"I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place."
That's a silly and obtuse take. By this logic you can never lose a job or source of income.
That's a silly and obtuse take. By this logic you can never lose a job or source of income.
He clearly states "My income dropped almost immediately", which makes it clean that he was earning money from it, and that a specific event—the piracy—coincided with a drop of "$Xk worth of sales" per month.
The analogy being drawn is to losing a job and consequently losing the income you would have earned from it. You've switched from "you never had that income" to "you never had that job".
It's like saying "I lost a Tesla because Elon Musk hasn't given me one." It's a pathos appeal by trying to paint the speaker as a victim to generate enough sympathy that you stop reasoning logically. Claiming to have lost money you never had is exactly as absurd when you eradicate the appeal to emotion embedded within it.
YouTube videos that hit ~1M views famously rarely keep up the pace beyond a week or a month. Hard to find data, but what I’ve heard is that after a year or two, looking back, most popular videos get 75-85% of their views in their first month after release.
Unless you have a contract to be regularly paid $X, or constantly put out new and engaging content, you really can’t get mad when your income peaks and then nosedives.