We’re Trying Something New!

Spoilers: We’re going to start making our videos free to download.

The ministry of Douglas Talks is sort of an oddity. Our videos have always been free to watch on the Douglas Talks YouTube Channel, and we’ve also always offered our videos for sale as digital downloads.

• “YouTubers” make their living from the revenue generated by the ads that play before, during, and/or after their videos. But we’ve disabled almost all ads on the Douglas Talks YouTube channel to make it as safe as possible for our viewers.
• Many content creators make their living by selling digital downloads of their videos. Their standard practice is to only put samples of their videos on YouTube (like partial videos, or only a few videos from their catalog), so that people will be more likely to purchase their videos instead of illegally downloading them off of YouTube using third-party software. But, though we certainly don’t condemn the content creators who do these things so that they can make a living from their videos (1 Tim. 5:18 and 1 Cor. 9:14), we feel that God has called us to make all of our videos free to watch on YouTube.

The common question we get is, “Why would anyone buy your videos if they can just watch them for free and it’s so easy to illegally download them from YouTube?” And our answer is, “Most won’t.” We make our living from the less than 0.2% of our viewers who choose to support Douglas Talks through financial gifts or by purchasing digital downloads of our videos. We’ve stepped out in faith, knowing that God will take care of us, and it’s paid off big time. Perhaps not in terms of finances, but certainly in terms of ministry.

At the time of writing this (November 2021), we’re reaching more than 80,000 homes and churches every month. And many of our viewers watch Douglas Talks together as a family or in a classroom, so we estimate that our actual audience is at least twice that size. And it’s growing more every day!

There’s never been a time when God has not supplied our needs. And so, we’re going to take another risk…

We’re not sure how many people illegally download our videos from YouTube, but we know it’s a lot (likely thousands per month). Many people don’t actually realize it’s wrong to download a YouTube video using a “stream ripper” (it’s pretty common for people to not actually read the terms of use, and, even if they do read all the fine print, sometimes tech language can be confusing). But, unfortunately, there are also many within the Church who know that it’s wrong, but attempt to justify their sin by saying they are “doing it for God.” Christians stealing from other Christians in the name of God seems insane to me, but I’m not the Judge.

We also know that there are many people who genuinely can’t pay to download our videos, but would love to use them in their ministry. By the grace of God, our audience is worldwide. And though $10 is a fair price for our downloads, there are some places where $10 is a truly prohibitive price. We want other ministries to be able to download and use our videos no matter where they are or what their financial situation is.

So, we’ve decided to make our videos free to download. The downloads are still worth $10, and download sales make up about a third of our income, but we want to remove any obstacles in the way of people using our videos to further the Kingdom of God.

Making this switch is going to be a pretty time-consuming process—we’ve got about 230 episodes to switch over, so it will take a while before all of our videos are free to download. Click the link below to see which episodes are free to download.

Next Steps

Moving forward, each new episode of Douglas Talks will be made in the new “free to download” style, and we’ll also be slowly transitioning all of our old videos into this new format. And, as we’re updating the old episodes in the new style, we’ll also be adding a mini-devotional PDF for every episode to match our episodes made from 2020 onwards. Here are some other things that are coming soon to DouglasTalks.com as we slowly roll out this change:

• New “Watch Page” that will eventually have all of our episodes free to watch on our website in one place (right now our Watch Page can only handle 99 episodes, less than half of our total episodes!)
• Easy-to-navigate “Index Page” with all of our episodes sorted by category
• Streamlined website. There’s currently a “Post” page and a “Product” page for every episode we’ve made, which causes a lot of clutter. Eventually there will just a “Post” page for every episode that will have all you need in one place.

What About…?

Our Mailing List – In the past, we’ve used our mailing list to send out coupons for our latest episodes. But, with the change to free downloads, you won’t need coupons. Instead, each week we’ll tell our mailing list about the latest episode and let you know which old episodes have also become free to download. Our hope is that those who have used coupons will still support Douglas Talks financially, just with donations instead of sales.

Club Douglas – We’re going to phase out Club Douglas. The discounts to Digital downloads provided by Club Douglas will eventually be irrelevant. If you’d like to support us on a monthly basis, follow this link to learn about making a Recurring Monthly Gift.

Everything else – I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but please feel free to reach out if you have any questions! info@DouglasTalks.com