Advertisements on YouTube videos

I earn about £18 per calendar month from YouTube monetisation. YouTube provides some controls for content creators to decide where advertisements are placed, but with around 900 videos (not all publicly available) on my YouTube channel, that’s far too many to manually go through and select where the advertisements should occur. I had selected the option for YouTube to only place advertisements at the start and end of videos, but it looks like YouTube changed that setting at some point.

I have had a report that there are obstructive advertisements in my videos, where there shouldn’t be. I agree, advertisements mid video are obstructive! So, I have temporarily removed all advertisements from my YouTube videos (except the four more ‘profitable’ videos), while I figure out what the best thing to do is.

One option is to duplicate the videos from my GCSE Physics, A-Level Physics and GCSE Astronomy collections, then make one of each of the duplicates only available via the links on the physicswithkeith.com dashboard (without advertisements) and the other of each of the duplicates available publicly but with advertisements placed manually at the start by me. This would require quite a lot of my time (and how long would it be until YouTube changes something again) because there are so many videos. For the sake of £18 per month, it probably isn’t really worth it. I estimate that I would be working for about £1.20 per hour to go through and duplicate each video and put the plan above in place.

In all likelihood, I will just leave my videos without advertisements (except new videos that do not form part of the collections mentioned above). If any new videos earn a bit of money, I’ll leave the advertisements on for that, but otherwise I’ll just switch them off.

It’s actually a bit of a pain including YouTube revenue on my tax return anyway, because views that originate from the USA are subject to different taxes and so the paperwork is a bit more complex; YouTube withholds quite a chunk of the tax, but it can be partially offset against the HMRC self assessment tax. It’s a faff, and really not worth it for £18 per month (pre tax. More like £10.80 per month after tax).

Advertisements are off-putting, I agree. I pay for YouTube Premium because it is good to be able to show short video clips in lessons sometimes, but I don’t want a two-minute clip to require the class to watch two minutes of advertisements (but adblockers feel like theft somehow, and as the content creators I want to show to classes often earn very little, I feel it would be unethical to effectively steal their work). Some people may see YouTube Premium as a waste of money, others may see it as too expensive, but it’s a subscription service I wouldn’t do without now. Maybe that’s a topic for another blog post.

So in summary, enjoy my YouTube videos advertisement free; I’ve almost entirely removed advertisements. I didn’t start Physics With Keith to get rich, and £18 per month is a long way from being rich anyway.