I know at times I may sound like a shill for Patreon, but I have no connection to them whatsoever beyond "normal customer", and don't care if you use a competitive service to them or whatever. But if you are in the position of finding yourself with a growing show like this, I implore you to set up some sort of voluntary subscription revenue as soon as possible, before you embed into the very foundation of your content a dependency on ad dollars. Even if you use it as an augment to ad revenue, it's so much better for you. It's more stable against Youtube deciding to tweak an algorithm one day. It's more stable month-to-month. It's even more socially stable since it releases you from having to chase ad dollars by keeping advertisers happy instead of your "actual" customers. If your primary money base is subscriptions rather than ads, you could even completely shift video services if you need to without crashing your income.

My interest in pitching this so often is my desire to play my little part in sticking a stake in the idea that getting advertising money is the default path to monetization. I'd rather move to a world where it's either merely one option among many, or even, dare I dream, a last resort considered vaguely déclassé.

Oh, and I would also implore you, let your patrons download video directly somehow. I'd love to not even have to go through YouTube at all. Of course, I'm a crazy Linux user for whom YouTube isn't as convenient as it could be, but it's another way to detach your patrons from a particular video service.