The video below is an interview with David Simon, the creator of The Wire. He's being interviewed about the Hollywood strike.

Everything about this strike is relevant to you if you're interested in having your own cooking show.

And what appears to be happening at YouTube is definitely relevant to your cooking show ambitions and David Simon touches on it at around the two-minute mark of the interview.

The YouTube Connection

It actually starts with Facebook.

Back in the day, Facebook Fan Pages were a fantastic way to build a following.

They were later renamed Business Pages, but they still worked the same: You got people to follow your page and now you had a way to easily communicate with them because they would see everything you posted.

And then Facebook started monetizing the platform.

Whereas before, your followers would see everything you posted, once Facebook started monetizing, it throttled your organic reach more and more.

Now, only about 2% of your Business Page followers will see what you post, unless you pay to put it into their feed.

So Facebook is now, and has been for many years, pay-to-play.

If you want people to see your stuff, you have to pay for it because if they let you build up a bunch of followers and reach them for free, nobody would pay for advertising.

YouTube appears to be going down the same path.

What you see in the screenshot above is something that has recently started appearing in people's YouTube accounts.

It's a prompt encouraging you to put some dollars behind your videos to reach more people.

As David Simon stated, it appears that Wall Street has decided that some money can be made, so YouTube may be about to change forever.

Just like Facebook did.

I've seen more than one experienced YouTuber document a significant decrease in the number of people viewing their videos, even though they were posting consistently about the same topics that have always been relevant to their niche audience.

This is exactly how things went with Facebook. Business Page owners had something that worked well and then it started working less and less until it no longer worked at all.

Either pay up or nobody will see your posts.

So What Can You Do?

You can't get mad because that's pointless.

Social media is free, after all, so any marketing benefit you're able to achieve through social media is marketing that you didn't spend money on.

It took Facebook years before it got to the point where only 2% of your page followers would see your posts.

So you may still have a little bit of time to still use YouTube for free advertising.

But I suggest you get to it NOW because it looks like the writing is on the wall.

If YouTube does what Facebook did, you're going to have to pay for people to see your videos.

It's difficult to believe that YouTube would bother creating a new way for you to pay them money and not give you any incentive to use it.

I always communicate to business owners that tomorrow is not promised and this is an example of that.

What you're able to accomplish today on YouTube for free is something that you may have to pay for a year from now.

If you want to have your own cooking show, you need to get going for a variety of reasons, including:

• The Hollywood strike is going to create holes in the TV lineup and those holes are opportunities for you to get subscribers for your cooking show. But this strike is not going to last forever and neither will the opportunities that it is creating.
• YouTube may very well be transitioning to pay-to-play. So if you don't have a budget to pay for advertising, you better get going while YouTube is still free.

YouTube is the best thing going right now for someone who wants to host their own cooking show.

But it's not going to stay like that forever. Nothing ever does...especially when there's money to be made.

[RELATED: How To Make $420K A Year With A YouTube Cooking Show]