Why I’m Not a YouTuber
Note: This was an email sent to our subscribers on Sunday, 21st August 2022
A lot of my students ask me – “Kush, why don’t you teach via YouTube?“
If you’ve done my online courses, you would see that I do use YouTube but only to host the videos of my courses. These videos are private videos only available to the buyers of the course.
But I don’t use YouTube as my main channel of teaching.
There are a lot of reasons as to my why I don’t choose to become a YouTuber like so many of my competitors. Let’s see some of these:
You can’t rely on YouTube
YouTube has a bad reputation of banning your channel if you violate any policy. And sometimes you might violate these policies without even knowing. So it’s a big risk. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. I don’t want to wake up one day and suddenly find all the eggs broken. In fact the basket itself might disappear.
No A to Z learning in one go
YouTube is full of random videos that you have to go through to learn something valuable. Whereas if you do a structured online course, you learn everything in a systematic manner from A to Z.
Monetization is not easy
A lot of people have the misconception that the earning from YouTube depends on the number of subscribers. It doesn’t. It depends on the number of views your videos get. And even then, not all industries earn equally. Channels related to Health and Finance get a disproportionately higher ad revenue than other niches.
Bad learning experience due to ads
YouTube is full of ads and other distractions which makes the learning experience a poor one as you are not able to concentrate.
Relying on Sponsored videos
A lot of my competitors who teach on YouTube have those annoying 60 second ad pitches for their sponsors. Sometimes they make an entire video just for the products they are endorsing. All this again gets in the way of a quality learning experience. I never endorse any product officially in any of my online courses. In fact I refused an approach from one of the most popular lens manufacturing companies because I don’t want to be influenced by any company.
Continuous creation of videos
Have you seen my competitors on YouTube? Two things happen to them. Either they create quality videos in the beginning and then slowly stop making them. Or they reduce the frequency of uploading to something like once a month. The reason behind is that in order for your channel to grow, YouTube wants you to consistently create new videos all the time even when you don’t have any topic in mind. If you don’t do that, your channel will start to lose views.
There are a host of other reasons too but they would require me to be slightly politically incorrect in what I have to say so I will not go into that.
Also, I’m not trying to discourage anyone. If you want to become a YouTuber, it’s a great thing and you should definitely give it a go because when it does work, it can also do wonders.
This was just my opinion.
Let me know your thoughts.
