4 ms·

What about monetizing via Patreon? I watch a few channels that do this such as S/V Delos.

CM30 9y ago
Patreon is good when it works, but it's got even more of an uneven 'curve' than ad revenue. If you're not a massive celebrity with a huge following, your Patreon will at best pay the equivalent of a minimum wage job and more likely pay far less than that. For example, based on some channels I subscribe to: Boundary Break has 178,000 subscribers, and makes $844 a month on Patreon. A Start Show has 500,000 subscribers, making $429 a month on Patreon. Source Gaming makes $80 a month with 4000 subscribers and Top Hat Gaming Man $120 a month with about 7000. They all make good content, but they certainly wouldn't make enough to live on through Patreon alone if they were required to. And even that's more money than a lot of creators make from it. I know good YouTube creators whose Patreon accounts bring them either literally nothing or between $5 and $15 a month. In other words, Patreon basically never makes as much money for a creator as YouTube ads and monetisation does, and even the best cases (people with millions of fans) make at best a lower middle class income from it. It's just not viable for most YouTubers.
- prawn 9y ago
  How much time are those individuals putting into their channels? I know quality videos take a lot of effort, but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? It's not dangerous, no longer requires expensive equipment, rarely involves a commute. I think most people would rather play or talk about games than flip burgers.
  - CM30 9y ago
    From what I've seen, a lot of time. These people aren't just discussing anything about games or what not, they're actively researching stories no one else has covered online yet. For example, the Boundary Break channel is all about reverse engineering games to disable camera restrictions and take them outside the game world. That takes a lot of time to set up, especially as each game needs to be treated as its own thing due to how they're coded. Probably dozens of hours with the community on Discord figuring how the camera format works, then even more using it to explore the hell out of the game to find interesting stuff before even making the video. Or in the case of Slopes Game Room/Guru Larry/Top Hat Gaming Man, looking into game series and games either from decades past (which have very little documentation online) or aspects of games people didn't know about. It's only thanks to them that stuff like Drivergate (a scandal where a video game magazine publisher gave artificially inflated reviews to a broken game to get the reviews out early) came to the surface or got added to Wikipedia in the first place. A lot of time goes into these videos, it's just a lot more of it likely goes to research and journalism than editing.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    As described in the article, it takes a ton of time. Often editing the video can easily take twice as long as shooting it, which itself can take much longer than the final video length even for something as simple as a talk show. There's a lot of work that goes into any decent show and it climbs exponentially with quality.
    - corobo 9y ago
      I've found editing video is often anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1 ratio (edit:shooting) depending on how much effort goes into the video. This probably comes down with experience
  - icanhackit 9y ago
    > but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.
    - CM30 9y ago
      This too. Content creation is a volatile thing, and it's pretty damn difficult to tell whether your audience (or the internet in general) will really appreciate your work. You can try and migitate this uncertainly. By looking at trends, seeing what videos are popular, making content about whatever the new big thing is at the moment and by putting a lot of effort into your writing or production values. But at the end of the day, it's at least much luck as skill and time that determines your success. I've seen people who are terrible video creators get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers simply by being in the right place at the right time. For instance, the Irate Gamer got big not because he was a particularly talented individual, but because he was a family friendly Angry Video Game Nerd alternative in a time when the nerd was getting super popular and YouTube wanted to present others like him. Others got popular because a big news site posted about their work, or a creator with millions of fans like PewDiePie mentioned them on social media or their channel ended up in a related channels box on a large channel or because a bunch of people on Reddit came across them and thought their work was good. And it can easily go wrong for successful or skilled people too. Doug Walker thought Demo Reel was going to be the next big thing, but it failed miserably to the point he had to bring back the Nostalgia Critic to keep his business going. I know a pro game designer with decades of experience in the industry who made a series about his speciality on YouTube... and squeaks by with about 300 subscribers. There have been more amazing looking websites and apps than I can name which tanked hard while their worse looking, worse functioning competitors took off. Content creation (and perhaps creation in general) is a volatile, very hard to predict thing that has made fools out of experts and millionaires out of fools at an almost equal rate.
    - narrator 9y ago
      Labor is a unit of cost, but not necessarily of value.
- jopsen 9y ago
  It's hard but not impossible. My favorite channel thegreatwar seems to pull in 16k/month on patreon.com But, yes the web needs some form of micro payment system to replace ads.
  - narrator 9y ago
    There's Steemit. What's interesting is that the ads take care of themselves since you can buy as many upvotes as you want and all the other creators who get legit upvotes get paid out of that.
- narrator 9y ago
  I just checked and S/V Delos makes $10,000 a video. They do have something really unusual and unique going on though, sailing around the world and all. I would also imagine that they are watched by an older demographic probably with a lot of disposable income.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mullen 9y ago
    SV Delos is one of the first "Watch Us Sail Around the World" You Tube Channels. They got in earlier and they do go to some great places and have some great adventures. Most sailing channels are, "Look at us, we're in the Bahamas, drinking beer!" It also helps that Delos has a great crew and they do rotate in a group of good looking women who don't have problems with getting topless or naked and it not have it be sexual.
- shalmanese 9y ago
  OTOH, Binging with Babish is making $9000 a month with a million subscribers. In general, monetizing off nerds is tough. Once you move outside of nerddom, people tend to be more willing to fork out money for goods.

CM30 9y ago

Patreon is good when it works, but it's got even more of an uneven 'curve' than ad revenue. If you're not a massive celebrity with a huge following, your Patreon will at best pay the equivalent of a minimum wage job and more likely pay far less than that. For example, based on some channels I subscribe to: Boundary Break has 178,000 subscribers, and makes $844 a month on Patreon. A Start Show has 500,000 subscribers, making $429 a month on Patreon. Source Gaming makes $80 a month with 4000 subscribers and Top Hat Gaming Man $120 a month with about 7000. They all make good content, but they certainly wouldn't make enough to live on through Patreon alone if they were required to. And even that's more money than a lot of creators make from it. I know good YouTube creators whose Patreon accounts bring them either literally nothing or between $5 and $15 a month. In other words, Patreon basically never makes as much money for a creator as YouTube ads and monetisation does, and even the best cases (people with millions of fans) make at best a lower middle class income from it. It's just not viable for most YouTubers.

prawn 9y ago
How much time are those individuals putting into their channels? I know quality videos take a lot of effort, but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? It's not dangerous, no longer requires expensive equipment, rarely involves a commute. I think most people would rather play or talk about games than flip burgers.
- CM30 9y ago
  From what I've seen, a lot of time. These people aren't just discussing anything about games or what not, they're actively researching stories no one else has covered online yet. For example, the Boundary Break channel is all about reverse engineering games to disable camera restrictions and take them outside the game world. That takes a lot of time to set up, especially as each game needs to be treated as its own thing due to how they're coded. Probably dozens of hours with the community on Discord figuring how the camera format works, then even more using it to explore the hell out of the game to find interesting stuff before even making the video. Or in the case of Slopes Game Room/Guru Larry/Top Hat Gaming Man, looking into game series and games either from decades past (which have very little documentation online) or aspects of games people didn't know about. It's only thanks to them that stuff like Drivergate (a scandal where a video game magazine publisher gave artificially inflated reviews to a broken game to get the reviews out early) came to the surface or got added to Wikipedia in the first place. A lot of time goes into these videos, it's just a lot more of it likely goes to research and journalism than editing.
- manigandham 9y ago
  As described in the article, it takes a ton of time. Often editing the video can easily take twice as long as shooting it, which itself can take much longer than the final video length even for something as simple as a talk show. There's a lot of work that goes into any decent show and it climbs exponentially with quality.
  - corobo 9y ago
    I've found editing video is often anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1 ratio (edit:shooting) depending on how much effort goes into the video. This probably comes down with experience
- icanhackit 9y ago
  > but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.
  - CM30 9y ago
    This too. Content creation is a volatile thing, and it's pretty damn difficult to tell whether your audience (or the internet in general) will really appreciate your work. You can try and migitate this uncertainly. By looking at trends, seeing what videos are popular, making content about whatever the new big thing is at the moment and by putting a lot of effort into your writing or production values. But at the end of the day, it's at least much luck as skill and time that determines your success. I've seen people who are terrible video creators get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers simply by being in the right place at the right time. For instance, the Irate Gamer got big not because he was a particularly talented individual, but because he was a family friendly Angry Video Game Nerd alternative in a time when the nerd was getting super popular and YouTube wanted to present others like him. Others got popular because a big news site posted about their work, or a creator with millions of fans like PewDiePie mentioned them on social media or their channel ended up in a related channels box on a large channel or because a bunch of people on Reddit came across them and thought their work was good. And it can easily go wrong for successful or skilled people too. Doug Walker thought Demo Reel was going to be the next big thing, but it failed miserably to the point he had to bring back the Nostalgia Critic to keep his business going. I know a pro game designer with decades of experience in the industry who made a series about his speciality on YouTube... and squeaks by with about 300 subscribers. There have been more amazing looking websites and apps than I can name which tanked hard while their worse looking, worse functioning competitors took off. Content creation (and perhaps creation in general) is a volatile, very hard to predict thing that has made fools out of experts and millionaires out of fools at an almost equal rate.
  - narrator 9y ago
    Labor is a unit of cost, but not necessarily of value.
jopsen 9y ago
It's hard but not impossible. My favorite channel thegreatwar seems to pull in 16k/month on patreon.com But, yes the web needs some form of micro payment system to replace ads.
- narrator 9y ago
  There's Steemit. What's interesting is that the ads take care of themselves since you can buy as many upvotes as you want and all the other creators who get legit upvotes get paid out of that.
narrator 9y ago
I just checked and S/V Delos makes $10,000 a video. They do have something really unusual and unique going on though, sailing around the world and all. I would also imagine that they are watched by an older demographic probably with a lot of disposable income.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mullen 9y ago
  SV Delos is one of the first "Watch Us Sail Around the World" You Tube Channels. They got in earlier and they do go to some great places and have some great adventures. Most sailing channels are, "Look at us, we're in the Bahamas, drinking beer!" It also helps that Delos has a great crew and they do rotate in a group of good looking women who don't have problems with getting topless or naked and it not have it be sexual.
shalmanese 9y ago
OTOH, Binging with Babish is making $9000 a month with a million subscribers. In general, monetizing off nerds is tough. Once you move outside of nerddom, people tend to be more willing to fork out money for goods.