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From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video producti

by bane 9y ago

From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video production. I think the EEVblog guy posted a video when he went full-time youtube and he's looking at making somewhere between $30-40k a year and he has about half a million subscribers with most video getting somewhere between 40k-100k views and he puts out 1-2 videos per week. Considering the intense time commitment to producing content, this really doesn't seem like much. So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible. Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers, but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000 videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a street corner. On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of $100k. One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people complaining or shutting down channels.

corobo 9y ago
> about $500 per video [..] that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible. Don't forget to factor in that evergreen content will continuously bring in money, especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm. A video I made in 2014 is still the bulk of my YouTube income
- arve0 9y ago
  Making money of old videos might change, if video suggestion algorithm prefer new content. Some suggest that it already have changed: https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw
  - corobo 9y ago
    If you're relying on your videos getting views for your monthly pay you shouldn't be relying solely on some constantly changing algorithm. > especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm
    - icelancer 9y ago
      Right. You should also be blogging, engaging with others on forums, having a solid social media presence, etc.
      - corobo 9y ago
        Especially if the content is truly evergreen. Chances are your audience has grown a year or so after posting it - tweet/fb/etc it out again!
        _0ffh 9y ago
        Yeah, even with reduced discoverability evergreen content is very possible as long as you've got any exposure at all. I will often watch videos from the backlog of content creators I have newly discovered.
kalleboo 9y ago
> So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base. A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  Source on the Patreon claim? I watch a lot of frequent YouTube channels and my anecdote is that < 10% have Patreon.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo on Patreon.
    - sndean 9y ago
      On the more extreme end of the spectrum, CGPGrey is making ~$20000/video on Patreon [0] [0] https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey
      - Applejinx 9y ago
        Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining even as the total population grows. With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.
rocqua 9y ago
> One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. This is why a lot of people encourage youtubers to diversify away from ad-revenue. A youtuber that relies solely on ad-revenue is like a supplier with only one customer. They are at the complete mercy of the whims and competency of their single customer. This is a large part of the reasoning behind patreon. Then there are people like CGP grey that diversify to podcasts, have patreon, sell merch and get paid-for promotions.
- cctan 9y ago
  This is similar to how we moved away from depending wholly on newspapers, TV etc (old media monopolies) to Google, Youtube, Facebook (new media monopolies). Even though we can reach more audiences than ever before, 99% of it are being controlled by the Big Five.
gambiting 9y ago
>>Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible. On the other hand, YT is populated by people from different countries. $20/hour is not great in US or UK, but where I'm from that's about 10x the minimum wage and 3-4x the median wage. There's plenty of foreign creators on YT and for them that amount of money places them firmly in the top income bracket.
onetokeoverthe 9y ago
It's not just youtube. The ENTIRE INTERNET works like that, for ALL websites. It's been called the "Google Dance". One day you are on page one and monetizing (I've been there), next day, page 5 and nothing (been there too).

by bane 9y ago

corobo 9y ago

> about $500 per video [..] that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible. Don't forget to factor in that evergreen content will continuously bring in money, especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm. A video I made in 2014 is still the bulk of my YouTube income

arve0 9y ago
Making money of old videos might change, if video suggestion algorithm prefer new content. Some suggest that it already have changed: https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw
- corobo 9y ago
  If you're relying on your videos getting views for your monthly pay you shouldn't be relying solely on some constantly changing algorithm. > especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Right. You should also be blogging, engaging with others on forums, having a solid social media presence, etc.
    - corobo 9y ago
      Especially if the content is truly evergreen. Chances are your audience has grown a year or so after posting it - tweet/fb/etc it out again!
      - _0ffh 9y ago
        Yeah, even with reduced discoverability evergreen content is very possible as long as you've got any exposure at all. I will often watch videos from the backlog of content creators I have newly discovered.

kalleboo 9y ago

> So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base. A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.

yellow_postit 9y ago
Source on the Patreon claim? I watch a lot of frequent YouTube channels and my anecdote is that < 10% have Patreon.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo on Patreon.
  - sndean 9y ago
    On the more extreme end of the spectrum, CGPGrey is making ~$20000/video on Patreon [0] [0] https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey
    - Applejinx 9y ago
      Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining even as the total population grows. With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.

rocqua 9y ago

> One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. This is why a lot of people encourage youtubers to diversify away from ad-revenue. A youtuber that relies solely on ad-revenue is like a supplier with only one customer. They are at the complete mercy of the whims and competency of their single customer. This is a large part of the reasoning behind patreon. Then there are people like CGP grey that diversify to podcasts, have patreon, sell merch and get paid-for promotions.

cctan 9y ago
This is similar to how we moved away from depending wholly on newspapers, TV etc (old media monopolies) to Google, Youtube, Facebook (new media monopolies). Even though we can reach more audiences than ever before, 99% of it are being controlled by the Big Five.

gambiting 9y ago

>>Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible. On the other hand, YT is populated by people from different countries. $20/hour is not great in US or UK, but where I'm from that's about 10x the minimum wage and 3-4x the median wage. There's plenty of foreign creators on YT and for them that amount of money places them firmly in the top income bracket.

onetokeoverthe 9y ago

It's not just youtube. The ENTIRE INTERNET works like that, for ALL websites. It's been called the "Google Dance". One day you are on page one and monetizing (I've been there), next day, page 5 and nothing (been there too).