Good morning, John. Eight months ago, I uploaded a white-noise video to YouTube. And I did this because I sometimes use white-noise videos on YouTube if I want to concentrate or just occupy the nooks and crannies of my mind that might otherwise turn to things that I don't need to be thinking about at a particular moment.

And there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people posting white noise videos on YouTube and pink noise and brown noise videos on YouTube. And I had an idea because of course I did. What if I made a white noise video and then any money that was generated by that video by people watching that first ad as it played or through YouTube Premium watchtime stuff, that money I would take and I would donate it to Partners in Health, an organization that I know well and I know that they do a lot of good work.

And this video comes in two parts. First, I'm going to show you how that went, how much money was generated, and you're going to get a behind-the-scenes look at the YouTube analytics of a YouTube channel. And two, I'm going to announce a new project.

So, here we are on the video analytics for white noise for charity. We got 547,000 views. That's pretty good, especially because in the beginning we were below average, but it has continued to climb up. In fact, now it is climbing up quite substantially. It has had an inflection point and it has started to go up faster, which is exciting.

Now, if this video were a normal YouTube video and it were 12 hours long, it would be making a ton of money because there'd be a lot of ad placements in there. But, I of course did not put a bunch of ad placements in a white-noise video. That would defeat the purpose of a white-noise video.

But the video does start with an ad. It plays an ad at the beginning. There's just no mid-rolls. I have excluded this from mid-rolls. But also the way that YouTube Premium works, the money that you pay for Premium—after a bunch goes to record labels—that gets split between YouTube channels based on watch time.

All right, here we are. We can click on the revenue, we can click on "since uploaded," and we can see that this video has raised over $10,000 for Partners in Health. What?!

Now, interestingly, this says that basically all of the money—there have been some Super Chats and gifts, so that's nice—but basically all of the money was raised through watch page ads. But that's a little bit misleading. There's a “see more” button or there's an :advanced mode" button. They do the same thing. I can click on "see more" and I can actually see how this breaks down. $8,800 of those dollars came from YouTube Premium, whereas the ad revenue is by far the smaller piece. That's only $1,300. So, that's people either seeing an ad on the sidebar—that revenue, I think, gets shared with us—or seeing the pre-roll, which definitely gets shared with us.

Now, you see at the very beginning here, it was actually much more even. And that's because people were just clicking on the video just to see that it existed because I made a video about this. I was like, “Hey, I'm uploading this video.” They were clicking on it in their subscription feed and then clicking away. So, those people were getting an ad, but they were not watching a lot of content. Very soon, that gap widened tremendously. Now, you should discount this last month because that's all going to be super compressed because this month isn't over yet.

But the rest of this, what I see here is that fairly consistently, this video is making about $1,000 a month. Now, I'm about to make an announcement. But before I make that announcement, I want to say something.

You should not just let these play in the background just to generate money for us. That's, I think, a silly use of resources and also it distorts the way your YouTube Premium revenue is being distributed. What I want to do here is to take the people who are already watching white-noise videos and convert them over to a new place.

Or maybe, maybe, they're listening to a sleepy-time podcast. I don't know if this will work. Maybe it won't. We could potentially bring people over to be listening to these. And I think it would be cool to capture some percentage of the market of white-noise videos on YouTube and have that money be going to make the world a better place. You could be chilling, studying, focusing, sleeping, trying to get to bed, and while you're doing that, you're making the world a little bit of a better place.

So, all that being said, I would like to introduce you to Zonderia. Zonderia is a YouTube channel that I just created this week. Don't worry about why I named it Zonderia. Zonderia is a YouTube channel that I created this week, uh, “Make the world better while you sleep” is our tagline. We've got pink noise, we got brown noise, we got 10 hours of binaural study sounds. We've also got a sleepy-time podcast that I recorded, only audio, 20 minutes of the life of Dmitri Mendeleev, a Zonderia sleepy-time podcast. And I don't know how any of this is going to go.

Now, what I will say is right now this channel is not even monetized. I have to get some views on the videos before it gets monetized. But once it gets monetized, all of the revenue from this channel will be donated to charity.

John, you might expect that this has come together quite quickly because you did the A-to-Z of Hank projects in your video and I didn't have a Z. So, I felt like this might be a good time to push out this project, which I have had in the back of my mind for a little while, but I didn't know what I was going to call it. So, I called it Zonderia.

As we speak right now, like, I'm not even done yet, I'm exporting, right now, audio that I took of an industrial air handler, because I was like, “That's a nice noise.” So, I recorded that.

All these videos are quality controlled. They have ramp-in and ramp-out. I have long ramp-outs because when a white noise turns off immediately, that can be very distracting.

I tried very hard to make my Mendeleev video as relaxed-sounding and boring as possible. He's a very exciting guy though, so maybe it's going to keep you awake. I don't know. We'll see.

I did an ultra-smooth brown noise that's really deep and you kind of have to be wearing headphones to really experience it. I did a more full-spectrum one that has some higher end. I did pink noise.

Anyway, that's something I've been thinking about doing for a long time, and here it is! Zonderia!

Two other things at the end of the video. One, if you order now, there's still a pretty good chance that your stuff—we can't guarantee it—but your stuff from Good Store or DFTBA.com will be delivered to you by Christmas or by the end of Hanukkah.

And number two, thank you to the lovely people at Dropout for being cool about me wanting to write it into my contract that I could release my special on YouTube after a year of it being exclusive on Dropout. That year has passed and I have, just yesterday, I uploaded my special, Pissing Out Cancer, on hankschannel, which you could go watch. There's also a link to that in the description.

But really, isn't Zonderia the story of the moment? Why did I even mention that? No, focus on Zonderia! John, I'll see you on Tuesday.