YouTube Televangelist Cut Off From Monetization for Anti-Vax Video
- YouTube pastors who livestream are some of the platform’s top earners from “Super Chat” tips.
- Super Chat has become a lucrative tool for varied communities on YouTube.
- VTubers have long topped the charts, but lawyers saw a huge boost due to the Depp vs. Heard trial.
On his three-year-old YouTube channel, with 770,000 subscribers, the Nigerian Pastor Jerry Eze streams daily. His broadcasts, frequently two hours in length, follow a familiar format.
Take, for instance, a stream last week titled “It Is My Time And My Turn” that has garnered about 244,000 views. It opens with a soulful gospel performance featuring members of Eze’s Streams Of Joy International church, which says it welcomes 6,000 worshippers each Sunday at its 13 branches across Nigeria, the US, UK, and Canada.
After the music concludes, Eze – Streams Of Joy’s lead pastor – appears onscreen bedecked in a tight-fitting Balmain shirt, flanked by two colleagues. They begin speaking in tongues over towering stacks of paper, prayer requests sent in by the channel’s global legion of viewers.
Occasionally, the ecstatic speech morphs into self promotion, with Eze urging viewers to “click on the share button – the more you’re sharing, the more your miracles are multiplying.”
As he continues for the better part of an hour, his voice devolving into a low rasp, the Super Chats keep rolling in.
Eze is one of several pastors raking in large sums using Super Chat, a tipping function launched by YouTube in 2017 that enables viewers to have their comments emphasized during livestreams.
Tips can be bestowed in denominations ranging from $1 to $500. YouTube takes 30% of revenues, after local sales tax and Apple’s 30% App Store fees are deducted. If donors are on an Android device, desktop, or mobile browser, there’s no app store fee.
According to Playboard, a YouTube analytics platform that tracks Super Chat donations, Eze clocked $70,899 worth of Super Chats last month before fees. Playboard uses bots to track Super Chats and comparable tips called Super Stickers in both live and recorded broadcasts.
Eze said his most recent check from YouTube, reflecting all earnings for the month of April (not just Super Chats), was for $81,501. Insider verified the figure with documents he provided.
And Eze is not alone. Top-earning YouTube pastors like Bishop TD Jakes and Mattie Nottage are following in a long line of televangelists dating back to the sixties, harnessing modern forums to reach religious seekers and get donations.
“It’s a universal human instinct to seek out spirituality, and so it makes sense that so much of that would migrate online,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer for ad agency Mekanism.
But YouTube’s platform policies have also caused trouble for at least one of these livestreaming pastors. Last week, YouTube suspended Nottage from its Partner Program because of a video that violated its Covid-19 vaccine misinformation policies, cutting off her ability to make money from the platform.
VTubers, lawyers, and pastors
Data culled from Playboard suggests that YouTube’s livestreaming industry is dominated by a handful of distinct content communities.
Last month, law-focused YouTubers (known as “lawtubers”) ascended to the top of the pack thanks to gavel-to-gavel streams of the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard trial. In May, YouTubers Emily D. Baker, LegalBytes, and Rekieta Law topped Playboard’s list of top revenue drivers from Super Chats.
“Lawyers do well because they’ve got specific skillsets,” Gahan said. “The information is often difficult to find on your own or expensive to pay for. Additionally, viewers have come to know them – they default to these experts in the same way you would reach out to your friend that’s a lawyer.”
Traditionally, however, the biggest Super Chat earners have been VTubers hailing from Asia. In 2021, 15 of the top 20 most-Super Chatted channels globally belonged to this community, in which creators use motion-capturing technology to appear on-stream as digital avatars.
But YouTube televangelists aren’t far behind.
Miracles within reach
Pastors comprise another formidable contingency in the Super Chat world.
On YouTube, the field last month was led by Bruno Leonardo, a Brazilian Baptist pastor with 10.6 million subscribers, who drove $72,065 in Super Chats before fees, narrowly besting Eze, according to Playboard.
They are followed by the American bishop TD Jakes (1.9 million subscribers); the Bahamas-based “prophetess” Mattie Nottage (210,000 subscribers); and Vinicius Iracet, who also hails from Brazil and has amassed 2.9 million subscribers.
Leonardo, Jakes, Nottage, and Iracet did not respond to requests for comment.
Jakes, for his part, heads up the non-denominational Potter’s House church in Dallas, where he streams live on Wednesdays and Sundays. In addition to getting $30,071 in Super Chats before fees last month, per Playboard, Jakes – who has counseled Presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama – is a real-estate entrepreneur and Lifetime movie producer.
Nottage streams multiple times per day, sometimes donning designer clothing and speaking in tongues. She got $22,140 in Super Chats last month before fees, according to Playboard.
And she shows that some YouTube televangelists are courting controversy like their linear TV predecessors. Until last week, Nottage’s most popular video urged viewers against getting a Covid vaccine. Last week, YouTube told Insider it had removed the video, struck Nottage’s channel (resulting in a seven-day upload restriction), and suspended it from monetization, including Super Chats.
“In accordance with our policies on Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, we removed a video from Mattie Nottage TV’s channel,” a YouTube spokesperson told Insider. “In addition, we’ve suspended the channel from the YouTube Partner Program for violating our monetization policies.”
Nottage will be able to reapply to the Partner Program in 30 days, whereupon YouTube will assess whether the violative content has been addressed.
Claims of medical miracles are a common theme for Nottage, as well as for Eze.
Toward the end of one of Eze’s recent streams, video testimonies sent in by viewers recount tales of enlarged lymph nodes, blocked Fallopian tubes issues, and cancer cured by prayer. It seems to signal to viewers that their own miracles could be just within reach.
“All I’m encouraging you to do is please stay on this channel,” Eze says in his channel’s introduction video, “and everything that pertains to life and Godliness will be yours.”
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