Right now, our relationship is a bit, complicated.

While it feels like just the two of us, me making videos for you, there's really three

of us.

And for you to be able to watch one of my videos, three things need to happen:

1.

I make the video.

2.

I have to put it somewhere.

That's YouTube for a variety of reasons.

3.

You need to be told that the video is up.

The internet is a big place and it's easy to miss stuff.

This last part is, presumably, why you're a subscriber and why, hopefully, you're seeing

this video.

But I hear from a lot of people that the message about a new video being up doesn't always

get though.

Now I don't want to point any fingers or anything, *but that's totally on YouTube*.

For whatever reason, they've had a bit of a history when it comes to *not* always sending

notifications to subscribers.

Like my last video which went up in the middle of some huge technical problem with subscriber

feeds.

This kind of thing has been going on for years.

Also, YouTube has been going the FaceBook path of deciding for you what you want to

watch, instead of just showing you the stuff you subbed to.

So they might just ignore what you've subscribed to for their own business reasons which turns

the subscriber button into more of a suggestion from you rather than a request.

And, because I don't have a way to talk to you directly, YouTube can, at any time, for

any reason, basically just shut down a channel.

Just done.

That's a lot of power that I hope they'd never lean on in a negotiations with creators.

But anyway:

I've been thinking about this a lot and I've figured out a crazy technological solution

to all of the above: it's called email.

Yeah, seriously.

I know email feels like barely post-industrial technology at this stage, but I've been testing

it out with several tens of thousands of people and it's working great.

If you want to always see the things I've made, click this button, enter your address,

and I can just tell you when I've made things.

It's amazing.

And we don't have to rely on YouTube to pass notes for us.

It makes our relationship direct and clear.

And I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to make it work best for you.

Click here to try it out.

...

Still here huh.

Not sure quite why...

Guess I should say something...

Well, I've been thinking about the relationship between creators and audiences for a while

now.

I've written about it here, and spoken with Brady, my podcast co-host about it here and

here.

If you're interested, you can click and check those things out as well.

Still watching, huh?

Well this is getting weird, so I'm going to just end the video now.

Bye...

Seriously.