I have a new video at YouTube & some thoughts about what I'm doing on YouTube

March 20, 2025

I’ve published a new video to my YouTube. Not a boring one where I’m just reading an essay, but a slightly less boring one where I’m out walking in the woods, talking about life and recapping fall and winter.

I have hopes (and an actual schedule in place to make those hopes into actionable goals) to get back to making lifestyle content videos for my YouTube channel.

I want to give it a go and see if I can get monetized on that platform.

I haven’t talked much about what I’m hoping to achieve with YouTube and my goals there. In part because that vision is developing and is a learn-as-I-go type thing.

I am 100% expecting to learn that monetizing at YouTube doesn’t bring enough reward for the effort, if the accounting is money earned for hours spent. However, it could bring other “rewards”, outcomes, and professional development type stuff that is of benefit to me.

Not to mention I just want to make videos about my life.

I like telling the story of my life for my own purposes, to a have a record of my life. That’s why I started blogging 20 years ago. So I'm willing to use a certain amount of my time, energy, and resources to create content regardless of monetary reward, because it meets other needs for me.

March 13 full moon

It’s not really like me to talk so much about monetary rewards related to my writing and creative work. Nothing on my blog is monetized these days and even back in the height of my experimenting with this, circa 2012, the amount of sponsored content, affiliate links and advertising-related stuff on here was very minimal.

I do not buy into the neoliberal, market fundamentalism narrative that everything we do should be monetized. And that we should turn our hobbies and interests and all our knowledge into commodities.

Market fundamentalism is the belief that everything exists in service to the market (humans, the earth and the relations contained therein) and therefore anything and everything should be commodified.

Market fundamentalism is not my worldview. However, I bump up against it all the time and some of my own actions, like monetizing YouTube, could be perceived as falling under it. And maybe they do fall under it. I am acutely conscious of the ideologies driving the show and so my relationship with monetizing is complex and critically-informed.

Anyway, this was more than I was planning to write about this most recent video release. But it appears that I need to get these thoughts out.

(Seems I can never just do “end product”, I always have to write through and reveal the process.)

Here’s the situation with YouTube.

I’m back to making videos now that winter has ended and my master’s degree is completed, which was winter’s project.

Now that my academic work has wound down (I still have a couple more days of editing and revision work to do, but for all intents and purposes, the writing is done) I’m going to take the momentum and discipline I put into that and apply it to video making, for the time being. (I always reserve the right to change my plan and tactics.)

What this means practically is that I have worked YouTube production into my weekly schedule, Tuesdays to be exact, which is necessary for me in order to achieve a goal of consistent production.

It can’t be a “in the off hours” activity, but it needs a dedicated space in my life. Coming out of my masters I now have that space, though I won’t be spending the same time and effort on video editing as I spent on writing. That kind of schedule is not sustainable with my other spring and summer goals of gardening, property work, community and relationship building and tending, and travel.

Oh yes, we intend to do some traveling and adventuring this summer!

But here’s the thing: all of that is the content for the YouTube channel and so there’s an integration of YouTube production with my daily life. Record what I’m doing. Edit, produce, and publish.

In that vein, the goal to publish hopefully interesting content to YouTube is motivating me to tackle some important projects around here that are both necessary and will make for good video (because of the subject matter).

I don’t want to make videos about deep thinking and cultural analysis. (Well, I kind of do want to do this, but they’d have to much more engaging that me reading essays. So I have a ways to go!) I want to make videos, from my life, about content that will be of interest to people in their lives.

I love when the downy woodpecker visits the feeder

I never think this strategically about my blog writing. My blog writing is a result of whatever is bubbling up in me and needs to be excavated and expressed in order to find release. It’s not about publishing something of use to others. Maybe it will be useful. Maybe not. Utility and even interest are not my driving motivations. Getting it out of my head and heart is.

Interest, and to a lesser degree utility, is more of a goal with YouTube.

Like I wrote last April when I published the video about getting ready to leave the kids in Montreal and move to Nova Scotia, “I’m inspired and interested to create more video content after we move. I think that where I will be living in Nova Scotia and the situation itself, living next to my parents, will generate a lot of good story telling material. Plus it’s really beautiful there, which makes for good video.”

Time to get back to it.

Commenting is still broken, but it is on the list to fix. If you are reading this in email and want to respond to this post just hit reply. Alternately, shoot me an email at renee@tougas.net. I'll reply back :) Or, leave a comment at YouTube.

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