YouTube Is Failing. I don’t know if I can keep this up forever.
I think its time I gave some of my take on this whole thing going on lately. If you’re unaware, YouTube is striking content for very silly reasons, some of which it refuses to explain. Videos get demonetized for no reason now because YouTube’s AI is biased to pick on certain channels, and the whole thing is trying to push a more family friendly, ant-controversy feeling. A lot of people are talking about the way the system works now, how creators are effected, and how there’s not much hope of fixing it. I decided that I wanted to talk about how its affecting me on an emotional level, having this anvil on a string above my head with “not suitable for all advertisers” written on it.
As per usual, here’s a stream of consciousness rant about where I feel like all this is going for myself personally. Some of this I wrote down while texting a friend on the subject and then realizing that these points were probably important to share on a broader scale.
I love making videos on this platform, but I feel like we're running on borrowed time. Its only a matter of time before this is not long financially viable and I have to drop all hopes of using it as a career. I've wanted to make it as a YouTuber since I started watching the site in 2008 and made my own channel in 2010. Now it feels like right when I'm making progress and have an audience, I'm only weeks out from getting shanked by the system and left to bleed in a gutter while my loving followers stand in a circle and panic while they fail to close the wound. Then I’ll be left to start over in some other entertainment field that's far less accessible than YouTube once was. All my life I’ve wanted to be a public persona and an entertainer. Ever since I was a kid. I felt it most when I became isolated and alone in middle school. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A lot of people begged me to start the Patreon as a last ditch effort to keep a steady flow of revenue before the bot inevitably notices all the times I committed to dark comedy and swear words in my videos. Now, the thing is, Patreon and stream donations are entirely dependent on the kind of audience loyalty I have. If I can't continue to grow as a channel, that audience stagnates. If I can't keep providing videos for that audience, they will stop caring, regardless of how loyal they are right now. They can't keep donating to someone who isn't posting videos anymore. Its a waste of their money and I don’t think they should do that. The paradox is that if I can't keep producing in a way that narrowly slips past the censors and bots, I will implode, but the more content I produce, the closer I get to being unable to make more content. I need a steady stream of content going or else I'll be forgotten. I can't keep a steady stream if YouTube is kneecapping creators in favor of whoever gets them the most cash. If the money doesn’t keep flowing, I’ll have to get a normal job and then have even less time to make videos, meaning that I’ll just get closer and closer to having to quit entirely because its going back to being a profitless hobby that’s distracting me from being responsible and working for a living.
I’ve heard others tell me that I can get by if I just go PG with the whole thing. That’s more difficult than it may seem. I'd be unable to put out a lot of gameplay videos because games are almost always violent and Kyle and I almost always cuss because that’s how my friend and I communicate. That’s our normal banter. Censoring that to fit the guideline and talking to each other with restrictions becomes disingenuous and its more clear that I’m trying to do the video to appease YouTube than to have fun. However, I can avoid cussing in reviews. In fact, in the Marvel nemesis review I said "shit" once and zero f-words. That wasn't even intentional honestly, I just didn't have a reason to swear that much. I think in my scripted material, I can exercise self control and avoid more adult oriented language and material, but that sort of limits the tone and humor people have come to expect from me and like about my channel.
My goal from day one was to be a comic channel that can have fun and isn’t quite as rigid or sterile as the others. Other comic channels do two things. They look at the material as something to be taken too seriously and avoid having any kind of humor towards it, often functioning as a sort of fanboy echo chamber to perpetuate safe and sterile opinions on this material without having a sense of identity or memorability. The other thing they do is become this sort of manufactured and dishonest figure, by really jumping on the train to make easy money and ride the sudden popularity of the medium that sprang up in the past decade. They report on and commentate on comics, but they often feign interest in it or turn their nose up at it with a subtlety that says to me, “I secretly think this is ridiculous and people who like this are more so, but they give me money so whatever lol Spider-Man radiation semen in Spider-Man Reign, remember that?????? I’ve never even read that story but I bring it up constantly for the lulz”
I honestly fucking despise both. I felt like most comic channels (with exceptions of course) gave this medium a bad name by taking it too seriously or not seriously enough. I thought the thing that made me unique was by staying in the middle and making jokes where appropriate, but also expressing my genuine love and fascination at others. And it was working. People were noticing and I was picking up steam. Now in the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been unable to increase my audience. I can’t seem to gain subscribers in the pace I used to, and even my comic book related videos are under-performing. I don’t think this is the fault of my current audience, I think they’re more excited than ever. I think its that the system is becoming increasingly hostile towards creators and making it harder to get noticed and build upon an established audience unless it was ALREADY massive. Channels with 2 million+ subs get promoted more and more, while channels with only a few thousand are either getting dismantled by the robot or just struggling to ice-skate uphill and get more views. Some mothafuckas’ always trying to ice skate uphill.
So in addition to being worried about being unable to keep making things the way I do without losing financial stability, I’m also worried that I won’t be able to keep growing with the safe and sterile content I’d have to make to keep being financially stable, and the way I’m making things currently is also being actively ignored by YouTube because I don’t spam 15 videos a day to stay relevant in the eyes of the promotion bot. Its a 3 pronged problem. You can almost turn it into some kind of complex equation. But the end result is that I’m getting stuffed from 3 different angles and its looking more grim as I go. In all honesty, I don’t see my channel surviving past the end of 2018. I can already imagine myself making a teary eyed video explaining that I can’t do this anymore because I can’t afford to pay my bills.
Honestly, this is very stressful for me. The thing I love doing most, the thing that I felt like gave my life meaning for the past 3 years... its being taken away little by little. I used to get made fun of for the things I liked. People actively avoided me in school for the comic books and video games because those weren't cool things to them. Now people respect me for liking those things and think I'm cool for knowing so much about both. I took my weakness and made it a strength. I have this legion of amazing people that treat me like I'm important now and I feel like once I can't provide entertainment for them anymore, they'll forget about me. And then I'll just have to work at the grocery store and never express my ideas and opinions. I'll just get set back to being a face in the crowd that barely anyone talks to. I don’t know what to do anymore. Best I can hope for is to just keep making things for my small but respectable audience. I’ll keep making them laugh and making them think and then when I can’t do it anymore, we’ll part ways and I’ll find a new way to entertain. And I’ll just pray to whatever’s out there that those fans will remember the times I made them laugh or made them think, and they’ll smile and ask “whatever happened to GodzillaMendoza?”
And hopefully they’ll find me in whatever new corner of the world I’m in trying to make a living being creative, and they’ll support that new dumb endeavor. I really feel like I have something to give to the world as a creator. Its just hard to do that sometimes, but generations before mine had it harder. Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter and pre-scumbag-George Lucas all had their own uphill battles becoming household names. They had to fight to put their ideas out there in a vacuum. The sad reality is, for a short time in society, it became super easy to be a big name creative type, no matter what you looked like, what you were into, and where you were from. For a time, anyone could have made it to the big-time. I’m trying my best, and maybe through some sheer accident I can be one of those people. But as it is now, it looks like I may have hopped on just a few years too late. It won’t be easy anymore. It’ll go back to being this infinite struggle to be heard or noticed. Both as a person, and as a creative voice. I dread that feeling, but I suppose deep down, I’m ready for it.
Being me was never meant to be easy. With every personal struggle, every abusive father, every financial hurdle, every cheating girlfriend and broken heart, every lie I’ve been told by someone I trusted, every cruel school bully, every time I had to fall back on a handful of pills to make it through the day without collapsing... with all of that plus run-on sentences-- I’ve gotten used to fighting to simply exist. Maybe this is just part of that. I can’t exist without art. Videogames, comics, movies, books, every other kind. It all makes me who I am, and its all I feel like I can give to the world. I’ll keep trying to give that until there’s nothing left of me. I never wanted to be rich and famous. I just wanted to live comfortably and stress-free doing the things that make me happy. Being an adult for a year and being responsible for myself taught me there’s no such thing as living comfortably or stress-free. Its always a battle with the world and yourself. So fuck it, I guess I’ll just keep going anyway. Live through the despair with blind hope and just pretend that I’m not freaking out constantly. This is going to get a lot worse and might not ever get better, but I can’t give up. I’m not particularly handsome. I can’t be some innovative inventor that will fix society’s problems. I don’t have the influence to reshape society and make the world more peaceful with a silver tongue.
All I can do is try to make living on Earth a little more fun for other people with this warped imagination of mine. Without sharing my creativity, I really have nothing left. I won’t live through that.
