EAT MY YOUTUBE SHORTS

Yet another shiny object to distract our creative endeavors

Welcome to ANTISOCIAL, a vulgar display of social media hostility.

Step right up, friends, and pivot to YouTube Shorts!

From Feb. 1, YouTube is introducing a revenue scheme to its Shorts format, meaning eligible creators earn a 45% share of the revenue from the ads viewed around their Shorts videos, while YouTube retains the remaining 55%.

(Sure, YouTube isn’t really “social media,” except that it’s media, and everyone talks about it, so it’s pretty social)

Soon after this announcement, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “YouTube Shorts has surpassed 50 billion daily views, up from 30 billion a year ago.”

YouTube says “qualifying channels can get between $100–$10,000 each month,” and note that, “Shorts views exclusively receive ad revenue sharing from the Shorts Feed, which is separate from long-form video monetization on the Watch Page.”

If you’re ready to compete with kids with 4K cameras, and way more time on their hands than you, check out YouTube’s 'Create YouTube Shorts,’ and ‘YouTube Shorts monetization policies.’

ANTISOCIAL

➡️ “A House Republican on Thursday is introducing a bill to ban kids and teens under 16 from using social media,” reports the Washington Post, just as the Surgeon General says that 13 is too early to join social media. Oh, and a bill just passed the House in Utah requiring parental consent for minors on social media.

➡️ Elon said “Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” but “To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified.” Pay to play! Oh, and he wants to charge businesses $1,000 a month to keep their check marks.

YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE PLAN

If the work we’re putting in a social media platform isn’t really working, then why keep doing it?

Think about reducing your time spent on social media without completely eliminating it.

Are all those hours staring at our phones worth it for the 14 “likes,” the 3.2% impressions, the 12 clicks?

Imagine if we took one day worth of social media scrolling (like 2+ hours), and instead spent that time on something else?

1. Learning how to edit videos (I recommend ScreenFlow on the Mac)

2. Writing new music (or finishing a year-old song)

3. Setting up a collaboration

4. Building a website (or buying a domain name)

5. Seeing how to build community via Discord, Substack, or Reddit

Don’t burn your social media platforms to the ground, but we can reclaim hours we’re investing in them to learn skills and strategies that will provide a bigger return down the road.

-SETH WERKHEISER
-seth@heavymetal.email