Thursday, June 1, 2023

Google "Bait & Switch", YouTube: Pay To Pay

I previously wrote a blog post on my last 10 years of Google organic search and our website.  The summary of that is the findability of our website, and the fall in AdSense revenue was algorithmically controlled by Google.  At first Adsense was paying our site hosting fees, but that lasted only a few years. I haven't accumulated enough for a payout now in something like 5 years.

I can assume that if I had started paying for website promotion, the fall off in findability would have been different.

I also previously did a blog post on our YouTube channel. I originally was getting ad revenue, and reasonable view, but every so often Google changed, the number of views, and the hours watched, until I didn't qualify any more, and our channel became almost unfindable. Anything posted since 2016 is now only seen by a few friends.

This recent post from Fran on her channel goes into the same kind of details, and shows the latest incarnation of Googles ongoing "bait & switch" where it looks like if you aren't now paying to promote your channel, you aren't getting the revenue you had 12 months ago with the same views, hours watched, and everything else the same.     

Looks very much the same thing I saw with our website , AdSense and promotion.  Same old, same old. 


Facebook has had "PROMOTE your post or else no one will see it" for years now. Twitter is now, similarly, "unless you pay $8 a month, none will see your posts".  So the Google is doing the same thing.  No surprise there. The "do no evil" guys left the building years ago.

I got off the YouTube roundabout in 2016, and didn't bother even trying to keep up with their changing requirements for monetization.  

It is a shame though that such a video media channel is being crippled like Twitter and Facebook have been.  

The main thing for me is that this supports what I had already seen myself. I hadn't imaged it all.  With  the ongoing changes, so few will see any videos I post on my channel.  

I ask myself "is it really worth the effort to me to make a video if only 10 people will ever see it?". The answer to that has to be, "I make a video because I want to see it, and views by others are nice, but aren't important". 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology


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