Is my channel is dying?

[Jungle Explorer]

Well, it looks like this youtube thing is not going to work for me. I had high hopes in the beginning, but now I don't know. My channel was taking off when I first started. Even though I only had a few videos and a couple hundred subs, I was making decent money. Now, two years later, I have 120 videos and 2500 subs, and I am making about the same thing as I was in my first months. It just seems like the harder I work to improve my videos, the less I make. My channel reached a high point last year in September where I was making about $140 a month. Then it started a slow decay. No matter what I do, it just continues to slowly slide down. In November I started paying for Tubebuddy Pro and did massive amounts of work tweaking my videos SEO, but it had absolutely zero effect at all.

Right now I have more views per month then ever, but I my earning just continue to go down. I have done everything I can think of. I keep putting out more videos and people must like them because my subs are growing at the fastest pace ever, but it does nothing to turn things around in the earnings department.

Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? I am not talking about a SUDDEN drop. This is just a stead slow decay over 9 months. Here is a graph to give you an example.

 

[HiEnergy]

What does it look like when you show the daily revenue, not the 30-days totals?
Correlated to watch time hours would also be interesting. So you can see how much an hour of watch time yields.

 

[Jungle Explorer]

Daily stats are irrelevant. The graph shows a steady drop from Sep 2017 to now. In Sep 2017 I was making $140 a month. Now I am making $50 a month and falling. This happened while releasing dozens of higher quality long videos (10 minutes on average), a 100% growth in subscribers, and doing massive improvements to the SEO of each video.

In the same time period, my average watch time has gone up almost a full minute from 3:50 to 4:49. Now my views and watch time has gone down about 25%, but I my revenue has gone down by 60%.

Part of the decrease in my views has to do with a couple of my really popular pellet air rifle pest control (hunting small pest rodents) videos being marked as restricted, which makes no sense at all, because there are thousands of videos on youtube of people slaughtering hundreds of hogs and coyotes out of helicopters with fully automatic AR-15 machine guns that are not restricted. This kind of overt BIAS crap is really turning me sour on youtube. Hunting rats with a BB gun is "Adult Content", but mass slaughter of hogs and wild dogs with a machine gun is not. Give me a break!

But regardless of the 25% degrees in views, that still does not account for a more then 60% decrees in revenue. I have stopped making hunting videos. 90% of my videos in the last 9 months have been HOW TO Instructional videos for homestead related issues. My last video was about how to hook an inverted to a golf cart to use it for wood cutting with and electric chainsaw, just for example. I have stopped making videos about any gun related content as well, just in case someone wants to take off on that tangent and blame that.

So while doing everything thing to make my channel more "Youtube Friendly", my channel is crashing. It is not a problem with my viewers, because I get nothing but positive feedback from all my subs and new viewers and my subscriber rate is increasing every month. But I can't keep doing all this work for $50 lousy bucks a month. I can't keep working harder, while continually seeing a decrees in revenue.

 

[videoeditgr]

Talking money, 140/month is not a viable income. Unlike real business nobody will force you to shut it down or pay for something. Be careful where you invest your money as long software and gurus are really a trend nowadays. No sucess guaranteed. But the good news is that the fate of your channel is in your hands. I used two words. Business and channel. Guess you will have to choose one of those for a start.

Hah!? I watched your screenshot and i am glad to see that there is another person in the world than me that still use Picasa!!!!

 

[Jungle Explorer]

Talking money, 140/month is not a viable income. Unlike real business nobody will force you to shut it down or pay for something. Be careful where you invest your money as long software and gurus are really a trend nowadays. No sucess guaranteed. But the good news is that the fate of your channel is in your hands. I used two words. Business and channel. Guess you will have to choose one of those for a start.

Hah!? I watched your screenshot and i am glad to see that there is another person in the world than me that still use Picasa!!!!

I love Picasa. It really is a great quick photo editor and album manager. I keep an EXE file of it since google got rid of it for Photos, which is crap. As far as the fate of my channel being in "My hands". I doubt that is true. You know darn well, that tomorrow YouTube could decide a new rule and kill thousands of channels like they did not too long ago. If the fate of my channel were truly in my hands, then youtube could not decided to change the rules, or cave to knee jerk advertiser recreations to sensationalism negative news trends. The fate of all of our channels is NOT in our hands, but in the hands of people who think they need to tell everybody else what they can think or say by controlling the almighty AD Dollar. I think you agree.

I am in favor of passing a law that says that, if a person is not breaking the laws set by the GOVERNMENT, they cannot be persecuted or discriminated against by AD companies. The bottom line is this. It is form of intellectual racism. A company can't refuse to hire you base on you sex, age, religion, or race. But for some reason discrimination based in ideological differences is A OK!

 

[HiEnergy]

videos being marked as restricted

I also had videos being marked as "not suitable for advertisement" (that was before the Feb/Mar 2018 demonetization). I contended those "unsuitable" marks and won every single time. Did you contend YT's decisions? Ask them why scaring rodents with a soft air gun is "restricted content".

 

[Jungle Explorer]

I also had videos being marked as "not suitable for advertisement" (that was before the Feb/Mar 2018 demonetization). I contended those "unsuitable" marks and won every single time. Did you contend YT's decisions? Ask them why scaring rodents with a soft air gun is "restricted content".

The videos were reported by PETA people and YouTube issued a STRIKE for them. I repealed the strike and won, but they made the videos RESTRICTED. Even after being restricted, the same person immediately reported them again, multiple times trying to get youtube to remove them. Bottom line, it's not about what's in the videos, it's about Youtube caving to a SQUEAKY Wheel, bleeding heart, powder puff, millennial, wimp who can't handle reality and thinks that unicorns still exist. If I could talk to a REAL rational thinking human being at youtube, I might be able to work this, but we all know that is never going to happen.

Regardless, the loss of those few videos, does not change the fact that my revenue is crashing while my channel is growing. There has to be a reason for that. It could be that youtube is just not putting ads on my videos, because my videos are not all about Sweetness and Light and Unicorns, they are about real life on the farm.

 

[sanitary103]

unfortunately anything even remotely related to any type of gun whether it's a bb gun or pellet gun can and will be restricted or flagged. like you said, Youtube is bending backwards for the advertisers and not being loyal to the smaller channels.

 

[Jungle Explorer]

unfortunately anything even remotely related to any type of gun whether it's a bb gun or pellet gun can and will be restricted or flagged. like you said, Youtube is bending backwards for the advertisers and not being loyal to the smaller channels.

I would be fine with that if it youtube were unbias in their application. I could post links to hundred of gun videos that are not restricted. I mean some really disturbing stuff. By my BB gun videos are. That is not fair. I am okay with rules if they are fair and equally applied, but I will cry foul when I see unfair bias application of the rules.

I also think that YT should not allow their staff's opinion be the part of the equation. YT needs crystal clear rules, and they should have to tell you EXACTLY what part of you video specifically violated those rules. My few videos that were restricted, were old videos that had been on YT for a long time. Youtube restricted them, but did not tell me WHY they restricted them. By my understanding of the TOS, there is nothing in the videos that violate the TOS, and even the person that revued the videos said they had no violations. They just said they FELT like they belonged in the RESTRICTED category, but they did not say why. Hunting is a LEGAL activity enjoyed by tens of MILLION law abiding Americans. Rodent pest control is a reality of every farmers life. There are hunting shows all over network television and they are rated in the G category for General Audience.

 

[HiEnergy]

The videos were reported by PETA people

Were those videos about hitting (and possibly hurting, torturing or even killing) rodents? Or did you just shoot in the air so the animals were scared by the sudden boom and ran off?
Shooting at animals is a different cup of tea, I think, than scaring them away by undirected shots only causing sudden loud noises. In the former case I can understand the videos getting flagged as restricted although it's not for the animals' sake but for the "poor" advertisers who don't want to see their "valuable" ad next to a "possibly disturbing" shot of someone torturing or even killing animals.