A famous YouTuber went from making $275,000/mo to under $2,000.

How you ask? Well, he was demonetized.

It was an event called Adpocalypse where a bunch of advertisers on YouTube stopped buying ads on creators' videos that weren’t considered family-friendly.

He would cuss in his videos and use copyrighted music.

This is who he was and he didn’t want to come off as being inauthentic just to please YouTube.

He continued to be himself and eventually was given the ad revenue axe.

This YouTuber’s name is David Dobrik.

He was getting 60+ million views per month making just over $275,000 from AdSense revenue.

And then POOF, it was all gone.

Losing monetization rights like this would end most creators.

To be fair, he had multiple other ways of making money (Big sponsors) so he ended up financially fine.

He’s an anomaly.

What about all the typical successful creators?

The ones who worked hard for years on end to build up a following of 50k-500k+ followers?

Imagine having your social media monetization rights stripped away from you knowing you can do nothing about it.

That’s where the safety net of owning your audience comes into play.

When social media followers turn into email subscribers, creators take back control of content distribution and monetization.

They also get to be authentically themselves and don’t have to conform to platform rules.

With email, you get to say what you want, to who you want, when you want.

You're subscribers want to hear from you, that's why they subscribed in the first place.

It’s much easier to sleep at night knowing you own the method in which you communicate with your fans.

You own their first-party data (email address) and can build lasting relationships in a much more personal way.

I’m not saying creators should give up social media, that would be crazy.

Social media is great for impressions and lead generation.

What I'm saying is that creators need to start owning their audience.

If not, you end up playing Russian roulette with the algorithm Gods.

Email marketing can also help grow your social media presence.

Many creators use email marketing as a way to send a bunch of traffic to their social media posts quickly.

It’s an algorithm cheat code.

Say you have 10,000 email subscribers and you alert them that a new video just dropped.

Within the hour that video is going to get way more views, likes, and comments than it would have with no outside traffic.

In response, the algorithm naturally pushes that video out even harder due to the organic engagement.

The moral of the story is that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Creators who collect email addresses from their followers and send consistent newsletters not only form better relationships with their fans, but also gain control of their content distribution.

Social media is only becoming a more crowded space so getting serious about owning your content distribution strategy is key to staying relevant.

Avoid being like David, don’t wait until it’s too late.