Sponsor Troubles (Patreon)

The main bulk of our expenses, as probably those of many YouTubers, is covered by our sponsors. These are the integrations for special offers that you see at the beginning or the end of the video.

I pick those sponsors very carefully so that the offers are of high quality and, hopefully, of interest to our viewers. It's an arrangement that works for everyone: Our viewers learn of special offers, the sponsor gets new customers, and I have the money to pay the script writers, and videographers, and fact checkers, and software subscriptions.

In the past couple of months we have lost a lot of sponsors. It's got nothing to do with our channel. I have asked around, and other YouTubers, who work with different agencies, report the same problem. My agency, who is working with many other channels, says it's the same all over the board. I have also heard reports that the issue is similar for podcasts.

The origin of the problem seems to be the same as the current crunch in the tech sector. Many companies overspent during the COVID pandemic and they now have to dramatically shrink their budget. They have, plainly, no money left for advertisement.

As grateful as I am to your support, the money that I make on Patreon is not remotely enough to cover the expenses that I have for 8-10 videos a month, and YouTube ad-revenue is somewhat of a joke, though I admit that this is partly so because I refuse to use non-skippable ads.

The bottom line is that if I run a video without sponsor, I have to pay for it privately. I can do this once or twice, but not on a weekly basis.

This means that it seems likely that in the next couple of months our videos will appear irregularly, depending on when and whether we can find a sponsor. The next slot affected by this is the one on February 25.

I am writing this so you know what's going on.  

I am not writing this to ask you for more donations -- this isn't a problem I can realistically solve with donations, there isn't enough money to go around on Patreon, and you're already doing what you can. But if you know of any company who might be interested sponsoring content on our channel, please tell them to contact my agency at sabine@mediamobilize.com