A few days ago, I was searching for a way to make a short video out of my long videos on YouTube. Since I was on my phone, under a different account name, I was able to see my videos as others see them, plus without the AdBlock. So I click on a video that has a high view count and wasn’t expecting to see…an AD!!! I repressed the anger for a bit because I was researching dammit, but today it has come bubbling back to the surface. You wanna know why this little thing bothered me? Well, I’ll tell ya.
I’m not monetized, and yes, I know YouTube does whatever it wants and throws ads wherever they want — I get that. That’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that even if they make pittance off that ad, I’m not getting anything at all in return. It’s not the money I’m talking about. It’s data. Because I don’t have enough subscribers and enough views, I don’t get the single most important thing to help my channel grow: information. I don’t know who is watching and where, what keywords they use to get to my channel, what time they watch and how much time they watch…any of that. The one thing needed to help channels grow isn’t given to new and/or small creators. In a lot of ways, I get it, I do, but this gave me a reality check.
Why am I doing this?
I know that the Lacey Stocking mysteries are very niche and I never expected everyone to latch onto them, but I had hoped that they’d grow into something a little bigger. But I have to accept that I’m investing in a sunk cost fallacy and this has now become a fruitless endeavor, even if I love doing them. It’s a labor of love for sure. It’s a lot of work, but the effort now outweighs the reward. Sometimes quitting is the smartest thing you can do.
After putting the finishing touches on my book Feral, I began to look ahead for other projects and read over a book I started a month before my cat, Butters, died. 11,000 words and holy shit, I liked it which shocked the hell out of me because my brain was a mess for all of ’23 and ’24. It made me realize that by continuing to invest in a project that isn’t going to get me anywhere any time soon (if ever) — YouTube — that I’m squeezing out everything else. And when I lost my other cat, Licorice, in December, I promised myself that in 2025 I was going to take bigger risks. If I’m always chasing after algorithms, (which often feels like chasing after people who don’t even like me), I’m going to be too tired to take those risks and won’t even see other opportunities that might be trying to get my attention.
Thank you for all who’ve listened and liked Lacey Stocking. In all my years of writing, I’ve never loved any characters more than Lacey Stocking and Hardley A. Witt, except for Owen Stanford from Dead, Still Breathing.