*CFP* "THE YOUTUBE PIVOT: CREATORS, COMMUNITY AND GOING AD-FREE", CHAPTER BOOK

Seeking contributions for The YouTube Pivot: Creators, Community and Going Ad-Free. Chapter submissions are sought for a prospective Palgrave Macmillan volume providing a critical overview of innovations with YouTube and other online video creators’ rejection of platform based programmatic advertising.

To date, much of the literature examining the struggle of YouTube Creators to build sustainable careers has focused on challenges embedded in the singular economic underpinning of both YouTube and parent company Alphabet. Both companies rely heavily on traditional advertising revenue to sustain their business and promote further growth. Indelibly linked as they are, much of the analysis to date has struggled to separate questions of AdSense and advertising revenue from notions of successful careers on YouTube. Indeed, these metrics of how successful online video creators are understood, (subscriber count, subscriber growth, video views and watch-time) are the same metrics by which YouTube seeks to monetize and demonstrate value to advertisers.

Industry reporting of the relative importance of advertising revenue for YouTubers continues to vacillate between inconsequential and integral. For every industry report on the need for creators to diversify away from AdSense reliance, another article exists warning of a return to the “Adpocalypse” revenue fallout of the 2017.

A gap currently exists in the literature on YouTuber’s, their community and their careers. The volume will take account of the ways in which creators are seeking a “pivot” away from the YouTube ecosystem in order to build and sustain careers independent of the vagaries of AdSense algorithms.

As content creators seek new opportunities of authentic community engagement the most well-known YouTuber (PewDiePie) recently decamped over ad-revenue and partnership model disputes to join an ad-free, community supported blockchain platform. The volume will offer timely case studies and analyses of YouTube creators pivoting into new, uncertain and unconventional models of community and fan based support of their creative labour.

The YouTube Pivot: Creators, Community and Going Ad-Free, will profile online video makers who dare to ask: When programmatic advertising, product placement and sponsored content are taken out of the YouTube ecosystem – what’s left?

We welcome chapter contributions that explore, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:

• Merchandise revenue streams 
• Crowdfunding (distinct from Patreon) 
• Patreon (distinct from Crowdfunding) 
• Live appearances, speaking tours 
• Book publishing 
• Subscription and membership models for video content 
• Online course revenue and other education partnerships 
• Commissioned content creation for clients outside of YouTube (BtoB) 
• Commissioned content creation for public outside of YouTube (BtoC) 
• Accessing existing public/private screen funding to create non-online/ad-supported content 
• Accessing emergent funding from traditional screen funders to create online/ad-supported content outside of the YouTube ecosystem.

Contributions or questions can be made to ruari.elkington@qut.edu.au

Dr Ruari Elkington (FHEA)

Lecturer in Creative Industrie

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT