I have another travel Youtube channel, it just serves as a backlink honestly and to sometimes use videos on my Africa blog. I filmed a whole lot of things as well on my trip to south Africa last year, where I was a month.

Put a lot of time in uploading my videos, shorts as well as longer form content. I have 58 subscribers there haha.

But once there are no videos left (unless you travel around the whole year), it kind of stops as well, so.. But the intent of that one wasn't really to make money with, but usable as a backlink for my site.
My Africa site was fairly new, but steadily growing, nearly everything got indexed.

Then again the core update: google just decided to not only deindex my African birds articles ( I get that, to high competition), but also my blog posts on which I worked for days, with my own unique safari's and stories, pictures and videos. (I don't think that there were a lot of tourists visiting particular museums or had a nice talk with a conservationist in a particular game park, etc.). BAM, google said: 'nah,not interested, not 'unique' or whatever they think this is.
It is f**ing ridiculous!
But yeah, I do hope for that monumentum some day on my miniature channel, we'll see. Good luck with the travel!
Lizzy

Yeah, that is what my YouTube Channel started off as, a Backlink to the Blog and of course, a convenient way to upload Video to embed in the blog, as a way of separating myself from the competition and providing unique and helpful content, proving we have visited the locations we were blogging about, you know the EXACT things google lied about us needing.

But I am evolving that now into it hopefully becoming the focus with the BLOG as the backup.

AI will kill blogging in my opinion, despite what the Gurus say, it's coming and people just want the short answer. Yes, this may be circular and with the death of blogging AI may run out of content to steal, but that's 5+ years away and even then maybe it can just cannibalize Social Media and Reddit to provide the answers.

So I see Video as partially future-proofing this, It's going to be really hard and hugely machine-intensive to fake actually visiting a location on video, so as people hunt out REAL people who have actually been somewhere Video has to be a real help. My last trip (don't want to post a link but search Youtube for YourUSACityGuide if you are interested) was the first one where I focused more on the Video Creation over the photo/just information gathering. And it will be the focus going forward.

I get the issue with running out of content when not traveling, but I see that as a positive, not a negative...It just means I HAVE to keep traveling.

Which for me is actually the point, I am not in this to make money, I am in this to pay for my traveling!

"yeah, that is what my YouTube Channel started off as, a Backlink to the Blog and of course, a convenient way to upload Video to embed in the blog, as a way of separating myself from the competition and providing unique and helpful content, proving we have visited the locations we were blogging about, you know the EXACT things google lied about us needing."
==> absolutely agree. I have seen tweets where people claimed that they even payed other people to travel to places and take their own pictures and videos and review their accommodation, being decimated by the update.

" AI will kill blogging in my opinion, despite what the Gurus say, it's coming and people just want the short answer. Yes, this may be circular and with the death of blogging AI may run out of content to steal, but that's 5+ years away and even then maybe it can just cannibalize Social Media and Reddit to provide the answers."

==> I'm thinking the same, seeing as the youngest generation gets their "news" on social media and even are allowed to now use AI in schools, it is bound to happen, if not now, it will in a few years. And I even think that what Google just did now, made that happen quicker, because when I use Google for personal things, I can't even find what I'm looking for or it misinterprets my search intent!

Just today, I am writing an article on 'how to redo a bad paintjob on plastic dollhouses". Even without adding the word "dollhouse", I get results on top that DO NOT MENTION THE PLASTIC PART, just the redo the paint job (I'm not looking for that!). It is ridiculous and we will all sooner now leave Google. I don't understand why gurus here and elsewhere don't even notice this! (and the Reddit result s¨¨cks to)

I am now looking up that keyword in Dutch, and here I still get way better results though, I hope they won't switch that either.

" So I see Video as partially future-proofing this, It's going to be really hard and hugely machine-intensive to fake actually visiting a location on video, so as people hunt out REAL people who have actually been somewhere Video has to be a real help" ==> I hope so, but you know, Youtube is also google, so don't know honestly.

" My last trip (don't want to post a link but search Youtube for YourUSACityGuide if you are interested) was the first one where I focused more on the Video Creation over the photo/just information gathering. And it will be the focus going forward. " ==> great focus, hope it works out!

(maybe you should also promote your travels on Instagram like Eric Cantu does, and then get yourself an MMO site and link to that on Instagram and promote WA to show "how you make your money while travelling" hhahahahaa! (actually good business sense @ Eric, if you read this, don't mean to defame you or anything, sorry :-))

travel videos could also work on Instagram I think, just spread them on different socials while you have them!

yeah, from ads alone, I haven't figured out yet if there's any sideway-affiliate income from that or traffic to my blog. Most of the time placing affiliate links in the description would be kind of irrelevant, except for some DIY miniature kits.
At the time it was 1000 subs, I think it is now only 500, no?

Also, depending on the niche, you might even get more per add income then I do, check out Dianes post : How Much Does YouTube Pay?

I thought it was 500 but Diane explained to me recently that this is if you place your own ads, though I do not even know how this would work. But I am far from this in any case. I do place links to my site and affiliate links, but as you say, useless.

Try adding some of your YT video to Rumble. Monetization is instant, no limit for subscribers, though from my experience terribly bad. But you never know what may happen, it costs nothing to try.

thanks for the tip, I really don't know what Rumble is but anyway haha

It is a video channel like YT but with a smaller audience. You can upload the same videos which you already have at YT. My videos were monetized within minutes. But this is about cents, at least from my experience.

Normally, this is also an environment with less censorship, just to know.

Here you can see more: Rumble Video Licenses- What You Need To Know

this is a good read by timothy, thanks. Good to know about the licenses, I don't want to give them the ability to use my vids

we could do anything for sure Jessie ahahaha! ( and maybe some luck) thanks!

Absolutely Lizzy and you're most welcome my friend! :-)

thanks Jef!

You're very welcome, Lizzy!

Jeff

thanks Gus :-)