I run a channel with 85k subscribers and around 10k views per day. My monthly income breakdown is roughly this:
- Youtube ads $900
- Affiliate links $2500
- Brand deals $3000 (equates to one sponsored video per month)
- Patreon $350
Took me around 5 years of posting a video a week to get here. Now I finally make a living. Started working full time about a year ago. Before that 15-20h per week for years. I talked to some other youtubers, and I think my "path" to making a living from youtube, and my income breakdown, is pretty standard.
Key takeaway here is that youtube is a looong game. You will be unlikely to succeed unless you love making the videos so much, that you are happy to do it almost for free, consistently, for years. And the money is not in adsense, but in brand deals and affiliate links (which are often part of brand deals).
How do you deal with “talking to the void” at the beginning? I speak publicly fairly regular and I get a lot of energy from people in the crowd. I’ve done some YouTube and converted that to podcast format. I can’t seem to get motivated to do it as I can’t see/interact with people. People I know in my niche community will tell me they watched my video or listened to the podcast, I think “oh that’s nice I guess” and I go back home to stare at a camera and I can’t seem to connect making a video with audience interaction. Is this a thing? How do you think I could deal with it?
Thanks for this Micael, very helpful info and your channel is pretty cool too!
Regarding the weekly video, are you saying you’d spend about 15-20 hours per week on that one video to get to the status you were at last year?
I’ve heard that regular releases are important for a channel to be picked up properly by “the algorithm”. Is this your experience, and is that a critical to keep up the cadence of one video per week?
I make music videos (basically myself playing keyboards) and have never really gotten a good long-term traction with “the algorithm” yet. Sometimes I get a burst of impressions for a few days with corresponding views and subscribes, but these come and go. I release ever few weeks, though some of my videos are shorts, or just a few mins long for a single song.
I think a weekly release would be a real challenge, but maybe that’s what is needed to get to the next step? For me the real time sink is all the time arranging and practicing to get to a point I’m confident to even film myself playing.
I started a YouTube channel at the end of 2017 and published on YouTube on a regular basis for a bit over a year. My best year was about $1,500. I've made $4,600 since I started the channel.
At the channel's peak, I was trying to publish a DIY video where I would build something two or three times a month. I started the channel because I enjoy making stuff and thought I would be able to do more of it and maybe get paid to do it.
As I continued, I worked hard to polish my production style and I realized I was prioritizing the video production over doing what I loved. Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped.
I still post videos from time to time, but I try to do everything in a single take and not spent more than an hour editing it. Last year I finished a project I was pretty proud of and spent about 20 hours working on a video and it only got 100 views after the initial posting. For me, it takes a lot of self promotion to get the algorithm to recognize the video as a good video and have it be shown to more people. The self promotion part is something I really dislike doing.
YouTube is great for people that love the process of making videos because it's a win whether someone watches your video or not. Editing can be fun, but for me it gets tedious and I prefer doing a lot of other things.
Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped.
Check out Kenji Lopez-Alt [1]. He’s an award-winning chef who makes cooking videos by strapping a GoPro to his head and going to work in his home kitchen. He has basically none of the fancy production you see on cooking TV shows. Yet his videos are very popular because he’s a great chef and he tells you the why in addition to the what and how.
I’m pretty sure he’s made his setup just about as close to optimal as possible in terms of minimizing the time he spends on the video production part while still looking great. I think his one bit of fancy production is that he has a nice spot by the window to set a cooked dish for his thumbnail photograph. I think a bunch of his cooking videos also do double duty to supply photographs for his cookbooks, but that’s unnecessary for the vast majority of video creators.
I think DIY content is so hard to make. For me, it usually involves building stuff that I find interesting, but that is usually super niche and doesn’t appeal to a mainstream audience. Thus, less views which makes the whole time spent on making the video feel wasted compared to other projects I could be doing.
On the other hand, I could try to build projects that might be more mainstream for the better views, but then I’m spending time creating stuff I don’t want to make.
I wonder, what would come out, if all these editing things can also be automated and optimized by an AI. Leaving the video intact, but doing the cuts, translation, timestamps, colorizing, densing, audio gaining, lighting, so it all looks compared to things out there.
I really want to get in to video editing and posting on YouTube, but I just can’t come up with something to record as all I really know is programming which doesn’t make for great video content.
I checked his YouTube account to see the kind of content he was producing and honestly, not really impressed. None of these have educational value per se and look (at a thumbnail glance) like opinion vlogs.
For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful...
I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!
I don't think getting into producing educational content is a viable strategy if someone is starting now and their goal is to have a good living. Specially on youtube where you also have to give away some of your privacy to the internet.
As someone who's posted videos for about 10 years, and posted them seriously since 2017, the best period I ever had gave me about £1,500 for a couple of months worth of videos. Usually it's closer to £250 a month or something.
This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers.
So I can definitely back up this point from the article:
> Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge.
Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then.
Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills.
But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.
While most of this comment is true, there are lots of youtubers that can make it full-time without getting millions of subscribers. The key is that you can't rely on adsense, you need to get as many different ways of getting income as possible (patreon, sponsors, merch, etc).
From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.
The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.
I don't disagree, but there are some that have managed to crack the code, or maybe just right place, right time,
but eg kurzgesagt has a team of 60 to run their channel, and also they get a lot of outside funding for their channel. (they have 20M subscribers, but my question is how they got there, not why are they successful now that they are there)
The most successful content creators know how to brand themselves and make a significant amount off such. I think MrBeast would be the shining example.
I think MrBeast could be compared to a Jay-Z of this content-creator era. What I think is noble about MrBeast, and a handful of other creators, is their trying to give back.
It is the classic & interesting question, but from watching other creators it seems to miss a key variable: Reliability of monetization.
Someone may love making videos, has a reliable core audience and good views from western audience (and thus high pay rate). However if it costs them 1k to make a vid and the algo is hit/miss as to whether it gets demonetized or not then that becomes a show stopper issue. If you make 3 vids a month and are unlucky then you've got a -3k cashflow...so you're not eating that month.
I've seen some move to Twitch as a result since core audience will follow and subs are a bit more predictable (or rather not as all or nothing)
I've seen twitch let's players say they wish they prioritized youtube first because they claimed youtube revenue is larger and more reliable than twitch subs.
But gamers are able to publish a video nearly, a contrast from the kind of youtuber that spends 1k on a video like you mentioned.
Dealing with Youtube's "copyright" department isn't worth the trouble.
Also the same content on a Adsense monezited site yields factor 10 earnings vs Youtube.
Just one example of their copyright shenanigans:
A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music".
Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload.
Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public?
The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with.
So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever.
And 10 times the earnings of the video.
Hold the line music is absolutely copyrighted in a way that you can’t post a conversation containing that music to a channel that you are monetising, without compensating the creators of the music.
Copyright is designed for an industrial content creation context, and it does not have the flexibility it needs to avoid the absurd results it reaches as it's been extended outside of that context.
In this case, it's the same reason that $BLOCKBUSTER_FILM needs to license $HIT_POP_SONG as the montage or mood-setting music for part of their film. It's possible that there's a viable fair use defense in this case, but defending it would likely cost several orders of magnitude more than the lifetime revenue of the video, and to be frank, even the fair use defense ultimately seems weak to me.
Copyright laws are just there to screw smaller creators, on TV they have agreements with the monopoly license fee holders and they just put whatever they want without asking anybody.
> Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public?
Well, me for one. Honestly this sounds like a rookie mistake.
This is entirely anecdotal, but reading the comments here it feels like compensation for the bottom 50% of creators has gone down in the last 5-ish years
I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped
How often did you post a video, and how long were they, roughly? I'm asking because my YouTube channel has about 2,500 subscribers but I've yet to see a penny.
Here I see 116 writers complaining about the near-impossibility of making a living via youtube, a property of one of the biggest big dogs in the technological world. Consider the following:
1. Youtube is a monopoly.
2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation.
3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions.
4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S.
5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work.
If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.
What’s the alternative that you’re proposing? From what Google has published, YT barely makes money even at the current 55/45 cut. Consider what they’re doing —- hosting billions of hours of video, at global scale, 365 days a year, for free. Nobody wants this business because it’s a terrible business.
Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example.
Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns.
All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).
There's a section about YouTube in this video [1] by Samuri Guitarist called "How Much Money Guitarists Actually Make Might Surprise You". The YouTube money is covered in the "The Content Creator" section.
Overall the video lives up to its title. I was in fact surprised by how much guitarists actually make. The surprise worked both ways--some of the ways guitarists might make money paid much worse than I expected, and some paid much more.
I think this data is subject to change quickly. I think content creation has enjoyed it's "Dot-com Bubble" era. I think it's already starting to change, but will likely very rapidly change if a recession sets in soon, as many prominent economists are expecting.
Content creation payments are fueled by advertising dollars and it's easy to see that the advertising market has started to contract, as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding, driven in much part by loss of advertising revenues.
Yea I was interested in the article until seeing this. And then:
> and my content went viral several times
Clearly there is misunderstanding of the platform, its scale, and how to use it if you are seeing this as viral.
That said he seems to be off to a good start. It’s just a slog to get going unless you are going to go truly viral with shorts but that won’t happen with topics like software, etc
Actually that holds out for all platforms including Medium, but medium seem to actually pay better based on my exp:
1. Monthly hits at 35k
2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now!
The key seems to be advertising in sm in the right numbers. When I increase my sm posting to fully daily and multiples using video slide strategy I tend to get the right number of impressions to drive traffic to my medium articles. In my case I need to post 500-1000 postings a month and then I will see my earn per month multiply by 10 to 100.
Impressions will always be the highest but with ads you have it reversed in that
you get paid for a distraction which is a different set of metrics. This is good yt creators follow that up with some market product to sell that the yt acts as ad for. In my case my books act as the market piece that my medium articles and yt reels advertise for.
I fully expect to be at 500k in the next 6 months using a modification of GaryVee's content strategy and that is concurrently with my current code and book writing schedule. So yes it is possible even if you have a day job.
And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.
GaryVee's content strategy is to create pillar content then repurpose it.
How do you find the time to post on social media 15-30 times a day and create the extrapolated content? How do you create quality social media content from based on your main content?
I am working FT on a startup and social media has been a stumbling block for me because it takes a lot of time and I am having trouble balancing building the product and marketing/advertising it.
This guy only has 4k subscribers and averages only 1.2k views per video... that's not good.
I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week.
The devrel / dev content niche is hardly a niche anymore - thinking about a market is everything and as others have said building an audience you can market to with brand partners is where most of the $$ comes from these days.
If you are doing content creation part time you are going to have more income than the 2k. the 50% is likely the marginal rate though and not the effective rate.
if you're in Denmark it would be easy to get to the point where half would go to taxes, also some countries can have different rates on what is your primary income and what is income earned from secondary sources that are taxed higher. However in the case of having a business that is generating taxable revenue you are probably also buying things at times you can deduct, so it's probably not as dire as all that - although depending on how things are you might not want to deduct more than you actually earn from your secondary source of income.
In terms of monetization I think content creators are better served focusing on leveraging their reach to build up a community to support them instead of optimizing primarily for ad revenue. Platforms like YouTube have continuously shown that relying on automated ad systems is unreliable and puts your ability to monetize subject to the whims of the advertisers. Many established creators have wrongfully received demonetization strikes against their channels threatening their livelihood.
It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
I think it's really difficult to answer that because revenue per watch varies depending on the content, because different industries are willing to pay different amounts for advertising.
I imagine if you have a popular channel to with anything around money (banking, gambling, investing etc) or high value/margin goods like makeup, cars, etc. then you make significantly more than niche interest channels.
Matthias Wandel posted this a while ago, he didn't censor the number of views or earnings (apparently YouTube doesn't like people doing that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0
Is there a specific reason why you have your link structured that way? I'm surprised to see that many tags as subfolders to the content, not sure I've come across that structure before. Just curious!
I really like your channel, I'm a developer who wants to learn more of the *Ops world in general.
But for me these platforms like YouTube have a big problem, they force content creators to accept that everything in life have a trade off, which in this case is quality x quantity. YouTube values quantity in the end, while it's users values quality in a strange way. Because of this, niche channels like yours, gets less attention than it should be.
Suppose today you go on YouTube and see 10 recommended videos.
There are thousands of videos it could put in these slots, so they'll be ranked and only the very best (based on metrics and your interests) will make the cut.
Video #11 might have been great, but wouldn't get suggested to you merely because it had a few seconds lower average watch time. Because of this I'd expect a 10% better video (like %, watch time) would improve its views by some huge nonlinear factor (maybe double?).
I appreciate your support I'm in it for the long game. In this world the fastest way for growth is riding the waves. An alternative is grinding to build an audience that appreciate the value you offer. The latter takes years of consistent work.
Making non-commercial videos about coding some product is the equivalent of majoring in basket-weaving at Youtube University.
How much you make via advertising is directly proportional to audience size and geographic distribution. Niches with large audiences include video games, superhero movies/IP, makeup, gadget review videos. And even then, ad revenue usually needs to be supplemented by adding affilliate links and in-video sponsorship messages.
Interesting. We could do the same thread for apps on the App Store. I have the feeling that platform owners are painting a picture that is far too rosy ...
Yep. That's exactly why I published this, I see a lot of how "creator X made Y in Z time" and usually it's insane figures. I never saw any realistic figures to gauge what the median might actually look like. This post is it. This is what an average channel performance looks like.
I think I could enjoy uploading videos of me doing things I enjoy. I noodle around with things from oil painting to writing emulators. However, both are mostly me tinkering, researching, “hello world” ing and then maybe producing.
That’s mostly up to YouTube who is opaque and arbitrary about what they will allow you to post and make money from. They’ll drop the hammer when it suits them.
Ironic that the author has a principle of "no clickbait bullshit" but the article uses a clickbait title since it only talks about his personal experience.
Also you're shooting yourself in the foot by not doing any clickbait, considering that clicks = money. So if you want to make more money on YT, you need more clicks.
mwidell|2 years ago
Took me around 5 years of posting a video a week to get here. Now I finally make a living. Started working full time about a year ago. Before that 15-20h per week for years. I talked to some other youtubers, and I think my "path" to making a living from youtube, and my income breakdown, is pretty standard.
Key takeaway here is that youtube is a looong game. You will be unlikely to succeed unless you love making the videos so much, that you are happy to do it almost for free, consistently, for years. And the money is not in adsense, but in brand deals and affiliate links (which are often part of brand deals).
Here's my channel if anyone is curious: https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell
dmuso|2 years ago
petepete|2 years ago
Really wasn't expecting you to pop up on hn!
naavis|2 years ago
jeffwass|2 years ago
Regarding the weekly video, are you saying you’d spend about 15-20 hours per week on that one video to get to the status you were at last year?
I’ve heard that regular releases are important for a channel to be picked up properly by “the algorithm”. Is this your experience, and is that a critical to keep up the cadence of one video per week?
I make music videos (basically myself playing keyboards) and have never really gotten a good long-term traction with “the algorithm” yet. Sometimes I get a burst of impressions for a few days with corresponding views and subscribes, but these come and go. I release ever few weeks, though some of my videos are shorts, or just a few mins long for a single song.
I think a weekly release would be a real challenge, but maybe that’s what is needed to get to the next step? For me the real time sink is all the time arranging and practicing to get to a point I’m confident to even film myself playing.
themodelplumber|2 years ago
I'm curious, do you adjust or renegotiate your brand deals periodically based on anything like metrics, value of their new campaigns, etc.?
In general just curious about how those contacts work out for you. Not in the game but have worked around it a lot, away from YouTube.
batmaniam|2 years ago
oblio|2 years ago
hahamrfunnyguy|2 years ago
At the channel's peak, I was trying to publish a DIY video where I would build something two or three times a month. I started the channel because I enjoy making stuff and thought I would be able to do more of it and maybe get paid to do it.
As I continued, I worked hard to polish my production style and I realized I was prioritizing the video production over doing what I loved. Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped.
I still post videos from time to time, but I try to do everything in a single take and not spent more than an hour editing it. Last year I finished a project I was pretty proud of and spent about 20 hours working on a video and it only got 100 views after the initial posting. For me, it takes a lot of self promotion to get the algorithm to recognize the video as a good video and have it be shown to more people. The self promotion part is something I really dislike doing.
YouTube is great for people that love the process of making videos because it's a win whether someone watches your video or not. Editing can be fun, but for me it gets tedious and I prefer doing a lot of other things.
chongli|2 years ago
Check out Kenji Lopez-Alt [1]. He’s an award-winning chef who makes cooking videos by strapping a GoPro to his head and going to work in his home kitchen. He has basically none of the fancy production you see on cooking TV shows. Yet his videos are very popular because he’s a great chef and he tells you the why in addition to the what and how.
I’m pretty sure he’s made his setup just about as close to optimal as possible in terms of minimizing the time he spends on the video production part while still looking great. I think his one bit of fancy production is that he has a nice spot by the window to set a cooked dish for his thumbnail photograph. I think a bunch of his cooking videos also do double duty to supply photographs for his cookbooks, but that’s unnecessary for the vast majority of video creators.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt
_davebennett|2 years ago
On the other hand, I could try to build projects that might be more mainstream for the better views, but then I’m spending time creating stuff I don’t want to make.
sebazzz|2 years ago
Isn't that why a lot of YouTubers (or content creators, whatever the name is), hire a videographer to do that work for them?
okr|2 years ago
Gigachad|2 years ago
AnimalMuppet|2 years ago
evrimoztamur|2 years ago
For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful...
I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!
dopidopHN|2 years ago
I picked a video on the utility and challenge of test engineers because of all the thumbnails that the subject I had more familiarity with.
The content is good IMO. I can’t tell if great but it’s not garbage.
But you are right that it’s not educational per se. It seems akin to a podcast of Software lifecycle.
vasco|2 years ago
CM30|2 years ago
This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers.
So I can definitely back up this point from the article:
> Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge.
Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then.
Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills.
But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.
bleah1000|2 years ago
From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.
The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.
zamnos|2 years ago
AviationAtom|2 years ago
I think MrBeast could be compared to a Jay-Z of this content-creator era. What I think is noble about MrBeast, and a handful of other creators, is their trying to give back.
Havoc|2 years ago
Someone may love making videos, has a reliable core audience and good views from western audience (and thus high pay rate). However if it costs them 1k to make a vid and the algo is hit/miss as to whether it gets demonetized or not then that becomes a show stopper issue. If you make 3 vids a month and are unlucky then you've got a -3k cashflow...so you're not eating that month.
I've seen some move to Twitch as a result since core audience will follow and subs are a bit more predictable (or rather not as all or nothing)
tester457|2 years ago
But gamers are able to publish a video nearly, a contrast from the kind of youtuber that spends 1k on a video like you mentioned.
lakomen|2 years ago
Just one example of their copyright shenanigans:
A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music". Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload.
Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public? The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with.
So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever. And 10 times the earnings of the video.
saaaaaam|2 years ago
jcranmer|2 years ago
In this case, it's the same reason that $BLOCKBUSTER_FILM needs to license $HIT_POP_SONG as the montage or mood-setting music for part of their film. It's possible that there's a viable fair use defense in this case, but defending it would likely cost several orders of magnitude more than the lifetime revenue of the video, and to be frank, even the fair use defense ultimately seems weak to me.
realusername|2 years ago
macintux|2 years ago
Well, me for one. Honestly this sounds like a rookie mistake.
nicksiscoe|2 years ago
I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped
mwidell|2 years ago
bookofjoe|2 years ago
lucas_membrane|2 years ago
1. Youtube is a monopoly. 2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation. 3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions. 4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S. 5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work.
If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.
e63f67dd-065b|2 years ago
Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example.
Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns.
All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).
tzs|2 years ago
Overall the video lives up to its title. I was in fact surprised by how much guitarists actually make. The surprise worked both ways--some of the ways guitarists might make money paid much worse than I expected, and some paid much more.
[1] https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk
AviationAtom|2 years ago
Content creation payments are fueled by advertising dollars and it's easy to see that the advertising market has started to contract, as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding, driven in much part by loss of advertising revenues.
kachurovskiy|2 years ago
paulette449|2 years ago
From 173,000 views
mattlondon|2 years ago
gennarro|2 years ago
> and my content went viral several times
Clearly there is misunderstanding of the platform, its scale, and how to use it if you are seeing this as viral.
That said he seems to be off to a good start. It’s just a slog to get going unless you are going to go truly viral with shorts but that won’t happen with topics like software, etc
amelius|2 years ago
fredgrott|2 years ago
1. Monthly hits at 35k 2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now!
The key seems to be advertising in sm in the right numbers. When I increase my sm posting to fully daily and multiples using video slide strategy I tend to get the right number of impressions to drive traffic to my medium articles. In my case I need to post 500-1000 postings a month and then I will see my earn per month multiply by 10 to 100.
Impressions will always be the highest but with ads you have it reversed in that you get paid for a distraction which is a different set of metrics. This is good yt creators follow that up with some market product to sell that the yt acts as ad for. In my case my books act as the market piece that my medium articles and yt reels advertise for.
I fully expect to be at 500k in the next 6 months using a modification of GaryVee's content strategy and that is concurrently with my current code and book writing schedule. So yes it is possible even if you have a day job.
And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.
hahamrfunnyguy|2 years ago
How do you find the time to post on social media 15-30 times a day and create the extrapolated content? How do you create quality social media content from based on your main content?
I am working FT on a startup and social media has been a stumbling block for me because it takes a lot of time and I am having trouble balancing building the product and marketing/advertising it.
nibbleshifter|2 years ago
I'm interested in reading about this
elintknower|2 years ago
I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week.
The devrel / dev content niche is hardly a niche anymore - thinking about a market is everything and as others have said building an audience you can market to with brand partners is where most of the $$ comes from these days.
andai|2 years ago
jklein11|2 years ago
gennarro|2 years ago
bryanrasmussen|2 years ago
paulpauper|2 years ago
veidr|2 years ago
ryanthedev|2 years ago
dsir|2 years ago
It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
https://sociables.com/creators
IshKebab|2 years ago
I imagine if you have a popular channel to with anything around money (banking, gambling, investing etc) or high value/margin goods like makeup, cars, etc. then you make significantly more than niche interest channels.
Link-|2 years ago
tpoacher|2 years ago
For people who multiplatform, how does youtube compare to other platforms, and how does monetization differ on those platforms?
netsharc|2 years ago
His main channel is about wood-working: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel and he has another one where he tinkers with stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221
jamalone|2 years ago
kamel3d|2 years ago
IdontKnowRust|2 years ago
But for me these platforms like YouTube have a big problem, they force content creators to accept that everything in life have a trade off, which in this case is quality x quantity. YouTube values quantity in the end, while it's users values quality in a strange way. Because of this, niche channels like yours, gets less attention than it should be.
bemmu|2 years ago
There are thousands of videos it could put in these slots, so they'll be ranked and only the very best (based on metrics and your interests) will make the cut.
Video #11 might have been great, but wouldn't get suggested to you merely because it had a few seconds lower average watch time. Because of this I'd expect a 10% better video (like %, watch time) would improve its views by some huge nonlinear factor (maybe double?).
Link-|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
How much you make via advertising is directly proportional to audience size and geographic distribution. Niches with large audiences include video games, superhero movies/IP, makeup, gadget review videos. And even then, ad revenue usually needs to be supplemented by adding affilliate links and in-video sponsorship messages.
amelius|2 years ago
Link-|2 years ago
flandish|2 years ago
Would be neat if someone else enjoyed it.
Maybe I’ll try.
Link-|2 years ago
weregiraffe|2 years ago
stcroixx|2 years ago
ZachSaucier|2 years ago
TheLML|2 years ago
ImKevinArcher|2 years ago
ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago
AbsoluteCabbage|2 years ago
moremetadata|2 years ago
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