Good morning awesome camera geeks! Today’s post is a little bit of a rant but please bear with me as I’ll share some insights and information so that hopefully you won’t run into the same situation. You would think that after getting a (mostly) good response from my last full length video, which is the video about the legend of the Nikon D3, that I would follow it up with something to keep up the momentum right?

Well, today’s article is about how YouTube and specifically mother Google killed my motivation.

Now, before we continue, I’ll admit that I made some mistakes here too, but the majority of the problems came from the YouTube and Google Bots and I’ll explain.

The screenshot that you’re seeing in this posting basically says that I am not currently being monetized. Before we get to the current situation, it’s important to understand the whole situation right from the start.

Ok, so the story goes, in December I was monetized after being accepted into the YouTube Partner Program months earlier. Without making a long story even longer, just know that to be monetized you have to have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours and I reached the 4000 watch hour threshold so they started to monetized my videos.

Now before you think that this can change you from rags to riches overnight, I’m here to tell you that it won’t. We’re talking about literal cents per video.

But the good thing is that it adds up and I enjoyed looking at those metrics. It helped me to see which videos were doing good and what topics people actually wanted to see.

Flash forward to the end of January. I noticed that my monetization seemed to stop and I didn’t know why. There was no clear reason given, no notifications on YouTube.

Here’s the part where I think I messed up. In messing around trying to figure out the problem, I found that I had a second AdSense account. Now if you’re not aware, you can have multiple channels but only ONE AdSense account. Now I had an AdSense account from like 20 years back, of which I had no idea which email it was linked to and this was supposedly cleared when I started the Camera Legend AdSense account so I don’t know how I had this new account.

It is possible that I my panic mode I may have clicked on something that created another account. I don’t know for sure because I messed with a lot of settings.

The sad reality is this…

Through my own research I found out that the monetization wasn’t actually stopped, it was paused. The reason for that is because at some point Google sends a physical snail mail PIN to verify your home address.

Well, dumb me cause I DIDN’T KNOW THAT!! Had I known they’d be sending me a PIN I wouldn’t have messed with any settings. But nobody tells you this! At least I don’t remember hearing anything about having to wait for Google to send a PIN for me to verify.

So long story short, after numerous chats with tech support, I deleted the second AdSense account and am two weeks into the 32 day wait time that the system requires for me to reapply for AdSense.

I’m sharing this story for anyone who’s been recently monetized or looking to get monetized so that they don’t run into the same issues. You will receive a PIN from Google through snail mail at some point. Wait for it.

My real rant comes from the fact that while Google is seen as the cutting edge when it comes to tech stuff, their AdSense system is ridiculously old and antiquated. Anyone who has run into AdSense problems I think can testify to this. When problems occur, there’s no clear explanations, no clear links to correct things. Most “help” links will send you straight to these outdated pages that seem like they were written in the early 2000s.

It reminds me of the US Postal where you go into the post office and still see antiquated machines being used by the most unenthusiastic workers ever. Sorry if you’re an enthusiastic USPS employee reading this 😂 I admire your hard work, this is not about you.

There’s actually a lot more to this story, but I’ll give you a last and good example. When the Bot found that I supposedly had two AdSense accounts it said “You already have an AdSense account. Use that one or delete your other account.”

Fair enough but there were no links, no way for me to put the channel back on the correct AdSense account, which is still open. Since it was already linked to YouTube, one would think the machine would automatically do it or at least give me a link to do it, but no. Nothing.

So I’ll wait out the 32 days. I have no choice. That’s supposedly for security. Ok I get it. But my fear is if after 32 days, if things don’t go smoothly, I’m afraid I’ll be in this cycle of trying to figure out how to get the AdSense account back to my YouTube channel.

This is a major motivation killer. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t making any real money on YouTube but the potential was there. I didn’t start YouTube with the motivation of making money. If I did, I would have done everything I could to get to monetization much quicker than I did.

However, once the Pandora’s box opened, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it felt good to see a little bit of money growing every day.

Now I already had the monetization paused by YouTube when I posted my latest full length video on the Nikon D3, which was (for me) a well received video, so that video would have earned a little but I put it out anyway because I thought people might get something out of it.

But honestly, making these videos take a lot of time and effort. Not to mention a lot of research and editing. Especially harder for a family man with two growing kids. Without the motivation, what’s the use in putting precious time and effort into this?

If anyone of you guys reading have been in this situation I would love to hear from you. Maybe you could help me in a way the Google customer service reps simply couldn’t or wouldn’t and I’d greatly appreciate it!

Sorry for the rant but thank you all for taking the time to read it! 😍🙏👍