News Post/'House Party Hell' Status

(This isn't a post post; your regular scheduled piece is still coming in a couple of days)

Those who follow me on Twitter will know I've had a rough old week. On Friday, I got this notification from YouTube:

This means, while ads would still run on my videos, YouTube will get all the revenue. Anyone looking at my viewcount knows I effectively make a pittance, but it's my pittance, and I'm obviously hoping the channel grows to the point it becomes an actual income; a goal that's literally my full-time job. 

I'm the perfect example of the 'do' column, so was baffled by the decision. In this situation, you're given a couple of weeks to make an appeal, in the form of a 5-minute video, taking them through how you create your content. So I wasted a couple of days putting together a video arguing my case. If you're interested, as it shows my process, albeit in a demeaning way where I'm having to justify myself to a big corporation, it's available to view here.

I lost the appeal, with the sole feedback "Videos referenced in your appeal are not representative of your channel." I feel like a simple 'video x is not within our monetisation rules, please remove it in 24 hours' would be better than 'something's wrong, but we're not gonna tell you what!' After that, the only option is waiting 30 days to re-apply, having to just guess what it is they don't like. I figured it might be the House Party Hells, or an old 90-second clip of Samantha Fox calling out a groper on a Swedish chat show, but they were all there when someone from YouTube manually went through my channel to accept it into the partner program, seven months ago, so...?

Anyway, I was angrily tweeting about the whole mess, and my beloved followers kicked up enough of a stink that YouTube said they'd look into it again, and this morning I woke up to another notification:

Back in business, baby! Watch out, Mr. Beast. The upshot of this is, to be sure it doesn't happen again, I've had a big cleanout of my channel, and taken down all the House Party Hell videos. Some point soon, when I get the chance, I'll upload them somewhere else, and edit that into their posts on here (findable in the pinned index post). 

Now that nonsense is (hopefully) taken care of, onward, to more content!