Matthew Hurst

Looking for some help from the internet!! 🙏 While I love reporting every single week on bad tech policy on YouTube and fact checking viral false claims about tech, I am losing money every month doing it. Here are my YouTube earnings for the past month. It costs $200 to make each video, so as you can see, I lost about $800 last month producing my content including my Free Speech Friday series. I care deeply about civil liberties and censorship, but these are not advertiser friendly topics. I have a solidly engaged audience, it's not huge, but I'm often the only content creator/journalist covering these age verification and censorship laws like the ASAA, KOSA, CHATBOT Act, etc. I have policy leaders, lawmakers, and tech experts on my show every week and I think I've built an influential platform. My question is: what should I do to make this sustainable?? I feel like this content is important, but I simply don't have the money to keep funding it myself. There are massive grants and opportunities for those who want to push pro-"child safety" slop and pro-censorship laws, but zero money in fighting them. If I ranted against data centers and fed people reactionary slop on the left or the right I'd be making millions 😭 Is my whole series a doomed endeavor? Should I just quit and try to get a real job? 😅 What should I do to try to monetize the content that I'm producing, or is it a lost cause? I really would value useful feedback because I'm struggling to figure out what to do! Most recent topics on my podcast: - Why the the Digital Age Assurance Act is bad - Why we shouldn't pause AI - The problems with AI watermarks - Why xAI is actually right to sue Minn over their bad deepfake law - How copyright laws, not AI companies, are to blame for book destruction - Trump's war on "woke AI" and why we need 1A protections for AI outputs - Bars selling our biometric data Feedback welcome!!