Raped by the Ghost of Lovecraft's Cat--My Youtube Story

How I continue to endure a fourteen-year abusive relationship with my ad company

One of the most conceptually frightening villains in fiction is the Anti-Spiral from Gurren Lagann. This species became as advanced and powerful as an entity could possibly be without it weakening the universe for them to exist--thus they decided to freeze themselves in suspended animation and to implement rules for other growing species to form caste and belief systems which enforce the deliberate limitation of their populations. Whenever a species attempts to break the rules and rebel, the Anti-Spiral does not seek to defeat them outright--they could do this any time in a species' development if they wanted to; rather, their strategy is to attack the spirit. They continually present a challenge just above the level of the heroes heads, so that when they narrowly rise to that challenge at great personal loss, the Anti-Spiral can introduce a ten-times more-insurmountable threat.

Posting on youtube feels an awful lot like fighting the Anti-Spiral. I've had my channel completely removed three times since 2014, and had to battle for the existence of countless videos against ever-changing rules and circumstances for dodging copyright claims. I lost monetization for the first time in 2013, forcing me to become one of the first ever patreon creators.

As early as that point, I knew I could not consider myself to be a career youtuber--the platform is way too unstable to rely on even as a hosting platform, much less as a primary source of income. I have regularly tracked $500 to $1500 in ad revenue during months where I could collect it, which has comprised supplementary income throughout my career. I was attached to the idea that because I offered my videos more as a product to patreon supporters than as a youtube product, I would keep my videos free of mid-roll ad breaks. The mature, non-lazy version of this idea would've been to offer ad-free access to videos via torrent or private server and to run mid-roll ads all over the public uploads, but I had no idea what I was doing.

Only after Geoff Thew blew up in 2016 did I learn about how important mid-roll ads actually were to algorithmic success on youtube, but I ignored this and pushed ahead going my own way, seeing myself as more centrally a cult of personality than just the creator of a youtube series. When I changed my patreon to a monthly structure and announced it would account for both my anime-centric analytical content and my unstructured and experimental After Dark content, it exploded in size, finally allowing me to start trying to have the life that building this career was meant to help me achieve.

Discovering life and the concept of work-life balance was a very rocky road. I combined my personal and professional life heavily to try and find time for both, but the manic and constant pressure to produce as a content creator hurt my relationship, and the changes to my image and content style that came from being in that relationship pushed a segment of my audience away from my content. In my attempts to simultaneously find my footing in adult life and in the evolution of my career, I slipped up hard and lost footing in both.

Life became chaotic in the following years as I began dealing with debt, marijuana addiction, mental dysfunction in both myself and my partner, and the fact that even in my most upbeat and functional moments, I still felt emotionally dissociated from most of my own behavior and struggled to view myself as a real person. After fully realizing myself and coming out as trans in 2020, I decided to put a focus on getting myself to a place of emotional wellness that I could re-approach my life in a way that better suits my lifestyle and creativity, the messages that I want to put into the world, and the kinds of people that I want to interact with. It took until early 2021 and some incredibly huge shake-ups in my life, along with spending all of my money, before I found myself not only fairly sure of what kind of content and public identity I want to present, but with a decent idea of how to post it on youtube.

You see, youtube is still an excellent ad platform when it actually works. If for some reason your video catches the recommendation algorithm just right, you can have a massive hit instantaneously--and it's one of the only platforms where long-form writing can be adapted into something saleable to a mass audience. Aside from the fact that you can advertise your patreon thru the video and run ads in it, you can also promote sponsorships or even sell videos as product advertisements to companies with relative ease if your videos are even somewhat popular, though quality of endorsement varies.

But really, the biggest thing that's always kept me coming back to youtube is it's scope as a content archive. Having no filesize limits and uploading quickly are crucial to giant-video uploaders like me, and the content options on both creator and user end remain unmatched by any other platform without real contest. There are sites that function well if you pay an amount to use them, but none of these have powerful built-in promotional algorithms or install bases. Again, had I been a smart investor in 2013 I always would've had a personal server, but here we are today, and youtube has been the only host for most of my content, and by far the main focus of my attention as a creator simply for the format advantages. But it has been grueling.

There is never a sense of victory with youtube--only the prolonging of encroaching defeat as your soul goes hollow. If you don't ride the connection slide on the way up and have better opportunities by the time you're on the other side of your peak, then you did it wrong--and I did it wrong. Not that I couldn't again or lack opportunities, but some of it is bleak.

One by one, youtube has locked me out of my account on all of my devices. When I do what people want me to do and make content about other content, youtube punishes me with copyright strikes and demonetization. Apparently when I rebrand and start making original content which a lot of my audience doesn't want, it takes my account away for suspicious activity.

As with many aspects of youtube and google “help" there is no recourse offered for the lockout--I will make a video clip soon showing how the lockout looks, but the only advice on the help page which seems potentially relevant is to simply “wait three weeks and stay logged in and the account will revert to you.” I have no idea how that makes sense or why I should believe it would work out that easily.

In my experience the only thing that ever works for getting help from youtube or other offending companies using youtube's system erroneously is to start a campaign on twitter and through email to have people constantly spam them until someone decides it's a big enough annoyance to deal with. At worst, as we saw when the PCP channel was hacked, it can take well over a month to get their attention after several increasingly massive pushes. I know how to stage this and will have to, but at this moment I just feel so tired.

I want to live my life as a writer in many styles, a storyboard artist, and a musician--a producer helping other creative people to realize their potential, and a character actor who plays alternate versions of myself of podcasts and vlogs. I may have to find a completely new approach to how I produce, advertise, and monetize all of these forms of art, because whether it becomes possible to use the platform again, it is obvious that continuing to focus so much on youtube has continued to be a mistake. I just hope I can find a way to publish something that can make me any money before next months rent is due.