Click here to visit my new Ko-Fi page.
On Sunday I published a blogpost explaining that my experiment of using YouTube as a more sustainable funding model for Scot Goes Pop wasn't really working out, and I added that I was going to have to spend a few days mulling over what to do next. I expected it to amount to a straight choice between doubling down on the YouTube idea and trying to make my channel go truly galactic, or setting up a Substack newsletter and transferring all my energies into making that work instead. I've now made a decision, but before I come to that I'll just briefly recap how I arrived at this point.
For several years after 2014, the funding for this blog worked fairly smoothly - I simply ran a fundraiser once a year and it pretty much always hit its target within a few days or weeks. Things first started to become more difficult in 2021, and I think a big part of the reason was that I had begun commissioning opinion polls the previous year. Quite understandably, people tended to only donate once to each site within a reasonable time-frame, and so the general fundraising to keep the blog going became a victim of the success of the poll fundraisers. That wasn't the whole explanation, though, because after a while even the poll fundraisers started to fall well short of their target figures. The poll I commissioned last month for the Holyrood election was actually the first I'd managed to do for three years.
To be clear, the general fundraising for the blog was still working in the long run, and I was still staying afloat, but it was taking a hundred times more effort than it had done in previous years. Fundraising became practically a year-round effort, which effectively set up a vicious circle, because after a while the constant mentions of the crowdfunder became just 'normal background noise' and readers were far more likely to skim past them. That meant I had to continuously devise ever more in-your-face methods of getting the fundraiser noticed whenever progress stalled, and although those efforts worked, it was getting increasingly stressful and I realised I couldn't go on like that for much longer.
So just under a year ago I decided to make a radical change to try to find a sustainable solution. I checked the average earnings per 1000 views that YouTube creators in the UK receive simply from ad revenues - the figure was surprisingly decent, and I realised that could be the ideal outcome for me, because I would no longer have needed to receive any funding from readers/viewers at all. That would have been a much healthier situation. However, I couldn't be sure whether it would work in practice, because earnings vary wildly on either side of the average depending on the subject-matter of each channel and the demographics of its audience, so the only way I was ever going to find out was to give it a spin for a while. Doing that was far from straightforward, because to even qualify for earnings I had to reach 1000 subscribers on YouTube, which took me until almost Christmas.
So it's only really now, five months later, that I have a good sense of how much I'm earning from YouTube per month, and it's simply nowhere near enough. My viewing figures are, if anything, higher than I had expected, so that's not the problem - it's just that videos about Scottish politics pull in well below the UK average earnings per 1000 views because of the demographics of their viewers. I did some sums, and I realised that to achieve the type of earnings I had initially been hoping for, I would have to get an average of 10,000 to 20,000 views per video, which I'm not sure is even attainable. I've checked various Scottish political channels on YouTube and none of them are at that kind of level. There's simply a finite number of people out there who are interested enough in Scottish politics to regularly watch videos about it. Some YouTube channels attract additional revenues from sponsorship, but again, that only really seems to be possible with an average of over 10,000 views per video.
I did have a mad thought about aiming for a faster turnover by stripping back to audio commentary and perhaps doing several videos a day, and getting up to 10,000 views per day that way, but I quickly realised that was a hopeless idea. So I then started thinking about abandoning YouTube and switching to a Substack newsletter, which had always been my main Plan B - I regarded that as an inferior idea because it would have involved charging readers for subscriptions, but at least it could have provided more stable funding and would have got me out of the crowdfunding trap once and for all.
I very, very nearly set up a Substack account on Monday afternoon, but once the doubts started creeping in, I swung hard in the opposite direction. I had several concerns, but the biggest of all was that I would have needed to put at least a substantial minority of my content behind a paywall. To me, that defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. When pro-independence bloggers and content creators first started to crowdfund in significant numbers just over a decade ago, the reason was that we didn't think the mainstream media was serving Scotland well enough, and we wanted a thriving alternative media to step into the breach as best it could. So the point of the funding was to help people like me make more content and to get it seen by as many people as possible, not to hide the content and only make it visible to a secret society of a few dozen people.
There are no perfect options available, but I realised I wanted a solution that ticked as many of the following boxes as possible: a) no paywalls, b) no more stress from having to run 'boom and bust' annual crowdfunders, c) funding that comes at least partly, and to the greatest extent possible, from sources other than my readers or viewers, and d) the opportunity to continue growing the audience substantially. I think YouTube, combined with some conventional blogging as I've been doing in recent months, is actually the best fit. I've definitely reached a new audience with my YouTube channel - that's clear from the comments section of the videos. Although there is probably a natural ceiling on how much that audience can expand, I have not come close to reaching that ceiling yet, so there's still considerable scope for growth, which will in turn increase advertising revenues over time. There's plainly always going to be a significant shortfall of funds to plug, however, so I've come to the conclusion that using a Patreon-type site is the best (or least worst) way of bridging the gap.
I've always known I didn't want to use Patreon itself, which is far too fussy in the way it works. I've checked up on the alternatives as carefully as I can, and I've decided to go with Ko-Fi. My new page on Ko-Fi is now up and running and you can visit it HERE. It allows anyone who wishes to support my YouTube channel or the blog to set up either a small recurring monthly payment (the suggested options are £5, £10 or £20, but you can also choose any other amount you prefer), or to make a one-off 'tip' of any amount. This can be done at any time, and of course you're also free to cancel recurring payments at any time. Payment can be made by card, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and one or two other options. It's just a much more flexible arrangement all round, and if it works it will hopefully generate much more stable and predictable funding from month to month. That will free me up to concentrate on growing the YouTube channel as much as possible and creating the most interesting possible content. As I'm sure some of you know from personal experience, making videos for YouTube is an insanely time-consuming process - even though I do it in a completely no-frills way without fancy editing or graphics or background music or whatnot, it still usually takes me hours each time.
My decision will of course mean I'll have to promote my Ko-Fi link in the description section of the videos, and at the bottom of each blogpost, but it should be a lot less obtrusive than the previous reminders of the annual fundraisers, and hopefully the whole issue of funding will become much less stressful from this moment on. (No guarantees, of course, but I'll soon find out.)
Just to address a specific point that was raised the other day, one or two of you said that for a variety of reasons it's convenient for you to listen to podcasts but not to watch YouTube videos. As most of my videos are effectively monologues, they would generally work as podcasts as well, and until a few months ago I used to upload an audio version of each video to Soundcloud. The only reason I stopped doing that was because the videos took so long to edit, process and upload that I was usually losing the will to live by the end and I couldn't be bothered facing another few minutes dealing with Soundcloud. However, it's something I could go back to doing if there's a strong enough demand for it. Let me know in the comments section if you have a strong preference for audio content.
And once again, just a reminder that my new Ko-Fi page can be found HERE.
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