Yeah, monetize from the start. One thing your audience has to learn is they need to support your channel. While not every can buy products, they can least let an ad play and passively help your channel. While I'm all for helping people with unique selling propositions and such, the reality is this all takes money. Remember that Google/YouTube is part of your audience as well. It's a three-way deal: you, your audience and YouTube itself. YouTube isn't charging a dime for us to do all this.
It's like the relationship I have with my old day job. Even though I that job quit to do YouTube, I go there often to read, study, write and think. They'll let have something to eat if I want, free drinks no problem. I buy my gas from there for my fishing trips and such. I know they aren't making much if any money off the gas, but if they're willing to give me free food, drinks and a place to study and think, maybe paying a little more for gas is well worth it.
I think the same way with YouTube. If they're going to give us all this for free, I'll run the ads every time because my goal is to make money for YouTube as well. They may not make much money off me, but the exchange for what they are offering, it's more than fair.
Also if my people are too lazy to skip the ads that they don't want to watch, then I don't want them to be my subscribers. Those are not the kind of people I want using my products because they won't lift a finger to do anything for themselves. Sure I want to help them catch boat loads of fish without spending boat loads of cash, but at the end of the day, if they rather sit on the couch and watch fishing videos as opposed to get off their rear end and go fishing, I can't help them. Usually these people leave on their own.
