My own private adpocalypse šø
What happened to my YouTube channel? A year after my ad revenue dropped by 40%, Iām still searching for answers.
I have been uploading videos to YouTube for thirteen years ā almost as long as the platform has existed. Over the last decade, I transformed my YouTube hobby into a side hustle and then into a full-fledged business with an employee and a health plan. šŖš»
This is not that story.
This is the story of why I had to layoff my employee, cancel our health plan, and go back to having a day job. This is the story of how my YouTube ad revenue collapsed without warning and how after a year of asking for answers, YouTube is either unable or unwilling to answer my most basic questions about what happened. š£
This is yet another story about YouTubeās failure to support and communicate with its most vital constituents: creators.
Living the dream
At the start of 2018, I was feeling pretty good. Due to my efforts in 2017 to diversify my revenue beyond YouTube ads, I had the most money in my business checking account ever. I had a bunch of new ideas for 2018 and with the extra money, I could afford to try them. š¤
My YouTube studio was no longer a room in my apartment. I was renting an artist studio in a fun neighborhood. After years of working like a maniac to build this business while also holding down a day job, I was a full-time YouTuber. I also had an employee who handled all my video editing, social media management, and more. I was proud of what I had achieved. š
I had turned a creative pursuit into a career. Playing and building with LEGO was my job. By all appearances, I had achieved the dream.
I was also exhausted and on the edge of burn out. I was running a small business with tight margins in a highly competitive and turbulent space. I had been a full-time YouTuber for 18 months and hadnāt taken a real vacation during that time. š„“
Most of my 500+ videos were slight variations of a few formats I established years earlier. I was tired of making the same stuff over and over again, but the YouTube algorithm rewards consistency and I had bills to pay. š¤·š»āāļø I also outsourced the most creative part of my job (creating custom LEGO models based on fan requests) to freelancers because it was more efficient than doing it myself. š
I was planning to take a week off in late January to relax and recharge creatively. As a professional creator, I literally couldnāt afford to burn out. My creativity and passion were the bedrocks of my business. Ironically, I needed to take a break so I could continue being as productive as possible. š¬
Was this the dream? Was I living it? If I was doing what I loved, why did it still feel like work? Was I doing it wrong? š
Worst January ever (for ad revenue)
Meanwhile, I started to notice that my YouTube ad revenue numbers were unusually low. The beginning of the year is always a rough time for advertising-funded companies. Ad spend tends to peak in December and plummet in January. YouTubers freaking out about low January numbers before they understand the ad cycle is so common it should be a meme.
But my January 2018 revenue numbers were really low, even for January. š¤
My views and watch time were fine ā in fact, they were the highest they had ever been. True, they had plateaued in 2017 after growing rapidly from 2014ā2016, but that was a larger issue that shouldnāt impact January revenue.
I checked to see if there was a problem with ads not showing on my videos ā but none of my videos bore the telltale yellow dollar sign of demonetization that haunted so many creators during the first adpocalypse. The estimated monetized playbacks stats for my channel all looked fine. There was only one possible culprit ā CPM.
Sidebar: š Whatās a CPM?
If youāre not intimately familiar with the advertising industry, you probably donāt know much about CPMs. (If you are a CPM expert, feel free to skip this part.) Heck, there are plenty of people who rely on advertising for income who donāt really understand CPMs.
CPM stands for cost per mille. Mille is the French word for thousand. A CPM is a way of relating the cost of an ad to the views of that ad. A CPM of $1 means an advertiser pays $1 for a thousand views of their ad. Simple, right?
š« Wrong. Digital ad auctions these days are complex and opaque systems where advertisers bid what they are willing to pay per click or conversion and then lots of software figures out which advertisements show up where based on a myriad of factors (and personal data). There are also various ways creators get credited for advertisements. If you want to really try and understand this system, listen to this puppet.
There are many other factors that make it difficult for creators to understand CPM on YouTube. For years, YouTube has prioritized reporting on views and watch time, but the engagement metrics that matter from a revenue point of view are estimated monetized playbacks (EMP) or ad impressions. These metrics are hidden in a submenu in the Creator Studio Classic (which has been the default view for years).* YouTube also reports two different CPMs to creators: CPM and playback-based CPM and does a terrible job of explaining the difference between them and how they line up to the engagement metrics. Here are the two equations that matter:
EMP x playback-based CPM x 0.55 = Creator ad revenue š°
Ad impressions x CPM x 0.55 = Creator ad revenue š°
*The new Creator Studio Beta forefronts estimated monetized playbacks and playback-based CPM on the Revenue Report. This is a positive change. š
Okay, enough about CPMs, back to my story!
So in January 2018, I noticed that my CPM was abnormally low, even for January. But I didnāt immediately freak out, because I had just cashed a huge check from a content licensing deal and was prepared for January to be a low-performing month. š If my CPM returned to normal by mid-February, everything would be fine. (Spoiler alert: it didnāt and it wasnāt.)
Hereās how bad January 2018 was compared to the previous 3 Januarys:
Remember that those previous three Januarys were already low-performing months. The highest daily CPM in January 2018 barely reached the lowest daily CPM of the previous three Januarys. š
Worst. January. Ever. (So far.)
Looking at my numbers, it was clear that my CPMs were in a bad place. I reached out to my creator network ā the forum at the ICG, the Video Makers & Marketers Facebook groupāto see if anyone else was seeing CPM issues like this. Nobody was. In fact, many other channels were reporting a small increase in CPM in February 2018 due to YouTube cutting off monetization to channels below 1,000 subscribers.
Since no one I trusted could explain to me why my CPMs were so low, I begrudgingly reached out to the source.
āCommunicatingā with YouTube
As a creator with over 100,000 subscribers, I had the privilege of being able to email the support team at YouTube.* On February 21, 2018, I emailed the YouTube Creator Support team with a graph showing my CPMs and asked if they could explain why my CPM was so much lower than previous years.
āI know that CPMs drop at the beginning of every year because of ad spending cycles. But after plummeting on January 1st, they usually are back to normal levels by early February. This year, my CPMs have been riding at the lowest level in 3 years (see orange line on graph below). Can yāall give me any insight into whatās causing this?ā
A week later I got a response.** Despite the fact that I had emailed the YouTube support email with a question about my YouTube channel, the response I received had nothing to do with YouTube. š
The email contained suggestions for optimizing ad sizing and ad placement on my website (it was more or less a copy and paste of this AdSense Support page). This was not my problem. YouTubers cannot control ad sizes and placements on our videos. We can just toggle different types of ads on or off.
I had reached out to the experts and they took a week to give me a copy-and-paste response to a problem that I literally couldnāt have had based on the special channel I was communicating with them via. It was like taking my car into the mechanic and being given advice for treating a sick dog. I felt frustrated and alone. I felt silly for thinking YouTube would help. š
*YouTube has since lowered the threshold for email support to anyone in the Partner Program (1,000 subscribers) and added a chat option for channels with over 25,000 subscribers.
**The Creator Support team now commits to responding to emails within one business day.
Extra money! Wait, what? šµ š¤
During the week I was waiting for a reply from Creator Support something strange happened. I received my YouTube payment for the month of January. The 3-week lag is totally normal, but the fact that the check was significantly larger than YouTube had estimated it would be was strange. In fact, it was 20% higher than the estimate ā which equated to more than a thousand dollars. There is always a little disconnect between YouTube estimated revenue and actual AdSense payments, but it is usually around 0.05% ā a few dollars at most. This extra amount was almost a whole rent payment. š¦
(Months later, when I mentioned this bizarre extra amount of money to YouTube experts and YouTube employees, they all said they had never heard of anything like this before.)
I was thrilled to have this extra money. But also deeply confused. Did this mean there was a deeper reporting problem in YouTube analytics? Maybe the estimated numbers were off by 20% and my CPMs werenāt actually as bad as they seemed to be? I was hopeful but skeptical. š¤Ø
āCommunicatingā with YouTube - Part 2
On March 3, I responded to Creator Support to 1) tell them they had misunderstood my question 2) attach another graph showing the severity of the CPM drop 3) ask them about payment discrepancy in January. I wasnāt asking for a magical fix to the CPM drop, just for a simple explanation.
āIām just trying to understand what happened. If this because of advertisers pulling out of the YouTube ecosystem as a result of Adpocalypse? Has my channel been downgraded to receive lower paying ads? Is there anything I can do about this?ā
It took Creator Support nearly two weeks to acknowledge they had received my email and say they would look into it. It was now nearly a month since my initial email and they were just beginning to actually investigate my problem. It was like talking to a slow unhelpful chatbot. š
It was another two weeks until they responded to tell me that āthe fluctuations appear normalā and that compared to the last 365 days āthe revenue follows a very similar pattern.ā Hereās a look at my channelās CPM for the first 91 days of the year for the last 4 years.
The CPM line from 2018 is so far away from the previous three years, it never even overlaps. How can they look at this data and not see that something is different in 2018? How does it take six weeks to get such a non-answer? š¤¦š»āāļø
It made me feel like I was going crazy. Something was clearly off, but I couldnāt figure it out. And the one source that should be able to clarify it kept telling me that everything was normal. šµ
Regarding the strange payment overage in January they said, āwe identified an issue with the YouTube revenue calculation and are processing adjustments so that you always receive the correct payment.ā Notice that while this answer notes that was an issue and they are making adjustments, itās not specific enough to say whether this was isolated to January or ongoing. It was only a January thing. At the end of March, I got my revenue from February and it was exactly as low as it had been predicted, no bonus money this time. So much for that scant hope. ā¹ļø
Living the nightmare
While all the ācommunicationā with YouTube was going on, I kept making content. Ad revenue had accounted for 75% of my business income in 2017, so I did everything I could to release videos that were guaranteed to bring in views. All the excess money I had in January was being eaten up maintaining the monthly budget now that AdSense was underperforming by 40% every month. And I never did take that week off in January. šŖ
Simultaneously, I did a massive outreach to brands to try and set up sponsored videos. Out of over $40,000 in proposed projects, two deals came through for a grand total of $3000 over 4 months. But I needed $4000-$5000 every month to make up the AdSense gap.
I was working harder than ever and getting paid less and less. š§
In hindsight, I could have budgeted better so that there was more slack in my budget and I didnāt need every dollar from AdSense just to keep the lights on. I put too many expenses on my personal and business credit cards. I had probably jumped my employee from part-time to full-time too quickly. I own those mistakes. At the time I couldnāt see any of that. š
Being a full-time YouTuber is a constant grind. Rather than feeling a sense of pride when I launched a video, it was crippling anxiety, āwill this get enough views so that I can pay all my bills this month?ā š° When I switched to YouTube full-time, I went from having YouTube as an escape and having a day job full of colleagues to bounce ideas off of to being trapped alone in a hall of mirrors. Every decision I made reflected back on me in a million ways.
As the CPM drama unfolded I felt frantic, barely holding my business together. I knew there was only so long I could keep it up. I had pulled from all my emergency reserves. š
At the end of April, I told my employee about the financial situation. I told him I could keep him on through the end of May, but in lieu of a financial miracle, I would have to eliminate his position. (Spoiler alert: there wasnāt and I did.)
Building a working theory
As a full-time YouTuber, I paid close attention as the adpocalypse unfolded over the course of 2017. I knew that disruptions to the YouTube ecosystem could affect my livelihood, even if my channel was advertiser-friendly. When advertisers leave YouTube, all creators suffer, not just the ones that incite the issue. The less money in the ecosystem overall, the harder we have to hustle to get some of it.
Throughout the main adpocalypse in spring/summer of 2017, everything seemed fine on my channel. While other YouTubers were fearing yellow dollar signs, I just kept doing my thing. š
Then in November 2017, James Bridle published an exposĆ© on the horrors of kidās content on YouTube and it went viral. In response, YouTube shut down a lot of terrible channels that were churning out horrifying content for kids. Yay! But it also led to another group of advertisers leaving YouTube. Boo!
If some of the advertisers who left in November were specifically focused on advertising to kids, then perhaps my channel and the other kid-focused channels that survived the purge were all competing for a smaller pool of ad dollars and that was decreasing CPMs for all of us.
In lieu of answers from YouTube, that was the working theory I developed by reading a lot of articles and pouring over my analytics again and again. It made sense, but it also raised more questions. Was YouTube doing anything to woo back kid-focused advertisers? If advertisers came back, would my CPMs improve again? Why was I being punished when it was YouTubeās fault for not preventing the spread of terrible childrenās content in the first place? š
Talking to YouTube experts
After getting my non-answer from YouTube, I decided it was time to contact some people who actually understood how YouTube works. š„
In April, I had an independent YouTube expert review my channel and give me their thoughts on the CPM drop, my plateauing watch time, and anything else I could be doing to make my channel successful. When I explained my theory about kid-focused advertisers leaving, the expert mentioned that other kids channels they work with had also seen the same CPM drop in the same time frame.
This was the very first confirmation I received that this issue was larger than my channel. It was a huge relief to have someone tell me I wasnāt crazy and I wasnāt alone. I had been searching for that certainty for 3 months. š
This is what I was hoping the Creator Support team would give me when I had first emailed them. Not a magical solution to my new business reality, just an explanation of why it was happening.
They also told me the best thing I could do for my channel was take a break. They were right and I knew it, but I felt like I had to keep going and trying to keep my business at the level it had started the year at, even though it was clearly unsustainable. Even now, it hurts to admit. š
Another independent YouTube expert guided me to a sub-report in YouTube Analytics I had never seen before. Under the Ad Rates report, there is an Ad Types tab. This shows you exactly which type of ads are contributing to your channelās revenue and overall CPM. Looking at this report it became immediately clear what had happened to my CPM.
For years my channelās overall ad revenue (black line) was primarily (85%ā90%) determined by two types of ads: auctioned skippable video ads (blue line) and reserved non-skippable video ads (red line). But on November 21, 2017, something happened that significantly reduced the reserved non-skippable ads on my channel. They went from accounting for 30%-40% of my monthly ad revenue in 2016 and 2017 to about 6%-10% in 2018. This was the underlying issue that caused my overall CPM to drop drastically. I didnāt notice it until January, because November and December are always high-performing months across all ad formats, so the initial loss was masked.
Uncovering this was a huge moment for me.
This was concrete data that allowed me to pinpoint what changed and when. This change happened right around the same time as James Bridleās article was published and that wave of advertisers left YouTube. The data fit my hypothesis. This was the moment I stopped doubting myself (at least as far as my adpocalypse was concerned).
But now I had a new question ā why did my reserved non-skippable video ads specifically go down and not all other types of ads?
Was this a move away from non-skippable ads on YouTube? Probably not, considering the wave of news articles from August 2018 announcing they were making this ad format available to even more creators.
Nope. The simplest explanation is that my channel had been removed from the main source of reserved ad inventory on YouTube ā Google Preferred.
Hold up. I was in Google Preferred? And then I got kicked out!? What?!? š¤Æ
Sidebar: Whatās Google Preferred?
If you thought the CPM sidebar earlier was pretty inside baseball, prepare for some Inceptionesque shenanigans here as we go inside the inside baseball.
Google Preferred is a special set of ad inventory on YouTube. Google takes the top 5% most popular YouTube channels and then looks within those channels to find āthe most engaged and popular channelsā meaning channels that get lots of views and have very engaged audiences.
Advertisers pay a premium to access this inventory. According to my data, the CPMs for Google Preferred ads, which are sold on a reserved basis, are 2ā3 times higher than auction-sold ads of the same format. Being in Google Preferred is extremely lucrative. When Logan Paul was kicked out of Google Preferred he reportedly lost $5 million dollars in revenue.
Here are some assumptions you may have about Google Preferred:
- The channels included in Google Preferred are hand-selected. Since this is YouTube most premium advertising tier, YouTube would have humans oversee every channel thatās included.
- Creators in Google Preferred know when they are in Google Preferred. This is a huge privilege, so YouTube would tell creators when they get in.
- Thereās a comprehensive public list of Google Preferred channels.
All of these assumptions are wrong.
- Thereās a special algorithm called the Preference Score that determines what channels are in and out. However, as of January 2018, YouTube now manually reviews each video in Google Preferred before allowing preferred ads to play on it.
- Unlike a channelās inclusion in other YouTube features like monetization and live streaming, which can all be easily reviewed in Creator Studioās Channel Status and Features dashboard there is no indication anywhere if a channel is included in Google Preferred. If they know about the Ad Types sub-report, creators can make an informed guess based on how many reserved ads they are getting.
- YouTube only shares a small representative sample of channels that are included in Google Preferred publically. Apparently, advertisers can request the full list of channels.
Hereās a short video that explains it succinctly from an advertiserās POV:
Google Unpreferred
So I was out of Google Preferred? Which I never realized I was in while I was in it? Why didnāt YouTube communicate any of this to me? This was so much worse than when I thought my CPMs were low because kid-focused advertisers left. This was not something that would not be solved by advertisers returning to YouTube. Was it even possible to get back in?
If YouTube is giving yellow dollar signs to demonetized videos and publically announced when PewDiePie and Logan Paul were removed from Google preferred, where was my signal? This is business-critical information that YouTube withheld from me. If, as I have pieced together, I was removed from Google Preferred on November 21, 2018, due to a change in how YouTube handles kids channels, I should have been proactively notified about it, so I could plan for the new reality of reduced revenue. Not only did this lack of communication cause me to make some business decisions I would have made very differently if I had this information earlier, but it also caused me months of confusion and emotional distress. All because YouTube couldnāt be bothered to send a single email. š¤š
It gets worse.
In May 2018, I was granted a Partner Manager. This is a real-live human being who works at YouTube who I get to have video calls with and ask questions to. There are lots of problems with the Partner Manager system, but thatās a whole other article. By the time I had my first call with my PM, I had already pieced all of this together (no thanks to Creator Support) and so I explained it to my PM and asked them if they could find out if I was right? Did I used to be in Google Preferred and was I subsequently removed? Yes or no.
On our next call, my PM told me āI talked to the Google Preferred team. They canāt answer your question. They know the answer but they arenāt allowed to say because it would reveal information about the algorithm.ā š š” š¤¬
Emojis canāt describe how angry this makes me.
YouTube denied me the tiniest bit of closure because they value algorithms more than people. This is what creators are talking about when we complain about YouTubeās poor communication. Itās not just that they routinely make platform updates that affect millions of creatorsā revenue without advanced notice (or subsequent notice in my case). Itās not just that they donāt put adequate resources into communicating with creators (Partner Managers could easily be likened to Public Defenders, overworked and underprepared). At the core, they just donāt seem to understand the human impact of their decisions.
My months of anguish and confusion mean nothing to them. All I wanted was a simple explanation. I even did all the hard work for them, I basically became an investigative journalist just to figure out what happened to my CPM. šµš» In the end, all they needed to say was yes or no and they couldnāt even do that.
What makes this even more infuriating is that itās in YouTubeās best interest to support creators. Creators are the lifeblood of the platform, without their content there would be no audience and without an audience, there would be no advertisers.
Life after YouTube
On my employeeās last week of work, we packed up the studio. Not only was I laying him off, but I was moving out of the art studio. I was cutting every expense I could.
I felt defeated. The last thing I wanted to do was make YouTube videos. I still had to though, at least until I could find a day job again. June and July were spent slowly slogging through videos while trying to reactivate my professional network, update my resume and apply to jobs.
I found a job. I started in August 2018. It was a good job. It paid well and the work was interesting. I had people I could bounce ideas off of. I felt my social skills reactivating after a couple of years of languishing. When something went wrong at work, there were humans I could talk to about what happened and why. For instance, when I was laid off in February 2019* as part of a reorganization, I knew who had made that decision and was able to commiserate with others affected by it mere minutes after I was informed of the decision. I still donāt have that level of clarity from YouTube.
(*As of right now, I am currently searching for part-time and freelance work as a digital marketing writer. If you want to work with me, please hit me up on LinkedIn.)
I havenāt made a YouTube video in over six months. Iāve slowly started building with LEGO again, just for fun, just what I want to build. Sometimes I post images to my YouYube community tab. Iāll make another video when Iām ready; when I want to make it. I donāt know when that will be.
My YouTube channel still makes me money. Itās still a part of my husbandās and my monthly budget, but itās much much smaller than it was a year ago.
I still think about YouTube a lot. I started a local meetup group in Chicago for other creators. It has been like group therapy for me. I didnāt have a network of people who cared about this stuff before. Now I do, and Iām excited to help them grow their channels, on YouTube and elsewhere. š I want them to learn from my mistakes. I want to give them what YouTube couldnāt give me: information, community, care.
Iām still angry at YouTube for hurting me. I used to want an explanation from them. I thought they owed me one. (My original title for this article was āYouTube owes me an explanation.ā) Regardless of YouTubeās ability to produce one, I needed an explanation ā for my own sanity and self-confidence. Without an explanation, I couldnāt move on. Not completely.
Now I have an explanation. You just read it. It took me six months of self-reflection, therapy, and internet research to write this. Whee. š
What do I want from YouTube, now that I have an explanation? Confirmation would still be nice. So would an apology. But what I really want is a guarantee that YouTube will work to ensure that no other creator will go through what I did again. I want YouTube to be transparent with creators about when they are added to Google Preferred and when they are removed from it. If they truly view us as partners, they should be able to do that. We deserve that basic human decency.
Post-Script: About the Commentpocalypse
I literally finished writing this article days before the Commentpocalypse began. Watching this drama unfold over the last two weeks (during which I built and photographed my LEGO YouTube dystopia to illustrate this article) has been simultaneously triggering and validating.
The broad outlines of this latest crisis are the same as the one that I went through. A big expose of something terrible on YouTube leads to advertisers pulling out which results in swift action from YouTube which impacts the livelihoods of countless creators.
To YouTubeās credit, they have been much more swift and transparent with their communication to creators this time. But the gap between where they are and where they should beāwhere creators need them to beāis still so wide and it pains me to see people falling into it, being swallowed by it. Hearing Derral Eves explain how his channel for kids was briefly deleted and never recovered makes me feel less alone, but also deepens my despair.
How many times will this story play out?
The closer I look, the more it hurts.
Post-Post Script: About the FTC Settlement
August 6, 2019
There have been a few articles published in recent weeks speculating about a settlement agreement between YouTube and the Federal Trade Commission, following its investigation into whether kidsā content on YouTube violated COPPA. Apparently, part of the settlement resulted in YouTube tweaking the algorithm that recommends videos on the site.
The upside is that my channel has seen a small bump in viewers in the last week or two. So this algorithm shift seems to be in my favor, but seeing the lack of transparency from YouTube to creators negatively affected by this change is incredibly triggering.
From the Bloomberg article by Mark Bergen about the algorithm change:
Some creators are still grappling to understand why YouTube made the changes, and how to recover from them. Nathan Laud, a British animator behind cartoon song channel Tiny Tunes, said his daily views fell about 80 percent since the algorithm update.
When Nathan Laud asked YouTube about his traffic drop, an email from a company support account replied that there was a change in the ādiscovery systemsā that connect viewers to videos. It didnāt detail why his videos were affected.
āAfter further investigation, weāve found no issues on your channel. Everything is working as intended.ā
This email that Nathan received is almost a word-for-word copy of the unhelpful email I received after inquiring about my sudden CPM drop. Itās one thing for YouTube to make constant shifts to the algorithm, but it would be nice if they would be more transparent to creators about what factors led to a given change (or even acknowledging that something changed) when asked point-blank about it. Denying the change is gaslighting pure and simple.
I have started uploading to YouTube again. My new videos have been more sporadic and less focused than my previous content. It feels good to be in contact with my audience again. But it also hurts to see all the ways YouTube hasnāt grown or changed since Iāve been away.
Iām still angry and hurt. Iāve tried to move on, but mostly I just moved in a new direction (Iām currently pursuing an MFA in game design).
