834 – Do this right to make money: Tom talks Demonetization

Episode 834 - Demonetization
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 834 of Screw the commute podcast. Today I'm going to talk about a demon. Wait a minute. Wait. My notes are wrong. Demonetization. Oh that's different. Well, it's bad both ways, I guess. You don't want that to happen if you want to make money from YouTube by getting part of the ad revenue when they play ads on your videos. So if you want that, want that money, you got to listen to this episode. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 833. That was file transfer services. This is how we send big files to people most of the time for free using these services, because you can't really email them. So check that out. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number. That was 833 and today is 834. And hey, if you like our training, you know, I've got over 400 training episodes like this. And if you want to go directly to them, you go to screw the commute comm slash training and you can just they're all listed of what they're about. And boy, you could get $1 million worth of free training by just going there. Okay, check out my mentor program if you want one on one training from me and my entire staff, check it out at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree, where it's all the tips and tricks I use to handle up to 150,000 customers and 65,000, I mean 150,000 subscribers and 65,000 customers without pulling my hair out. And I still have a lot of hair.

[00:02:06] All right, let's get into it. Let's see. You know, I love YouTube to drive traffic and to do affiliate marketing and to sell my own stuff. I don't have millions of views, but because of my product and affiliate mix, I've made millions of dollars from YouTube. Now, one thing I'm not that interested in is ad revenue. And why? Well, I mean, you could make a lot of money with ad revenue, and that's what we're talking about today. But I can make more selling my own stuff and my affiliate products. You know, I have products up to $59,000 and $19,000 and anything from $27 and up, you know, so so I'm happy to sell my own stuff and affiliate stuff, but that doesn't mean I don't think it's a great way to make money, especially if you don't have your own product mix yet or you never want to have a product mix. I mean, heck, there are little kids are making millions of dollars just playing with toys. All right. So, uh, this is a very credible way to make money online.

[00:03:19] Just about any entertaining or educational video can make money from ad revenue. But let's hold our horses here for a second. And since I I'm kind of a continuous learner, I wonder where is that? Where did that saying hold your horses come from? So this is a sidebar educational thing. Uh, it comes from the horse and drawn carriage days and horseback riding, and it's now means, uh, you know, the ropes and reins were held to slow the horses down and direct them. So? So the idiom hold your horses means it means someone. You're telling somebody to slow down and think about what they're doing before they complete an action. Well, that's what I'm doing here. I don't want you to spend all kinds of time creating a channel and getting a bunch of views. If you're not going to be monetized, if you're just doing it as a hobby or advocacy. Well, of course I want you to make money with your hobbies. You know, I've done lots of episodes on that. But if you're just doing it for fun or to advocate some position and you're not making money, well, I don't care. All right. But if you want to make money, which is why you're on this podcast, then you've got to. I don't want you putting a lot of effort into something that doesn't have a chance to make money, because you're violating YouTube's rules.

[00:04:42] And if I talk about Google and YouTube, Google owns YouTube, so I use them synonymously. All right. So here's an example. If you decide to have a channel about turning semiautomatic weapons into machine guns, guess what? If you don't get kicked off completely off of YouTube, you absolutely won't be allowed to make money from ads. You won't be considered, quote, ad friendly. And with this example, I suspect you'll get kicked off altogether. Okay, now if you don't get kicked off and YouTube just refuses to let you make money from ads. This is called demonetization and it's more strict than ever. Okay, let's get into some of the things to stay away from. And I don't care too much what you talk about. I'm not any kind of, you know, goody two shoes, but I don't want to see you wasting your time creating a channel that has little or no chance of making you money. Before I actually get into the specifics, you must know that the same content could get demonetized in one context, but allowed in another. Let's say you were shown some bloody and graphic medical operation. If you were just doing it for shock value, Sayonara. You're in no way they're going to let you make money for it and you might get kicked off. But if you were a doctor showing a medical procedure with your own channel or backed by some big hospital system, then you could.

[00:06:23] In fact, big pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies would probably line up to advertise on that channel and pay big money to do so. So some of these things all depend on the context surrounding the channel and the video. Another couple of things to know is that sometimes it's not an all or nothing game. Let's say you cuss up a storm in your videos. They might demonetize you fully. In other words, cut you off from ad revenue. But let's say you only use a moderate once in a while amount of bad language. You might not get cut off, but they might reduce your chances of getting lots of revenue, and maybe from the much fewer number of advertisers that don't really care about profanity. Then let's say you're squeaky clean and a bad word sneaks in once in a long while. In that case, maybe nobody even notices. And you get full monetization. Now, unless you're someone like Gary Vee, who cusses all the time and is known for it, and I doubt he cares about ad revenue because, like me, he's got tons of other revenue streams, speeches, income, and all kinds of stuff. You're probably better off to keep the cussing to a minimum. If cussing is your thing, you might take it to rumble or some place like that.

[00:07:57] Which I am considering when I roll out my highly educated idiot book. Okay, because I could cuss up a storm and tell tell it like it is, but it has to be in the right place. Now I'm going to include a link to the Google AD friendly and content guidelines. Follow them and you should be okay. But you know what? There's not guarantees here. With some of the crazy nut cases, they hired a moderate content. You could get an adverse decision out of nowhere when some woke jerk or jerks who never accomplished a damn thing in their life is in charge of your channel. So, I mean, don't get me started, or I'll have to make this episode explicit. Quote explicit, which is what nasty content is called in the podcast world. Okay. Anyway, I'll put a link to that and some other things for you. Another thing you have to comply with and read is the Google AdSense. That's the program that pays you for YouTube revenue. You look at their program policies. I'll have a link to that. And let's throw in one more for good measure YouTube's Community Guidelines. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Now, if you devour all three of these, it'll give you the best chance of making money by sharing part of the ad revenue Google makes. All right, let's talk about banned words you should avoid.

[00:09:25] And some some guy actually made a list of them. Of course, his list is not approved or sanctioned by Google, but I'm including a link to it. Anyway, it's a Google Doc doc, and it's it's pretty darn informative. Some of the words are pretty obvious, like, hahaha, you're not going to catch me saying them. I'm not going to say them on here. You'll have to look at this Google doc to see them. Now, he does say that he's updating the list and as time goes by some may not. Some of the words may not be troublesome anymore. He makes the point that the title is the most important place to avoid the words and the description and the tags, which are like keywords you put in when you upload a video, aren't as important. However, you must keep in mind that Google slash YouTube uses voice recognition to hear what you say in the videos, and I'm certain that that would carry some weight, especially if the words were used early in the video. Here's some other things. Violent and shocking content is usually no good, except maybe on news sites or self-defense channels. Nsfw or not suitable for work. Channels like something highly sexualized or promoting illegal drug use would be just a few examples of that. There's loads more. Pranks that do illegal stuff or dangerous stuff that would try to, that people would try to emulate, that they could get hurt doing.

[00:11:07] It would be frowned on. Bottom line is that you must be careful putting lots of effort into a channel, doomed to be demonetized if you want to make ad revenue. Now there are exceptions. Youtube has taken heat for some super celebrities who make YouTube tons of money, and they only get slaps on the wrist. But for most of us that doesn't apply. So keep your nose clean. Make all the money you can off of YouTube. I'm all for it, even though I don't use that particular method. So if you want help with this and a million other things you need to be successful online. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And I have no problem saying that because nobody in all the years I've been challenging them, would put their program up against mine, uh, line for line, because they would be embarrassed for how much they charge and how little you get. That's not how I roll. That's why I'm still in business. And. And no complaints, no lawsuits after all these years. Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you on YouTube.