I am a business now, and what it means for the future.

I registered my youtube channel as a company today. This might look small, but I believe it comes with responsibilities. A big one among these being to explain to you why I did this, and what this means for this channel, and the videos it will produce going forward. I intend to do so here.

First: Honest Taxation

I never made a lot of money with youtube. I have run a youtube channel for almost 5 years. And when you add up all the money this channel made in these 5 years it is a total of around 27 000 euros. That may look like much to some, but it isn't by youtuber standards. I know channels that are 5 times smaller than mine who make more money through their youtube channel every year. And I am fine with that. To me, the low income of this channel was never much of a problem, but actually a benefit. It allowed me to work on videos primarily as a hobby. And as long as I made less than 14 000 Euros a year, it also fell beneath the minimum side income limit for taxable income. Meaning it was not taxable. This changed recently.

When I did my book-keeping at the beginning of this year I realized that this was now impossible. So I did the paperwork, paid the fees, and registered the company. This is the first and most important reason for why I did this. If I would not have done this today, I would have been committing tax evasion and tax fraud by the time I released the third video for the year 2021. I had to register this company to be able to pay taxes within the new tax bracket that I will soon enter. This means I will no longer just run this channel as a hobby, but also as a business.

Second: Identity Theft

One of the most frustrating things that have happened to me ever since I started making videos that garner more than 200 000 views, is a number of people who register sites and social media accounts pretending to be me and then start advertising products such as online casinos, or selling merchandise with artwork scrapped from my videos. This happened a few times, and every time it happens I have to go through a rather laborious and lengthy process of flagging an account for identity theft, or sending emails to service providers. This, as you can probably imagine, is very tiresome and frustrating.

Being not just an individual, but a company, I now have access to the legal advice and resources of the Austrian chamber of commerce, and by that extent the E.U chamber of commerce. What this means is very simple, if someone commits fraud again by stealing my identity to sell something and make money off pretending to be me, I will no longer just flag them, I will take them to court for identity theft, fraud, and corporate piracy. I hope the threat of such drastic actions will deter such behavior in the future.

Third: Hobby vs. Business

Doing youtube as a hobby is great. But it means you always have a side income limit on you. As mentioned before, as long as I made less than 14 000 euros a year, I could do this as a hobby and only a hobby. It meant that most of the money made through youtube was spent almost immediately on better recording equipment, editing software, and other programs and hardware that made video production improve in quality. But as soon as I made more than 14 000 euros a year, I would fall into a new and different tax bracket that would legally require me to register a business. Throughout the last year, I constantly had that number hovering over my head. And I will admit to you that there were moments when I didn't work and just thought "yeah, it's fine, you don't want to break that annual limit anyway". I didn't start youtube as a career. I studied IT in Germany and then studied history in Austria. I am a qualified assistant caretaker for the mentally disabled and worked as a caretaker for children with Down syndrome and brain injuries. I worked as a translator for English and German. And I worked as a lumberjack. I never believed that I would ever find any success here. It is a pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. What it meant is that I never as aggressively pushed the monetization of my channel. I only ever asked for patreons or paypal donations at the end of videos. I never censored my scripts to make the videos more ad friendly. I didn't accept sponsorships. And I didn't sell merch. I also behaved more recklessly on social media and trolled a lot more. Now with the limit of how much money I can earn each year gone, this will substantially change. In particular, I hope to be making more videos faster, and will behave more responsibly on social media. My current goal is to make a video every two months, and then try to push myself into making a video every two months.

What does all of this mean?

Well, you may disagree with me on this, but I believe the ownership of a business comes with social responsibilities. Because of this, there are pledges, or promises, that I will now make to you.

First: Quality will remain more important than quantity.

This channel was so far run on the principle that quality is more important than quantity. And I intend to stick to that idea. I promise you that the quality of the content will not suffer.

Second: A living Wage

I know there are YouTubers and Twitch streamers out there who ruthlessly abuse and exploit contractors such as artists, editors, and clip channels. I promise you that I will not do this. I believe in the living wage. I believe every job must pay enough to sustain a worker. You may disagree with me on this politically, but I believe that if one has beliefs one should first and foremost enforce them one oneself and hold oneself to those standards, which is what I intend to do. I will not cut costs by paying people who I hire less. I will continue to make the majority of the artwork of each video myself, but I promise you that every artist I hire will be fairly paid, just as they have been since I first started taking commissions. In 2020 I ran this channel like a co-op, meaning that I divided the income up equally with all contributors. Now that this channel is a business, there will be a wage system. I am legally obliged by Austrian law to pay a minimum wage of 400 euros per month. So exploiting people, like some YouTubers and twitch streamers have infamously done, is now illegal for me to do as a business. Should I exploit contractors, you can in fact take me to court and hold me legally accountable. My promise is to hire a contributing artist for each video at a minimum wage of 1000 euros a month. I also promise that I will not abuse deflated foreign currencies and inflation to pay artists from abroad less. I will pay a Mexican artist the same 1000 euros a month that I would pay a Norwegian artist, even though the Mexican artist would gain more buying power than the Norwegian artist.

Third: No Ad Spam.

I promise I will not plaster my videos full of adverts. I will also continue to not self censor my scripts to make them more ad-friendly. How ad-friendly a video will be, will be entirely dependent on the topic. If a video can be monetized it will be, but I will not place an ad every 2-3 minutes as some YouTubers do. That makes videos barely watchable and is annoying. If I place more than one ad in a video, the distance between the ads has to be a minimum of 30-40 minutes.

Fourth: Expense transparency.

I promise I will not complain about having to pay taxes. And I promise I will not emigrate to the United Arab Emirates, as so many successful German YouTubers have done, to pay fewer taxes. One of the most embarrassing, weird, and out-of-touch things I have ever seen during my time on youtube was a socialist political commentator on twitch who complained that he had to pay taxes on 650 000 dollars of the annual income through twitch.... I am pretty sure most people reading this would love to be in such a position in the first place, and cringe at complaints about it. I don't know if I will ever earn that much money, but I promise you now that I will never do something so out of touch and cringy. Instead, I promise you something else. I promise that my Patreon will remain public. If you want to know how much I earn per video you can always go to my patreon and you will see yourself. And I will promise that at the end of each quarter I will publish my full expenses and details on my tax returns for you to read. You will be able to find out how much I earn through youtube, and you will know how much I pay in taxes.

Fifth: Channel reinvestment.

I promise you that I will re-invest a substantial amount of the earnings this channel makes, back into the channel. I will be buying a Camera to film real historical locations. I will buy better audio equipment, better editing software, and better microphones. The quality of the videos I upload will continuously improve.

Sixth: Unmonetized Opinions.

I used to be a political commentator. That is how I started on youtube. Uploading my opinions. You may have liked my content, or you may have disliked it, but I have come to dislike it. I believe there is something very wrong with what I would like to call a "politics-entertainment-complex" where entire industries are built on selling people agreeable talking points. I see the entire political commentary sphere of youtube but also on twitch and TV media as something very damaging to political discourse and democracy itself, from the left to the right. I have therefore disengaged from such over the previous 2 years. I might make a video explaining my thoughts and rationale on this later, but for now, I will be making one promise to you here: Should I ever make any opinion videos again in which I express my political beliefs (which is unlikely) Every single opinion video I make, will be clearly marked as an opinion video, it will clearly tell the audience that I am biased and that the contents of the video are my opinions, and each and every single opinion video will also be completely and 100% demonetized. I will not earn any money with my political opinions.

Seventh: Responsible Sponsorship

I will be accepting Sponsorships. And I will promise you that each and every sponsorship I will from now on take, will be for products that I have used myself, liked, enjoyed, found to be useful, and believe are worth sponsoring. I will not be promoting stuff like Raid Shadow Legends.

Eight: No merch swarm

I will be selling merch at some point in the future. I promise you that I will not just rip random clipart from google search results to sell t-shirts. But that I will draw the artwork myself, that I will put effort into it, or that I will hire artists to design artwork.

These are the eight promises I make you here.

Grateful to make videos for you. Yours. Joseph.