Category Archives: Deals and Steals

Such a deal!

Why There are So Many Ads on YouTube

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It’s a money grab, plain and simple, and YouTube encourages creators to maximize the number of ads per video.

I’ve been a YouTube content creator for about 15 years now, starting my channels as a way to share videos of things going on in my not-quite-average life. I had the good fortune to create a video that went viral — 12.5 million views so far — and has not only earned me thousands of dollars since I put it on YouTube, but was the driving force to get my subscriber count on the FlyingMAir YouTube channel up to nearly 80,000.

My History as a Content Creator

It’s nice to earn money on content you create or, technically, intellectual property (IP). From 1990, when I left my last full-time job to become a freelance writer and computer consultant, to around 2012, I earned the vast majority of my income as what I insist on calling a content creator. (For some reason, many creators are opposed to that term. I’m not sure why.) I wrote books and articles and made videos for various publishers. I even did a little self publishing of books. I created the content that people wanted to consume. What else would you call that?

During that time, I was able to not only fund the training and asset acquisition for my next career as a helicopter pilot, but I also socked away enough money to retire* at age 62.

My YouTube channels — including the one for Flying M Air which I no longer create videos for — continue to earn me money with a direct deposit into my checking account every month. How is that money earned? Through advertising.

YouTube Ad Revenue

Love YouTube but don’t like ads?

Do what I did: become a YouTube Premium subscriber. (Sign up on the Web and not through your Apple device and you can save $5/month.) Although I was skeptical until I got a free trial, I’m now convinced that it’s worth every single penny. You’ll still have to fast-forward through the sponsorship crap, though.

If you watch YouTube, you know how annoying the ads can be. There are pre-roll ads and post-roll ads and mid-roll ads. You can skip some of them after a few seconds but are forced to sit through others. Most of them are short, but when you have three or four in a row, they take up (too much) time.

For a new channel that cannot be monetized by its creator, the creator has absolutely no control over the ads and doesn’t make a single penny from them. So if you’re watching videos on a channel with 567 subscribers, remember that 100% of the revenue for the ads you see go right to Google. (If that channel creator has a tip jar of any sort and you like the videos, consider sending a few dollars their way to motivate/reward them for hard work.)

Once a channel can be monetized through a share of advertising revenue, creators get a tiny portion — literally just pennies sometimes — on every thousand views. So yeah: unless a video has a lot of views and a lot of ads, you’re not going to make very much. I could go on and on about how some creators game the system to fool people into clicking on their content with misleading titles and thumbnails, but I’ll save that for another day. This post is about the ad revenue.

If you can’t control the number of views a video gets — and new channels usually have a steep hill to climb to get regular viewers — you can still control the number of ads that appear with your content. Again, there are three types: pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. Google isn’t shy about letting you know that the more kinds of ads you allow in your content, the more likely they are to push your content out on viewer Home pages.

Mid-Roll Ad Idea
Google does what it can to get you to maximize shared revenue.

And that brings me to what triggered today’s posts: the “idea” that appeared on my YouTube Studio dashboard for my MariaLanger channel, which just reached the point where I can monetize ads. When I set up ads for my existing videos, I specified pre-roll and post-roll ads, but turned off mid-roll ads. Why? Well, the main reason is that I hate them and I don’t want to torture my viewers by forcing them to watch them. I try to make my content smooth and continuous and breaking it up with tacky, annoying ads in the middle of it is, well, tacky and annoying. I respect my viewers.

(That’s not to say I might not change my mind in the future. On very long videos, I can specify exactly where a mid-roll ad can appear, so I can place it in a way to make it less obnoxious. I’d rather not, but I’m also not creating video for charity. I want revenue from my work and the tip jar isn’t working yet for me. Want to support my content creation efforts? Buy me a coffee.)

The reason so many people allow mid-roll ads is because they see “ideas” like this in their Studio dashboard. They want to make money and they are seduced by the possibilities. It’s the same reason they set up memberships or Patreon accounts. Even if they started their YouTube channel for fun, once they get to the point where they’re making money, they want to make more.

The Trap for Creators

YouTube Content Creation as a Job

Please don’t think I’m discouraging content creators from making YouTube content creation their full time jobs. There are many creators on YouTube who do just that. They have teams of writers — many of whom lean too heavily on Wikipedia — and video editors and they appear as talking heads reading off a teleprompter with a script while stock images that vaguely apply to what they’re saying appear onscreen. They have multiple channels and they come out with new content every day. These folks are making shit-tons of money while they pay a staff to do much of the work. It’s a business for them.

There are a folks with more modest setups that do much of their own research, writing, and video work. Some of them are really good; I subscribe to more than a few. But the ones who are most successful have YouTube content creation as a full-time job. You see, once you stop feeding the beast, the beast looks elsewhere for its next meal.

So unless you’re lucky enough to have a viral video after you’ve already become part of the Partner Program with a share of advertising revenue, you can expect to do a lot of work to build a YouTube channel to the point where it actually makes real money for you. Good luck.

I definitely get it. My FlyingMAir YouTube channel was earning, for a while, $500+ per month. One month, I took in $1200. That’s some real, bill-paying money!

Of course I had mid-roll ads and of course I set up a membership program and even a Patreon account. Do you know what that did for me? It turned content creation back into a job, something I had to do all the time to keep members and patrons and Google happy. I woke up to this realization when I was spending more time editing video than actually flying and watched revenues drop as the Google algorithm favored other creators more than me. I had fallen into a trap and I needed to get out.

Eventually, I sold the helicopter and could no longer create new content for the channel. I killed the membership and Patreon programs so I wouldn’t owe anyone anything. It was a huge weight off my chest.

A New Channel

So here I am, facing a new trap with my MariaLanger channel. This channel is older than FlyingMAir and actually still has a bunch of the helicopter videos I created before I spun off the helicopter channel. But it never had a good subscriber base until recently. I have just 1852 subscribers as I type this and am getting new subscribers at the modest rate of about 90 per month. I qualified for the partner program back in August and just qualified for advertising revenue in October. I’ve earned a whopping $9.03 so far this month.

I should mention here why I suddenly picked up so many new subscribers. It’s the boating videos I was creating while I traveled the Great Loop. And I have at least 40 more to come over the next year or so. The video has been shot; it’s just a matter of editing it into something worth watching. And yes, I’ll be getting back to that, probably this week. Editing video is no fun on a laptop, but I suspect the 27″ monitor I just bought will make it less tedious. That $9.03 will go toward the purchase. (Did I mention how much camera and lighting and audio and computer hardware you’ll need to buy to succeed as a YouTube content creator? That’s something no one tells you.)

And That’s Why

So that’s why there are so many ads on YouTube. Creators want to make money and Google does everything in its power to convince creators to include as many ads as possible in their channel content.

—
*My retirement is not a “stop working” retirement. I could never stop working and I don’t think anyone else should, either. Now I do the work I want to do when I want to do it — and take a shit-ton of time off.

When Greed Backfires

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A true story about the benefit of fighting back against lowball offers for the things you want to sell.

Heron
My stepmom made this gorgeous stained glass panel for the door between a bathroom and the pool area.

My stepmom is an accomplished stain glass artist. For years, she produced stain glass artwork ranging from simple window ornaments like angels and snowmen to gorgeous window panes depicting wildlife like herons, dolphins, and horses. She was serious about her art endeavors and, over time, accumulated a massive inventory of raw materials — glass, soldering lead, lead cane — and the patterns, equipment, and supplies she needed to do the work.

Stained Glass Inventory
This is about half the glass she had to sell. To the left, still covered in paper, are at least 50 very large sheets. And then she found a cooler (of all things) filled with more glass sheets. Even the scraps had value — and she had about 50 pounds of that.

She stopped working with glass a few years ago and, since then, all her materials and supplies languished in a shed off the patio and in various storage spaces around the house and garage. When I came by in late autumn on my way south, she talked a bit about selling all this stuff. When I returned in January on my way north, she had taken steps to do just that. She’d called the owner of a stained glass shop about 45 minutes away by car — we’ll call him John — and made arrangements to have him look at it and possibly buy it.

John warned her from the get-go that he would not be offering a lot of money for what she had, but he didn’t give her any dollar amounts. She and my dad decided that they wouldn’t take any offer under $1,000. There was a lot of stuff and it was all in excellent, if not perfect, condition.

The Offer

John drove up one afternoon with an assistant (presumably to help him carry everything out) when my stepmom was out but I was at the house with my Dad.

We showed him the shed full of glass sheets, some of them as large as 24 x 36 inches in size. (This isn’t the stuff you get at Hobby Lobby, folks.) There had to be hundreds of sheets of glass in there in a wide range of colors. He said, “Well, these are the colors your wife wanted,” he told my dad. “That doesn’t mean other people want these colors.”

Cane in Tubes
My stepmom had several PVC tubes of 5-foot lead cane lengths that hung in the garage.

We showed him the PVC tubes full of lead cane hanging from racks in the garage. “No one uses this stuff anymore,” John said.

While not everything else was out (yet), there were bezels and patterns and kits and soldering lead on a table for him to see. He didn’t seem to care about them.

He turned to my dad and said, “I’ll give you $250 for all of it.”

My dad had some trouble keeping his temper. It wasn’t just a lowball offer. It was an insulting offer. I think that at one point he said that he could melt down the lead and sell it as lead bars and get more money than that.

John was not happy. Apparently he thought he’d be able to breeze in and get it all for next to nothing. He said, “I told your wife I wouldn’t offer much. Did you think I would pay retail prices? I came all the way up here to buy this.”

But my dad wasn’t going to budge.

John left. When he got to his car, he called my stepmom. She reported later that he offered her $350 and sounded angry. She said no and apologized for making him come so far for nothing.

John left, but it would not be the last we heard of him.

Facebook Marketplace

Band saw
Need to cut glass? This bandsaw made for glass cutting was in like new condition with all instructions. There was also a grinder and cane stretcher.

As much as I absolutely detest Facebook, I have to admit that its Marketplace feature is a great way to sell stuff. My stepmom is on Facebook and posted a listing there later that day.

The responses started coming immediately. The buyers started coming the next day.

By that time, we’d gathered together everything she had to sell, putting it on folding tables inside the screened-in lanai. The shed with the glass was right there. So when people came, they could browse everything easily. After some uncertainty on how to price the glass, my stepmom settled on a price of $8/square foot. This was a lot cheaper than someplace like Hobby Lobby. And it was also cheaper than what John was selling it for in his shop.

We knew that because lots of the folks that came over the next week or so usually bought their glass at John’s place. Now they were buying it from my stepmom. Apparently, the glass colors she liked were the same glass colors other artists — including the artist’s that shopped at John’s place — liked. (Who knew? LOL.) As for no one using lead cane, well tell that to the woman who bought a whole tube of it — 30+ 5-foot lengths.

Although the first two sales were disappointingly small, when the real artists started coming, the sales got bigger. By the middle of the second day, my stepmom had already taken in more than John had offered for everything — and the shed full of glass looked as full as ever. (I took to yelling out, “Stuff it, John!” every time someone left with glass he could have sold.) Soon she’d taken in $1,000 and there was still a ton of stuff left. Then more than $2,000, with one woman buying $845 worth of glass and lead. Yesterday, my stepmom told me she’d taken in more than $3,000 and there was still stuff left.

Of course, all of these profits could have been John’s if he’d made a reasonable offer for what my stepmom had.

The Best Part

While it’s true that dealing with a constant stream of strangers coming to the house can be a pain in the butt, my stepmom and dad don’t really mind it. My stepmom is retired and is around the house most of the time anyway. My dad works part time and is home in the afternoon. They don’t have to have people coming through the house because everything is setup outside, on the lanai and adjacent shed. There were no weird characters. Everyone was a legitimate glass artist and everyone bought something.

And my stepmom and I think that my dad likes talking to the husbands that sometimes come along on the shopping trip.

My stepmom is happy about how things turned out. Not only is she getting rid of stuff she doesn’t need, but she’s bringing in good money to do it. Because she bought some of the glass so long ago, she’s actually profiting on some of the sales because the going price is higher than what she paid years ago. In the end, she might get back everything she spent on what she’s selling now.

And the buyers? They’re thrilled. They’re getting good quality glass at a good price. They’re chatting with my stepmom and learning from her. She’s giving away a lot of the pattern magazines she’s accumulated.

So it’s a win-win-win — for everyone except cheapskate John.

Stuff it, John!

My History with a 1995 Sea Ray SeaRayder F-16

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In my possession for 12 years before last week’s sale, it played a part in the theater of my crazy divorce.

Jet Boat For Sale
Here’s my little jet boat parked in front of Bob’s house on the corner. He also sold my Yamaha motorcycle for me. Now if only I can get him to take my truck camper…

Last week, I sold my little jet boat.

Or my friend Bob did. He lives on a main road and had a caller within 30 minutes of putting the For Sale sign on the boat where it was parked on the corner at his house. The next day, after a launch and engine run, he had cash in hand and the new owner was driving away.

About the Boat

The boat was 28 years old when I sold it. That is not a typo.

First Look
My friend Pete and the boat’s previous owner open the engine lid for a look inside. It was immaculate.

I bought it in late summer 2011 from the original owner, a couple who lived at Crescent Bar in Quincy, WA. I’m pretty sure my future wasband told me not to buy it — he didn’t like me buying anything anymore, even though I always bought with money I’d earned and not our joint funds.

It was a fun little boat. At the age of 16 years old — when I bought it — it was in amazing condition, having been stored indoors for most of its life. The one season the original owners had left it in the water on a mooring ball at Crescent Bar, the upholstery had taken a beating and they’d replaced it. It looked great. It started right up. It was easy to tow, easy to launch by myself, easy to drive, and easy to get back on the trailer by myself.

Because it was a jet boat, it seemed to steer from somewhere about 1/3 down the boat — instead of from the back. It was a weird sensation, especially at high speed. Virtually no body roll. It would just seemingly slide into a turn.

It had a 120 horsepower jet boat engine which, considering the boat’s diminutive size — it was only about 17 feet long — seems like a lot. But it didn’t have enough power to pull a skier — I was told that by the owner when I bought it. That was fine with me. All I wanted was a way to get out on the water and have some fun. The price of admission — just $1,500 — made it a no-brainer to buy.

Winter 2011/2012

Helicopter and Motorcycle
I had one of my two motorcycles shipped up to Washington because I was spending every summer there and wanted something to get around on other than my wasband’s truck. Here it is with my old helicopter parked at my friend Pete’s winery/orchard. Both of these are gone now; more life subchapters closed.

I couldn’t bring it home with me to where I was still living in Arizona because I had to drag home the fifth wheel I spent my summer working months in. Instead, I made arrangements to have it and my old Yamaha Seca II motorcycle, which I’d had shipped to Washington earlier that year, stored indoors for the winter.

I went home and had a miserable winter with my future wasband, trying to keep our marriage together by living with him during the week in his Phoenix condo and coming home with him on weekends. If anything, living in the cave-like condo he’d bought (for reasons I still don’t understand) made matters worse.

In the spring of 2012, I went back to Washington for my fifth consecutive season of cherry drying. I was growing my business there and had hired another pilot to help me during the busiest part of the season. I was also working on a Mac OS book revision — I was still writing computer books back then — and picking up flying work by taking people to wineries with the helicopter. It was summer 2012 and my flying business was really looking up.

When I wasn’t writing or flying and there wasn’t rain in the forecast, I was able to take my little jet boat out on the river from Crescent Bar and ride my motorcycle. My summer job was looking more and more like a paid summer vacation every year.

Parked Boat
Here’s the boat parked at the Colokum Ridge Golf Course campground, where I started each summer. You can see my old Montana fifth wheel and my wasband’s white Chevy truck in the background.

The Divorce Bullshit Begins

The idiot I was was dumb enough to marry called on my birthday to tell me he wanted a divorce. (Can you believe that shit?) A lot of weird stuff followed and if you look hard enough in this blog under early posts tagged divorce you should find plenty of that.

Meanwhile, I was stuck in Washington for work and I wasn’t sulking around. I was doing what I always did when I was there: hanging out with friends, flying for work and pleasure, writing, and doing fun things like day trips with the boat or my motorcycle or my wasband’s truck, which is what’d used to take that big fifth wheel up to Washington again.

When he didn’t actually file for divorce and swore that there was no other woman, a friend of mine told me that he wasn’t serious about the divorce and was probably just blowing steam. I emailed him to tell him I’d be home in September with the boat so we could use it on Lake Pleasant. But then I found out about the old woman he was already shacking up with and my plans changed.

At the end of cherry season, I stored the boat and the fifth wheel and went home. More weirdness followed. Then the nitty gritty of divorce bullshit. He dragged that out for months, certain for some reason that I was in a hurry to get back to Washington and would give him anything he wanted to finish things up quickly.

For a man who’d lived with me for 29 years, he certainly didn’t know me very well. I had no reason to go back to Washington before cherry season and I only had one home. So other than taking a few trips to visit friends and family members, I just stayed home and packed. I’d already decided that when the divorce dust settled, I’d buy 10 acres of land in Malaga that some friends were selling and build a new home on it.

The boat never crossed my mind, although, in hindsight, it would have been a lot of fun on Lake Pleasant and the Salt River lakes while I waited for him to get a clue.

The Boat as a Divorce Pawn

The boat was included in my list of personal property. Because I had purchased it while we were married, it was technically part of our community property, despite the fact that only my name was on the title. I don’t remember if I listed it for its purchase price of $1500 or something a little lower, perhaps $1200. I was honest about the value — which is more than I can say for the way he tried to undervalue his Mercedes by neglecting to mention its AMG upgrade. Although we tried mediation to split the personal property and other things before our court date in May 2013, the old woman he’d replaced me with — who was apparently managing the divorce for him — told him not to agree to anything. So that’s how the boat wound up in court.

Skinny Me
I lost 45 pounds while I was away in Washington during the summer of 2012. I’m surprissed my future wasband didn’t have a heart attack when he first saw me on my return. I looked and felt like the new woman I was about to become.

And this is where the farce began. I think it was our second day in court. Before things got started, his lawyer told my lawyer that my future wasband wanted the boat and was willing to pay half its value. He offered me $1000 for my share.

Now this was, in no way I knew of, half the boat’s value. The boat, in my mind, wasn’t worth a penny more than I’d paid nearly two years before: $1500. For some reason, he was claiming it was worth $2000.

But I knew what was really going on. They — my future wasband and his “advisor” (or mommy; call her what you will) — thought the boat was worth a lot more. Remember, he’d never actually seen more than photos. They figured that if they lowballed me and I refused, they’d somehow be able to prove it was worth more than I said. (For what purpose at this very late stage in the game, who knows?)

But I knew what the boat was worth: $1500 max. So he was offering me $250 more than half the value.

I’m not a complete idiot. I took the offer.

While all this was going on, my future wasband was squirming in his seat. It was pretty clear to me — after all, I’d lived with him for 29 years, too, and I’d been actually paying attention — that he didn’t want the damn boat. This was a ploy his mommy and lawyer had agreed to play in court as the judge was settling into his seat for the day and I don’t think he was happy about it. When I mentioned that the boat was in Washington and I would not be storing it for him, he started to see the reality of the situation: having to not only pay for a boat he didn’t want, but drive 1200 miles to Quincy, WA to retrieve it and another 1200 miles to bring it home. I relished the thought of him doing that for an 18-year-old boat he’d overpaid for.

So he told his lawyer he didn’t want it and it went back into the property pool.

Oddly enough, when the judge made his decision, he let me keep everything I’d bought over the years, even if I’d bought it since we were married. That included the fifth wheel, a hangar in Page, AZ (which was actually an exchange for like property purchased before we married), and the boat.

So I got to keep the boat and didn’t have to pay him a dime for it.

The Boat in My New Life

Janet Fishing
My friend Janet spent a week with me in late summer 2013. We took the boat out and she did some fishing. A typical trip would be to drive at full throttle up to the nearest dam, kill the engine, and drift back downriver, listening to music, snacking, and talking with whoever had come along for the ride.

When I moved up to Washington “full-time” to reboot my life closer to work, the boat became part of that life. My garage was big enough to store it and although I didn’t use it as much as I wanted to, it was great to be able to just hook it up to my Jeep and drag it down to the Columbia River on a hot summer day with friends. I even dragged it to Arizona behind my truck camper years later, long after that fifth wheel had been sold so I could go boating on the Colorado River, Lake Havasu, and Lake Pleasant.

Boat Dogs
Although I didn’t use the boat as much as I liked when I took it back to Arizona, it was good for a few outings on the Colorado River, Lake Pleasant, and Lake Havasu. Here’s my old dog Penny with Janet’s dog Dually on the bow when we headed out to the Colorado River late one afternoon.

But time marches on. I wanted to do more serious boating. Cruising in something I can live aboard while covering long distances. Like maybe the 6,000 mile Great Loop. After a series of unexpected positive events, I wound up buying the 2019 Ranger Tug R29 CB I named Do It Now. I’ve spent a total of 179 days on board since September 5, 2022 and I’ll be going back for more at the end of this September.

I didn’t need that little jet boat any more. I knew that, despite the fact that I really liked it and how easy it was to just go out on the river for a day of fun. It was taking up space in the garage, space I’d hoped to store other stuff in. Like maybe a trailer for that bigger boat.

Selling the Boat

So after a lot of soul searching, I put it up for sale last week.

I suspected, at this point, that it was worth more than I’d paid. Everything these days is worth more. (My truck camper is worth at least $7K more than I’d paid for it 6 years ago.) So I originally priced it at $2200, hoping to settle on $2,000.

Last Day
Here’s the boat on the last day I owned it. I’d taken it down to the river for one last ride with the neighbors who were interested in buying it. I almost changed my mind — as I almost had on my last motorcycle ride — but stayed firm.

The neighbors who wanted to buy it — well, she did and he didn’t and he won — said it was worth more. So when I dropped it off at Bob’s house where it would get a lot more exposure, I suggested $2500. He thought that was high, but it was worth a try.

It sold in less than 24 hours for the full asking price of $2500. I paid Bob a commission and pocketed $2250.

Did I lie about the boat’s value back in 2013? No. I think inflation and the fact that the 28 year old boat was in mint condition — due to being garaged for its entire life — worked in my favor.

And thus ends another subchapter of my life: my small boating days.