. So it’s really tough when you have a family and all the rest of the work in your diary pays money. My personal circumstances are now pretty dire so I have some tough decisions to make. This year, I have hardly gigged. For the first time since I turned pro, there just aren’t any gigs, we’ll not ones that pay. Gigging is half my income, the other half is teaching. Session work is sporadic so that’s a bonus when it comes in. Teaching is going just fine thankfully but, no sessions at the moment and no gigs. The UK live scene is decimated. Later in the year it will improve but financially now, I’m on the bones of my arse. Being a self employed musician, the Mrs and I can make sure one of us is always there for Fred, our autistic son. That’s the reason I stopped doing many tours with name artists anymore. It would be hard to find a job working for someone else that would fit around that but I’m looking. I’m also putting myself out there trying to get more work making music for games or sample pack stuff etc. it just feels like nobody’s hiring at all.
This of course, isn’t the fault of any YouTube viewer. I decided to be self-employed and nobody owes me anything, it’s up to me to fix it and Im in no way bitter. I’m simply sharing because I feel like people just see us on camera or on stage as successful and take us for granted. The whole world has become accustomed to getting everything music related for free, they don’t even think about it. Spotify are raping us, stealing from us and humiliating us blatantly in front of the whole world and nobody does anything about it. I don’t think it crosses most peoples minds. I think this share might might also help to explain why many creators don’t last and why they get disillusioned. But also, I’m sharing because I never open up, I never share - Jamie’s always ok. Broad shouldered, helpful stupid hippie. But right now I’m scared of letting my family down - I have to find some work somewhere. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I do know that the answer isn’t YouTube related. So despite the fact that many iOS and desktop developers who I don’t want to let down are still sending me software, I just don’t know if I can keep doing it. If I do, it will have to be when I have time and if you don’t upload frequently the YouTube algorithm kicks you in the balls.
YouTube premium here, so I'm already subsidising our very own @Gavinski, and all the others, extremely heavily 😶 with each view.
OTOH, I also apply ruthless rules to my content consumption, like never opening a video with a silly face on the cover image, or stopping immediately if the first seconds are characterised by heavy handwaving and/or more than one "you guys" per sentence. Luckily, these rules do not hurt our cherished YouTubers. More power to them!
Thank you for this explanation. Don't know what to say, other than it is sobering.
Great share Jamie, sobering indeed though. I hope you get more gigs soon ♥
I’m hoping for AI drafted class actions against both YouTube and Spotify. They deserve a reckoning for their outrageous BS. I have Youtube premium too and it’s worth every penny to escape the ads. I’d be a lot happier if the majority of the money I pay them actually went to the creators I watch but that’s unfortunately not the case. The same with Spotify, although I don’t pay for that any more. Audit them with AI too I reckon.
Doing the Lord’s work there, @ervin! Nice one.
The way the YT algorithm apparently works makes most content creators look 'silly' since they need to do them faces to get prioritized...
In the long run YT can almost (or maybe they already do) dictate what content they want to prioritize and publish?
I follow a dude called Andy Rehfeldt, he's got like ~230k subs.
Occasionally he gets to do product reviews...
What I like about him and his videos is the 'no BS' approach to having fun and not giving a flying f'k what people think.
Quality is not super polished (sound is ok though) and the pure fun-factor of not knowing what to expect in advance...
But yeah, at some point we'll get 'fed up' and 'bored' no matter how good the content is
Triple Amen and 1000x 👍
Wow. Jamie and RedSkyLullaby with some grim reality. Why YouTube have to be such pr*cks with all that minimum 4k watch hour stuff I just don’t know.
Thanks for sharing that, Jamie.
I hope the person reads it who called the transfer of review/promo codes from developers some sort of diabolical genius business concept on the youtubers' behalf.
I can also imagine how every time YouTube announces major policy changes can give creators a sinking stomach feeling as they open up their email to read the fine print.
All I can say is that this field & audience is still evolving, and YT has shown us many times that years of perseverance can get rewarded in very unpredictable and sudden ways. So please don't stop as long as there is even the faintest possibility to keep some sort of a balance between things.
I really like how you weave some of your videos around a musical theme of yours, it gives a very special vibe right from the first second. Your calm and collected presentation immediately reminded me of Dan Worrall (who does his own videos, but is getting paid for participating in fabfilter's media projects, but he is more of an audio engineer I think). But by no means do I want to single you out or dunk on everyone else, as I enjoyed some other creators' videos as well, maybe for different reasons. And I probably shouldn't voice too strong an opinion, not having watched a tremendous number of videos anyway.
We could probably fill pages regarding the topic of how developers fit into the current state of all things YT, and these forum posts are probably not the place to get to the bottom of it all. But I think altering the dynamic between developers and youtubers could bring forth some interesting changes, and even brand new perspectives of content. For example, I think right now there is too much dependence on the developer's graciousness (or stinginess) regarding promo codes, or the prevalence of the whole giveaway "genre". But of course that's just a facet of a really complex, connected thing that encompasses all aspects of this ecosystem, and not something you could change with a magic wand in itself.
Speaking of content (and addressing every YT presenter out there), I think there is probably a lot of room for improvement, but I also don't think there is a single direction to go towards. Perhaps something could be learned from some of the differences sometimes observable between desktop and mobile youtubers (and perhaps some differences are maybe there for a good reason). Perhaps more experimentation could reveal a brand new direction, maybe even in a counter-intuitive way. It's possible that some changes that will improve things will come from the outside, like Logic folks with M1 boxes getting interested in AUv3 stuff.
One thing I've been wondering about is all the silent members in the iOS musician facebook groups for example, who rarely react or comment posts from youtubers. Maybe the interaction rate is on par with larger groups (when adjusted for scale), but I always found it more than strange. Maybe I would want to look into that a bit deeper if I was a content creator.
Cheers, and thanks for your relentless dedication. A lot of people (including me) owe you tons.
@dspguy I think the relative lack of discussion in posts by youtubers on Facebook is because, at least using the Facebook app, clicking on a video opens it up directly in YouTube. So people then just join the discussion in the youtube comments section.
Another factor is that probably most youtubers aren't really engaging with those Facebook groups. There are maybe 20+ Facebook groups related to ios music so I think that's more than understandable.
For me nothing beats the AB Forum, in general, as a place for iOS related discussion, so I prefer to engage here. Some youtubers - most, probably - have their own discord servers or whatever so I imagine they focus their energies there. Tbh, I'll probably end up doing the same.
If you do , please let me know the server! I’ve learned a LOT from your channel.