** UPDATE ONE 11:24 19/1:
Adjusted figures are in,
159 subscribers and 769 Watch Hours to go
I realised that the ‘last 12 months’ timeframe would mean 365 days before the deadline on February 20 2018 hence the inflation of the watch hour figure.

Well, it’s certainly been an interesting twenty four hours as I experience the range of emotions you feel when you’re told you’re not good enough. But after reviewing the raw ratings data, in a roundabout way because it seems YouTube doesn’t want you to find the information, things aren’t all bad.

Once I sorted through all of the palava in the very confronting email, I discovered that there is a way of easily identifying exactly what YouTube is needing you to do with this shift of policy surrounding their ‘Partner Program’ which allows channels to monetise their videos by sullying them with often unskippable pre-roll ads that the channel has no control over, and receives very little in return.

You can actually ask the analytics pages to show you your watch time hours over the last 365 days, but not easily. You simply must click Analytics, then click Watch Time in the left context menu that appears, then click Compare Metric, then click More Metrics, then click Watch Time (Hours) – don’t forget to go hunting for it, because it doesn’t stand out. Then in the top right, click where it usually says ‘This Quarter’ to bring down a list of time periods and select ‘Last 365 Days.’ Phew.

This is the graph for my YouTube channel, showing that I only require another 197 watch hours (as of 9am, 19/1 Brisbane time.) Additionally, I’ve picked up another 5 subscribers overnight (thank you!) which brings me to 164 subs to go.

I freely admit that YouTube’s Partner Program does not afford me a ‘debt free, live off YouTube’ lifestyle… but the loose change it does bring in helps to offset some of the costs of server uptime, hosting for the website etc. My disappointment in YouTube merely stems from the double standard they have applied to the scenario’s surrounding Logan Paul, PewDiePie and others. And lets not even delve into the thousands of channels blatantly ripping off copyrighted works for financial gain (including using slow speed videos to circumvent the automatic piracy algorithms.)

Can you help me stay in the partner program?
Subscribe to TREKZONE.org here, and click here for the playlist of all Trekzone Spotlight podcasts.

Thank you.