So some of you may be active enough on YouTube to know that you can’t “monetize” your “channel” unless you have over 1000 subscribers and over 4000 hours of viewers watching your videos in the last 12 months. Monetization means you can add advertisements and such to your videos and get revenue from them.
OK. Deep breath.
So I’ve been getting notifications every day of one or two people subscribing to my channel. No idea why they’re doing it, but there they are, regular as clockwork, one or two notifications a day. And today, I apparently crossed the 1000 subscriber mark — and, as it happens, have also exceeded that 4000 viewing hours mark.
I say this because, today, I got the email everyone wakes up every day of their life hoping to get:
Woo-hoo!
But — the question inevitably comes up: what the hell are they watching?
I don’t have that many videos on YouTube. And nothing I have out there is worth watching unless you either know me well or you’re really bored.
So let’s check, shall we?
Sorting by number of views, my top videos are:
That’s right.
- Three minutes of cement mixer trucks driving by
- An ice cream truck driving up to my former employer’s office building
- Another cement mixer truck video, this one with holiday lights attached, taken one New Year’s Eve
The views kind of drop off after that — a video of my wife’s sometime concert band playing the theme from Hogan’s Heroes, the local minor league baseball team’s mascot shaking its ass at the opposing dugout, and a 360 degree video of the Richmond, VT July 4th parade. And so on down from there.
So I have to ask: what the hell is it about cement mixer trucks? And ice cream trucks? I mean, really?
And what makes a person, after watching three minutes of cement mixer trucks driving by, go “I don’t want to miss any more videos like that — I’d better subscribe!”?