For those of you who have followed my work on YouTube, you’ve seen my home for almost four years. You see how I live. You may have noticed I don’t have flooring except for the sub-floors that are painted. You’ll see that I don’t have a traditional kitchen. There’s no stove. There’s a mini-fridge instead of a full sized refrigerator. Although I’m working on getting upgrades, it’s a slow-going process to make big purchases. This is my life. It’s not where I thought I’d land in life, but it’s where I’m at.
I try to make the best out of every situation I deal with. If I had more options, I would prefer to live in a home with a real foundation and crawl space, maybe even a basement. Although I was not able to achieve it, I did instead get my Trailer which was more affordable. But I still have to pay monthly bills like everyone else. There’s no shortcuts in life. I work very hard on my Channel which brings me to today’s topic: Abuse through Content Creation.
Many different people watch content. People that are kind, unkind, rich, broke … lots of diversity of personality styles. Since the beginning, I’ve dealt with learning how to block certain words so when people cuss me out in the comments, it does not appear. The obvious insults are the ones that anyone of us could spot. There’s the “B-word” and the “C-word”. But what about the passive-aggressive insults that pop up?
With PA insults, those are more thought out. They are a bit more clever. And they still come up. In the meantime, I have a content creation schedule to keep up with to stay on task to get my work done. I’m not special. Just about every Content Creator has to learn to deal with this. It will either eat you up and derail you from doing your best work or it becomes just a regular part of the job.
What’s the impact of long-term abusive comments for online creators? I don’t know the answer but I do wonder as anything over a period of time creates an impact in your life. I recently managed an in-person PA insult that someone issued towards me in a public setting. It was a person that looked at me and said “pale skin is ugly”. My reaction was to smile and just continue to be myself. That’s the key. When someone insults you, but carries the plausible deniability to back out of it as if you were not the intended recipient, that’s how you spot PA behavior.
I could go into what the individual looked like, how they presented. But it does not really matter. The overall tone was they utilized a friendly conversation to insult a stranger. That’s a spiritual problem. I used to think people with this nature had personality issues. As it seems we are living in the most disturbing times in modern history, I think it’s rooted more honestly in spiritual dysfunction.
I don’t talk a lot about God on my Channel. And I would like to. The trouble with the algorithm is if you talk about something that could be categorized as offensive then it can push your video to the bottom. On the other hand, if you are totally offensive about a hot topic issue you can be rewarded through the algorithm. It’s all in how the algorithm chooses to promote your video or keep it down. There are people who do great work but get very little views or attention on YouTube. But then you could see a video getting pushed out that is something highly negative and it’s rewarded. Doing this work might have to end. It’s just not worth it financially to invest in the making and editing of each video and average out the income produced against the time invested just to earn how much? Well often it’s less than minimum wage.
On occasion I receive accusations of being YouTube rich. What a joke. A 10 minute video that receives 10,000 views might earn $100 plus or minus. It’s not guaranteed. It’s very sad to put everything you can into a video and earn less than minimum wage. It’s actually quite depressing. I make a decision each year of whether to pursue paid sponsorships or not. I have avoided it. But as the changes to the platform are impacting pay (for the worse) and the videos are not getting pushed out, I may have to do sponsorships. It’s not what I intended to do. Kind of like living in a Trailer. It’s not where I thought I’d land. But it turned out to be a Blessing. Maybe if I’m forced into sponsorships, it will become a Blessing, too.
Between the abusive comments and the low pay, I wonder why I should keep trying. It’s like being in a bad relationship. After awhile you look around and say what’s the point.
