The Hours

You voted, and POST won. At 12:30 a.m., Hermes uploads all eleven hours and four minutes of Apollo's stream, under YouTube's twelve-hour limit, and sets it to public.

By noon, he has four thousand one hundred followers and four thousand watch hours. Enough, he thinks, to finally get paid: a channel can apply to the YouTube Partner Program with a thousand subscribers and four thousand public watch hours in the last twelve months. At 1:58 p.m., he applies.

At 2:14 p.m., Apollo's removal request lands. The video comes down, and the account gets its second copyright strike. Here is the trap: only watch hours from public videos count, and deleted ones don't. His four thousand hours go with the video. And content copied with no real changes can't be monetized anyway.

That evening, Apollo calls: clip for me, and I'll retract both strikes. Work for Apollo, and both strikes can vanish, but Hermes clips on Apollo's terms. Refuse, and one more strike can end every channel on the account.

Here is what Hermes doesn't know: at 9:12 that morning, someone had already written down 2:14. One last thing: in the ranking, the god just above Hermes gained followers today too. Still exactly one ahead.