Back to YouTube

I signed up for YouTube Premium today. I'll get a free month, and then it will cost me $139 for a year. This is a lot of money and I really resisted paying it for a long time. I tend to think of Google as the evil empire. I certainly think they have been extremely obnoxious in making YouTube just hellish to use for free, if you don't happen to be sitting at your computer or doing nothing but staring at your phone.

I've been traveling a lot between my home in the Twin Cities and where my kids live, up north, this summer. It's about four hours by car, so that creates a lot of time each week during which I can listen to audiobooks or podcasts. And I've been trying to walk several miles and bike several miles each day. That adds even more opportunities. Problem is, if I'm listening to anything on YouTube, commercials interrupt the content every couple of minutes. It's possible to bypass them after five seconds or so, in most cases. But that means I have to tap a small button on the phone screen. That can be dangerous when driving, and it's a hassle when I have to continually take the phone out of my pocket while walking. YouTube videos also need to be playing in the foreground in standard viewing mode. So it's really easy to accidentally navigate away from the content you're trying to watch or listen to. Hard to safely put the phone in a pocket without "changing the channel".

Premium mode actually allows you to turn off your phone and stash it away, and the content will continue running. In fact, I think a whole playlist will run. So I can store things that show up on my feed in a "Watch Later" playlist and then play them all. And I can download the videos and play them offline. That will be helpful when flying or while I'm driving in areas with poor LTE service. There's a stretch of about 50 miles with horrible reception on my drive up north, where I often have to switch to listening to music because YouTube can't keep up.

As I mentioned, I resisted this for quite a while but it became too frustrating and there ARE some channels I enjoy listening to, on YouTube. I've also begun thinking I should get back on YouTube myself. I worked kind of hard, a couple of years ago, trying to get enough subs and views to become monetized; finally achieved it but never really earned a lot of money. Probably enough to pay for this Premium annual subscription, but I never hit the big time.

But now, as I'm continuing to ponder how to reach a wider audience with my History content, I'm considering YouTube again. I've been inspired by people like Milo Rossi and Lindsay Nikole, who each seem to have created a business model that works for them. I'm going to try to figure something out for myself, this summer. So stay tuned.