I agree with what William has said about intent. I initially didn't fault channels like this for advertising their content with topless women, since it's certainly an effective way to stand out on the platform. But time and again, no matter how hopeful I was, the content was always selling a fantasy rather than reality. Now I avoid content that's marketed in this way because it has consistently asked for me to invest my time but given me nothing of value in return. It's welcome to exist, it just isn't for me.
Now, I will say, permaculture
can be a fantasy. Things finally clicked for me this year and I spent maybe a month in a state of almost continuous flow during the busiest part of the season and none of it felt like work, even if it objectively was. It was just constant amazement over what I was observing, what I was accomplishing, and what I was producing. It was blissful, after years of struggle getting things established. So, I don't think it's wrong to sell a fantasy, because on some level, with a certain mindset, that is what permaculture provides. But personally, I don't find any value in living someone
else's fantasy. And if this is the entirety of one's media diet, and then one goes and tries to start a homestead in the mountains or the like, one will be woefully unprepared for the realities of this work. But I can't fault people for dreaming of a fantastical future when they are not ready to take responsibility for their present. That is a quality that can only develop over time.
But speaking as someone who was making Youtube videos and had to stop for a couple of years and ask himself the question "How can I make this permaculture?" I have some unique insights into how the platform functions and how it intersects with sustainable living.
For starters, we all have a tendency to show the good and not show the bad. In my case, it was because the first few years out here were excessively rough because the land had been clearcut and scraped down to subsoil by the owners, which caused a chain reaction of massive population swings amongst the local wildlife. Or because climate extremes made it difficult for plants to establish and finish their lifecycles due to drought, wild temperature swings, oppressive amounts or rain or sun, and the diseases that were able to flourish in these conditions. Things could have been going well for weeks or months just to lose an entire crop overnight. Or to lose all of your crops overnight. I literally had a gopher eat all of my fruit
trees one of the years. My annuals didn't stand a chance at all.
And it isn't that I didn't want to be honest about how difficult everything was, and in fact, when people would ask me for updates in the comments I would tell them exactly what happened. But what you have to understand is that in order to make a 10 minute video on Youtube that appeases the algorithm would take 20+ hours of scripting, filming, editing, marketing, etc. Tell me, when you're emotionally devastated by losing all the food you were depending on to survive the winter, if you'd be up for putting in 20+ hours of hard work to announce yourself as a failure to the world. It just doesn't happen, regardless of one's intent. And if the video isn't going to do well, there's even less point in doing it, because I can't even make enough money telling my sob story in order to replace the crops that I lost. And also, do I really want to discourage others just because I had a bad year? Maybe that's useful to know in the broader context, once you know that I was successful in spite of that, but at the time it seems to just do more harm than good to tell that story. At the time, the only perspective I could provide is "you will suffer and no good will come of it." Now I can say "you will suffer, but if you hold fast, your suffering will be compensated 100-fold."
As far as making money on Youtube goes, I don't. Or not practically. I would say that, at the outset, if you think you need to make money to do permaculture, then you haven't followed permaculture theory to its logical conclusion. And I would say that there is enough money to go around on Youtube, because if you are doing permaculture then you will be necessarily reducing your need for income. I have not had income for 4 years and eat like a king. Some people in my community do do paid work, and they share the surplus of their work and I share the surplus of mine. The result is that they get more and higher quality food than they would ever otherwise have access to, and when I need access to a vehicle or some tool or item that I can't produce for myself, then they provide that with all of the money they're saving on food. I "pay" for access to the land with the labor I put in to maintain it, labor that the owner would otherwise have to do themself or hire out at great expense. I produce all of my own food and all of my own seeds and all of my own fertility. There's no ChipDrop here. It's a closed system that benefits from, but does not require, outside inputs. Permaculture does not require me to buy anything, and therefore making money is irrelevant. If one designs their system to require money when they would rather not do the things required to earn that money, then that system hasn't been designed properly. Or if the things you're willing to do for money don't earn you the amount of money that you need, then that system hasn't been designed properly.
So yes, literally everyone on the planet could be making Youtube videos about permaculture, and there would be enough money to go around. Because even while the total amount or value of the money in circulation might decrease, if everyone is growing all of their own food, textiles, building materials, etc., and in a sustainable fashion, then we would all experience more abundance than we would if there were a couple extra zeroes at the end of our bank account balance. Ask anyone I
feed if we would be better off if I was instead spending my time on earning an income and they would say that we wouldn't. And in this hypothetical scenario where everyone is making Youtube videos, we would also be a more capable and skillful people, which is something that money can't buy.
As I've tried to figure out how to interact with Youtube in a sustainable way I've had a lot of challenges to face. If a 10 minute video costs me $400+ in labor (not to mention equipment, etc.) and does not earn me $400 in value, then it's not sustainable in the long run. Especially if I'm trying to keep up with an at least weekly upload schedule, which increases my workweek by somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% (assuming I would otherwise put in a 40 hour week on the farm), and steals $1600 a month in labor without returning anything to me. The information and educational content that I'd like to make just does not do well with the algorithm without dressing it up with pretty images, clean scripting and editing, and all the other things that make the algorithm happy. The fact is that most of the people who are interested in my educational content don't care what it looks like, BUT they will never see it if Youtube doesn't recommend it to them, which it won't if I don't invest 20+ hours of labor into it. What I want, and what my subscribers want, is at odds with how the platform is designed to function. This is how you end up with creators who are making high quality permaculture content, and might have 500k subscribers, but then consistently get around 10k views on their videos and make no money. So I've been asking myself if there's any way I can use the platform unconventionally that allows everyone to win.
Here's what I've decided to try: split my content into permies, algorithm appeasing videos to let new people know that I exist and am doing good work, and then have my private, raw, unedited, barebones, subscriber-only videos that are packed with knowledge but will never perform well with the algorithm. This separation means that my quality, informational content isn't negatively impacting my standing with the algorithm, and because I'm not investing hours of my time trying to get this content to perform well with the algorithm, I can crank out more of the content that my subscribers like with minimal labor and without having to worry about whether it will ever pay me back for my effort. But the one or more times a year that I want to really make something that's beautiful and artistic and finely tuned, I can do that and make it permies, and the algorithm will love it and send me new people who will love all of my other content, but I don't have the onus to make that the majority of my content or to sell an unrealistic fantasy. When one of my experiments fails I can record a 30 second video and upload it, unedited, to let my subscribers know. Without tanking my channel. And that's doable, whereas 20+ hours of work when I'm already an emotional wreck is not.
I think people who turn to Youtube to share permaculture content are quickly overwhelmed by just how unsustainable it is if you do it in the conventional way, and they quickly have to find ways to monetize it in order to keep it going, which so often pulls them further and further away from the permaculture values they claim to profess. If you don't take a step back and apply permaculture principles to the platform itself, it won't be long before what you're doing is no longer permaculture, even if it is pretty.
Youtube is work. Creators deserve to be compensated for the work they do to educate and inspire the world, so I don't fault people for trying to make money on the platform, just as I wouldn't fault someone for working an office job to fund their permaculture dreams either. We're each doing it in our own way. It's unrealistic to think that everyone could stop earning money all at once and there would be no problems. The pandemic taught us how fragile all of these systems are in the face of large, abrupt changes. But with sufficient time, this way of working in the world eliminates one's need for money, because money can't buy you anything greater than you already have. There's more than enough money to go around and there always will be. But people overextend themselves, and the platform makes it easy to do, so people need to be really realistic about what they're putting in and what they're getting out and whether that math works out in the long run.
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