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‘Success’ on YouTube Still Means a Life of Poverty
- ataturk 9y agoSooner or later Youtube is going to be superseded by a competitor that isn't so grabby with the $$$.
- bkraz 9y agoI've had a YouTube channel for years, and talk with other creators on a regular basis. This article is basically correct, but glosses over the point of sponsorships, side deals, and most of all, Patreon. All YouTube creators that I know personally make more money via Patreon than ad revenue. Just a data point. In the old days, Patreon publicly displayed each Creator's pledge amount, and it could be compared to socialblade.com for estimated ad revenue.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI expect at some point that Alphabet will require that 30% of your Patreon pledges be sent to Google in exchange for them providing you a platform. My reasoning is that Google has always gone after all revenue that was facilitated by something they did or provided.
- prklmn 9y agoNo they haven’t. When someone clicks on a normal link (not an ad) they found through google search that ultimately facilitates business, google gets nothing.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoIf you are speaking strictly of cash from the person clicking you are correct. If you consider the advertisers however, you would be incorrect. When a person clicks on an "normal link", Google notes the search terms used, the link that was clicked, the time it took you to click that link (which goes to hesitation or not), the IP address from which you clicked that link (which tells where you live), any google cookies (which if you're "logged into chrome" or your web browser can be substantial) and if you land on a web page with Google Analytics and AdSense advertisements they will know if your trip through the search engine ended up paying one of their advertisers or not. Rather than "nothing" that is actually quite a bit of useful information that Google then resells in a variety of ways to their advertisers. But you are absolutely correct that the person clicking the link doesn't pay any money to google.
- soared 9y agoSo data from patreon is even more valuable - what content is a user willing to spend money on? John Doe pays $5/mo on Patreon for a youtube channel that shows how to remodel a home? He is obivously in-market for real estate, remodeling, home decor, tools, furniture, etc. That data could be worth more than $1 (a 20% cut) per month.
- gowld 9y agoGoogle gets all the same data from a YT watch.
- busterarm 9y agoWhat normal links are most people clicking on anymore? I guarantee you that 90% of people clicking stuff they googled are clicking on an ad (I spent $20 million on Google ads last year). This is even more true as Google provides more and more structured data on the results page without requiring a click.
- prklmn 9y agoThat's quite a bit of money - just out of curiosity, what do you sell if you don't mind me asking? I personally click normal links and haven't seen an ad on google in years, as I have been a long time user of ublock origin and a different content blocker on mobile since ios9. I think I'm in a decent-sized and growing population in that regard. And as for your guarantee, I'd bet that at least 10% of people who use google don't see ads at all because they use adblock of some form, so maybe 90% of the people who see the ads click those links, but not 90% of all searchers. Does google report the searches that went without an ad displayed?
- busterarm 9y agoLegal services.
- flukus 9y agoThat would be impossible to enforce well and be very manual, which google hates. I'd expect them to simply integrate patreon like functionality into youtube itself. They have most of the infrastructure for such a system in place already and could add things like patreon exclusive content.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI agree completely. Back when Adsense for Content was a thing they would ban your account if you had advertisers from other providers on your page (in addition to Google ads) as it was against the terms of service. Given Google is trying harder and harder to make money on something other than search advertising this is what I expect to happen. I expect the Youtubers will find that Google will stop them from pitching products in their video or putting affiliate links in their description. They may also start cracking down on ads that roll in the video that aren't Google placed. Then I expect them to make it a violation of their ToS to receive third party compensation for your videos, and instead to use some Google supplied version (which they will 'tax' at some rate (probably 30% given the Apple precedent)). There was already rumblings of this in September of last year : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiWNSlHG-9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiWNSlHG-9Y
- nitwit005 9y agoEveryone would just change the description of their Patreon page to be "Support me so I can bake delicious cupcakes" or something else unrelated to the videos.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoAt the end of the day though Google/Youtube has the ultimate hammer, "sorry you can't use our service any more." which, in a similar way, has already killed a bunch of AdSense supported web sites (Dr. Dobbs being perhaps the most memorable to me). This is the world we live in today, company A has some good or service that company B uses in a structural way (ie without it company B wouldn't exist). Company A decides they want/need more revenue they squeeze Company B for it, generally it eventually kills Company B. This scenario has played out again and again, and whether it was Company B using Company A's free API, or Company A's copyrighted material, or Company A's community web site, the squeeze happens and company B usually dies.
- nitwit005 9y agoThey'd need a mechanism to squeeze them though. That doesn't seem to exist in this case, at least not in a reliable way. The Dr Dobbs shutdown doesn't seem to be related to Google blocking them, just that their ad income was too low to keep it going.
- adrianN 9y agoAs someone who works for a Youtube competitor, I would welcome that change.
- GuiA 9y agoI think they’ll just roll out their own pledge/rewards/etc features at some point if there’s really that much money on the table and just eat Patreon’s lunch in one fell swoop.
- voltagex_ 9y agoThere's some Youtube-based chat donation thing that Google takes a cut of, but I would bet that Patreon will shoot themselves in both feet instead - they've already tried with the changes negatively impacting $1 pledges. Based on the amount of VC funding Patreon took, they'll need to make more money somehow, and it'll probably hurt creators.
- derblitzmann 9y agoFrom what I recall regarding ad revenue. A single person giving a single dollar is worth around a (few) thousand ad viewers. Due to the way CPM work.
- garethsprice 9y agoPresumably not for the creators of YouTube, though. Content creation on closed platforms = modern-day sharecropping.
- paulgb 9y ago> One in 3 British children age 6 to 17 told pollsters last year that they wanted to become a full-time YouTuber. That’s three times as many as those who wanted to become a doctor or a nurse. Is this supposed to be alarming? When I was that age my peers might have said NBA player or Hollywood actor but those are not any more realistic.
- gizmo385 9y agoThat's also a really big age range, maturity wise, to group together for such a question. Like 2/3rds of 6 year olds might have said that, but 1/6 17 year olds might have answered the question like that. Just doesn't really end up being a useful metric the way that the article presents it.
- mratzloff 9y agoSeriously. I wonder how many in this sprawling 6 to 17 age bracket said they wanted to be a dinosaur when they grew up.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- VLM 9y agoWith a side implication that 1 in 9 kids want to become a doctor or nurse. That's not economically survivable unless medical personnel also take a similar vow of poverty.
- xkjkls 9y agoThat assumes the 1/9 who want to be a doctor or nurse actually end up becoming one. I'd say the rates for both of those are probably pretty low.
- limeblack 9y agoMy frustration is NBA and hollywood actors bubbles are quickly shattered by recruiters. You can go so far to study film/tv in college by taking out loans(which is fine if that is your dream), but frankly the bubble isn't burst until you almost 23 for those that choose such a path.
- CM30 9y agoAnd this is also often the case even if your money comes through Patreon or similar services rather than YouTube ads themselves. On that site, about 1% of the audience rakes in the cash, then a large portion of the rest basically makes enough for beer money every now and then (if they're lucky). Still, it's not surprising. Unfortunately, almost any artistic (or sporting) field has the same issue as YouTube and co here, it's hugely profitable for the small percentage that break out to become superstars, and then quickly becomes very unprofitable for the millions with less luck/timing/talent/whatever. Can anything be done there? Eh, probably not. At the end of the day, the idea of running a YouTube channel as your full time job is just so attractive to so many people that competition is almost always going to be sky high, and with the formula for success being pretty random in general, I suspect it'll always be a field where supply heavily outstrips demand. Like going to Hollywood to become a film star, or starting up a band in college.
- Scoundreller 9y ago“Can anything be done there? Eh, probably not.” YouTube has recently made it worse. Unless your content is the subscribable kind, you now make zero revenue until you get 1000 subs.
- elihu 9y ago> Can anything be done there? Eh, probably not. Perhaps if over time viewers and those running YouTube channels migrate to other platforms that give a larger percentage of advertising share to the people creating the content, then the number of people who can support themselves by streaming will increase. Also, as technology improves and hosting costs go down, the proportion of advertising money that could go directly to the content creator can increase.
- briga 9y agoI think YouTube's recommendation algorithms are complicit in this, and I can imagine an alternative system preventing the divide between popular and unpopular content. Currently if you watch one video your recommendation feed gets flooded with videos from the same channel, which creates a positive feedback effect for big channels. But I guess if the incentive for being a successful YouTube celebrity wasn't so great there would be fewer people trying to do it.
- leggomylibro 9y ago>Do your children dream of YouTube stardom? Do them a favor: Crush that ambition now. Ah, Bloomberg - always full of good parenting advice.
- crpatino 9y agoThey may have phrased it in a hamfisted way, but I do not see anything wrong with the core of that advice. I guess it all depends on how old those "kids" are. If we're talking 10 year olds, it can be dismissed as a (mostly) harmless hobbie, and their ambitions will get crushed on their own on due time (or not). However, if we are talking about young people in their late teens, it would be utterly negligent for a parent to not ask all the hard questions about what business model are they pursuing. Sillicon Valley lottery is bad enough as it is, and computer programming is a socially-appreciated skillset and craft. Artsy types, on the other hand, are ripe to be taken by the first promotor/predator walking down the street.
- thrillgore 9y agoAre they wrong though? I'd say that the streamers that are popular now (Pewdiepie, Markiplier, Rooster Teeth) have a lot of momentum with their audience. Streaming celebrities are a trend at best, and at some point the talent pool will bottom out.
- sotojuan 9y agoWhen I was a kid I wanted to be a soccer player, world famous paleontologist, rockstar, etc. My parents didn't "crush" any of these dreams because they knew I'd grow up. If your 18 year old is choosing a "YouTube" career vs something else, sure I agree. But if your 6 year old says they want to be YouTube famous (vs rockstar 20 years ago, or NBA player now), why bother arguing with them?
- watwut 9y agoBecause you are parent and these discussions are literally how child is learning from you and how they are learning about your opinions. Kids don't change opinions automatically by function of aging, they change them as function of discussions, observations and reading. It may be you or little classmate Johny or even somebody else. But no, it is not pointless, because that talking about world is child raising.
- seibelj 9y agoMost people wouldn't crack the poverty line with their earnings from painting, acting, writing, music, sculpting, etc. YouTube is just another type of art. Like any artistic endeavor, it is extremely helpful to be independently wealthy or have a patron supporting you (parents / spouse / rich monarch). For the rest of us, you do your craft when you can around your primary job, and one day retire so you can do it full time.
- duxup 9y agohttps://www.theonion.com/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do-it-1819584843 https://www.theonion.com/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionat...
- el_cid 9y agoouch
- psyc 9y agoYes, god help you if you want to make a living from entertainment or culture. Simply isn't where the big money flows are in this world. I went the games route, like an idiot, and now I get to read through narrowed eyelids every day about how selling TODO lists to businesses is like taking candy from a baby. Games: More than 0.99 is a psychological barrier B2B: Why not quadruple your prices?
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago> now I get to read through narrowed eyelids What is this? Could you tell me more? I spend inordinate amounts of time in front of the computer and never heard of this, and a quick search doesn't reveal anything obvious.
- corrigible 9y agoI read "through narrowed eyelids" as "with suspicion/mild disbelief"
- 9y ago
- dr_ick 9y agoTwitchTV is the new shiny. People are quitting their jobs to stream full time, and making a living off of it. This guy had a good teaching job, and now streams full time instead. His peak seems to be around 4k-5k viewers. https://www.twitch.tv/chocotaco https://www.twitch.tv/chocotaco https://kotaku.com/guy-who-just-quit-his-job-to-stream-battlegrounds-expla-1820309727 https://kotaku.com/guy-who-just-quit-his-job-to-stream-battl...
- maxyme 9y agoI think the concept of (optional) subscriptions funding Twitch streamers is an excellent replacement for ads however if you are considering making a living off Twitch you should be aware of the politics. There is a culture of banning streamers (sometimes indefinitely, but rarely upon first ban) for violations in their extremely vauge TOS. Usually no reason is given and there are major inconsistencies between some streamers' moderation and others.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- smogcutter 9y agoThe catch is that if a story like this is interesting enough to be printed, it's usually also too unusual to actually be representative. No one's going to read "guy quits his job to go to law school".
- busterarm 9y agoRelying on Twitch streaming for income is a hard life. Anyone who doesn't realize this is delusional. You're talking 10-12 hours _every day_ entertaining people. Successful streamers work 6-7 day weeks at those hours and if they're lucky take 2 weeks off a year -- one of those spent at TwitchCon. Most of them are playing the same game for long stretches of time (months to years). That's really hard! And if you regularly have ~3k viewers, you'll probably earn $2k-4k a month between ad money and donations. Except for outliers, obviously. The overwhelming majority of streamers are not successful, by the way, or are only successful for a year or two. It's absolutely a labor of love. You do it because you can't stand doing the alternative.
- subpixel 9y agoI subscribe to a woman in India who posts awesome Indian food recipes. She has 2+ million subscribers, and I can tell from the upgrades to her kitchen and the traveling she's doing that Youtube has made a significant improvement to her income. Edit: what the hell, I'll show her some love. This recipe is killer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzT1AQcGqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzT1AQcGqk
- dangerboysteve 9y agoI've read that YT changes the $ on the views based on country. USA being the highest amount paid for viewers from that country.
- Scoundreller 9y agoIt’s all about supply and demand for ads.
- bootloop 9y agoWho ever wants to play an ad bits for it against others who want to play ads for the same target group. Youtube takes its share and pays out the share of the content creator based on this price. Higher $ for content creators in the US just means that who ever wants to run ads in the US has to pay more money in the first place.
- jdietrich 9y agoYouTube don't directly determine how much ad revenue a creator receives. Advertisers bid to place their ads next to content based on keywords and viewer demographics; the creators receive a 55% share of whatever the advertiser paid. American viewers are generally the most lucrative, in part because of the share of YouTube Red revenues that creators are eligible to receive. A great deal depends on other contextual and demographic factors. YouTube do indirectly influence the revenue that creators receive by tagging certain videos as "not suitable for most advertisers". This is a substantial bone of contention in the YouTube creator community.
- SEJeff 9y ago
- imhelpingu 9y agoBasically "only 3% of youtubers can make a living doing it," so in other words, if I randomly select 33 youtubers, and put them in a room together, I'll be able to find one who makes a living from it. Furthermore, if I randomly select 100, one of them will be a millionaire? I really hope this is out of people who already making it their dayjob or something, otherwise this article is pretty stupid.
- sien 9y agoIt would be interesting to compare to what percentage of 'actors' would make that? Or the percentage of musicians, writers or game programmers.
- jadedhacker 9y agoOnly 3% of self-selecting YouTuber can. I'm guessing that these are people with an interest in video production and develop a modicum of skill. The numbers would be far worse if you randomly select people.
- dredmorbius 9y agoMass-publishing markets are very strongly given to power-law distributions. We hear that "anybody can be famous" (or successful, or ...), but everybody cannot be famous. Attention and publicity are the ultimate zero-sum games: no matter how large a given talent pool, there will only ever be ten top-ten spots, 100 top-100 spots. All you're doing by enlarging the pool is amplifying the competition for those spots. There's another side to the equation, though, which is the scope of the audience. Prior to modern technological methods, and I'm including here everything from relatively modern printing (say, 19th century onward), as well as phonograph, cinema, radio, television, and sound amplification, the reach of any given work was small. A book might have a printing of several thousand copies (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, ~5,000 initial print run, and the cost at ￡5 was roughly a quarter of a working man's annual wage). A theatre might seat (or stand) a few thousand (the New Globe Theatre: 3,000), and the largest cities had populations of about a quarter million (London in 1600, more or less). Transportation was slow and expensive (Smith again: 2 weeks, by stage coach or horse from Edinborough to London -- that's how he travelled to university himself). https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of... As a consequence, entertainment was strongly local. There might be small touring acts, local musicians, and in rare cases, artists with a noble or royal patron (think Shakespeare himself, after a fashion, or Handel, Bach, or a church appointment (Bach, Telemann, and others). Art as a freestanding business was more-or-less a 19th century creation -- look especially at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Impressionists, there are several excellent documentaries and biographies of each. Technology increased the reach (and income) of top performing creators and stars, but decreased the viability of those further down the rankings. Where it used to be possible to eke out a livelihood as a local or touring performer, this became far more difficult. (There's something of a reverse shift in that the overall entertainment budget has increased sufficiently that the field has expanded, but the overall balance holds true.) By way of quantification, I've been looking at the question of how many actors there are, and how many of those are considered "A-list". For the first: How Many Actors are in L.A.? https://hollywoodsapien.com/2012/07/05/how-many-actors-are-in-l-a/ https://hollywoodsapien.com/2012/07/05/how-many-actors-are-i... Based on SAG and AFTRA membership and some adjustments, anthropologist Scott Frank comes up with the figure 108,640, of whom 21,728 are working actors. Los Angeles itself provides about 80% of all acting work, and USBLS data claim 1.77% of Angelenos work in entertainment, more than any other U.S. city. How many of those are considered "A-List" actors? The definitions are ... fluid ... but generally about ten, no more than twenty. The Ulmer scale is a 100-point model estimating a star's value to a film. The 2009 top ten list, in order, were: Will Smith, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Will Ferrel, Reese Witherspoon, Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Russell Crowe. https://www.webcitation.org/5mnRWTArh?url=http://www.ulmerscale.com/Mainarticle.html https://www.webcitation.org/5mnRWTArh?url=http://www.ulmersc... Consider that given power law relationships, the earnings of a given star are going to be 1/n of the first-ranked, income falls off tremendously quickly. VSauce has a surprisingly good video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE Upshot: We're not all going to fame our way to wealth and riches. Or even subsistence survival. It's not a creators world.
- H4CK3RM4N 9y agoIt looks like this is disregarding sponsorships tho. My mental model is ~$300 per video for a reasonable sized channel, which(with weekly videos) could well double their income estimates.
- voltagex_ 9y agoListen to some of the larger tech creators talking about taking sponsorships - you risk driving away your audience if they're too "in your face" or you pick the wrong brands.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SQL2219 9y agoMy Son's youtube channel got 606,595 views in past 28 days. Estimated revenue=$221.49
- Vadoff 9y agoAnd here's the top 500: https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/trending/top-500-channels-30-days/most-viewed https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/trending/top-500-channel... Even semi popular channels I watch have 15M views per month.
- Eridrus 9y agoI think it's worth noting that revenue grows superlinearly in views. As channels get more popular they get vetted manually, which puts them in a more lucrative ad share. Also opens up sponsorship deals, etc
- AstralStorm 9y agoAlso depends on the specifics of the channel. Specialist ones can get endorsement deals earlier and more reliably even at comparatively smaller (but not small) audiences.
- city41 9y agoI don't doubt making a full time living on YouTube is very difficult. But a few channels I subscribe to at least claim to do it, and are nowhere near the top YouTubers. They all supplement their ad revenue with Patreon. But I would also think doing Patreon is just a standard prerequisite to full time YouTubing now. I've always wondered if these channels are truly making a living off of just Patreon+YouTube, or if there is more they aren't sharing.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoWhen I was 17, I thought I was really beautiful and I wanted to be a model. By which I mean I imagined it would be easy money and I never seriously pursued it. I imagine many people who want to be a YouTuber are kind of like that. It sounds like easy money and they aren't ever going to work that hard at learning their craft, etc. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that a lot of them aren't doing particularly well. On the other hand, I'm a writer and it is the same thing: A few big name stars raking in the dough and a whole lot of losers struggling to get by. And I get told all the time to go get a real job if I want a middle class income. I don't know where people think these real jobs are. We are seeing the rise of the gig economy. There are fewer full time jobs with benefits and more gigs. I am medically handicapped. Doing gig work has overall worked better for me than a corporate job. I hit $50k in debt while working a corporate job. I paid a lot of that off while homeless and doing freelance writing and struggling to eat. I don't know what the answer is. Historically, middle class jobs did not just magically happen. Society designed them that way. Most were designed under the assumption that it was a man supporting a family whose wife would do the cooking, etc, so he could focus on his job. Under that model, you didn't need everyone to make a middle class income. You needed the primary breadwinner to have a good job with benefits that supported his whole family. Society was designed around a nuclear family model and jobs were designed with that in mind. The world has changed and the nuclear family is not the default expectation. Plus regular jobs are getting scarce. So I think we need to take it seriously that there are systemic problems here. We are allowing a system to develop with a few big winners, a lot of losers and little or no middle class. At the same time, we need to accept that not all content is equally worthwhile. However, if we want some form of UBI, I would be much more comfortable with the idea that if you have some kind of YouTube channel or similar, you should have some kind of basic income from it than with "free money for everyone."
- contingencies 9y agoI think we need to take it seriously that there are systemic problems here. We are allowing a system to develop with a few big winners, a lot of losers and little or no middle class. I believe Marxists see this as the inevitable endgame of capitalism... by rewarding hoarded capital, there is no possible conclusion except the centralization of wealth to enormous levels of disparity. Even for those of us who travel across boundaries, in some parts of the world I personally feel ridiculously wealthy (which objectively I am) whereas I can't afford to raise my kids in the manner and environment in which I myself was raised (which was not considered particularly wealthy at the time). Politics seems to have failed us on most fronts, and the big problems are really international and therefore beyond the scope and reign of political animals, even naively assuming they cannot be bought out or sidestepped. Perhaps then, fundamentally as individuals we can only analyze the net effects of our actions and try to contribute to positive change instead of perpetuating a self-serving culture. More snarkily, "Oh, you can't make a good living producing content on the internet with $1000s of dollars of e-toys?" ... this is perhaps something of a first world problem, where others are still down the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago> Benjamin spends an hour a day editing his videos and holds out hope his postings could become a career, even after he heard the odds. “I think if I keep uploading, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to make it a career,” he said. He recently hit 100 subscribers, up from 71 at the start of the year. So can he not do 3rd grade Math, or is he literally insane?
- CyberDildonics 9y agoI'm not sure something that has only been around for 10 years can mean a 'Life' of poverty.
- kazinator 9y ago"Life" doesn't refer to just the span from birth to death; it also refers to "day to day existence".
- petercooper 9y ago“I’ve seen as low as 35¢ per 1,000 views and work with some YouTubers who can earn $5 per 1,000,” Comparing that to the numbers in the DailyCandy YouTube advertising post from yesterday, it seems video creators aren't getting a lot, advertisers aren't getting a bargain, and so someone is making an absolute mint on the difference..
- detaro 9y agoNote though that the CPM billed to the advertiser is for when their ad isn't skipped, whereas the views for the YouTuber include those that skipped (or blocked) the ad, so the numbers do not compare directly. I'd be curious how large the skip-rates are (Candy Japan mentions 70%, but I don't know how far that generalizes)
- BadassFractal 9y agoLike other posters mentioned, it's crazy hard to make a good living doing what you want artistically. E.g. take photography: the only way to make a living is to shoot weddings, professional headshots, interior/architecture, or products for brands, which isn't exactly thrilling (how many times can you shoot Nike shoes or Ikea chairs before the excitement wears off?). If you want to shoot the stuff that you want to shoot, maybe edgy dark fashion, or quirky abstract art etc. you will be piss poor, especially considering most invest way too much in gear rather than actually doing the work. It's not unlike say being in a metal band. 99% of them have to have real jobs, even when they're "famous". It's just too much of a niche and making money with it is not obvious. At the same time, that seems only fair. Should you be paid more for doing something you enjoy doing? E.g. playing music/videogames/making art all day vs someone stacking boxes at a warehouse all day or an accountant looking at taxes etc. Most people have mind-numbingly boring jobs that pay the bills because nobody wants to do them. Making a living with the arts without "selling out" is super hard, probably not worth it to most.
- shkkmo 9y agoThis article, its headline and its use of statistics is stupid and doesn't deserve a place on HN. It's a bunch of poorly analyzed and disjointed statistics. They mention the hourly rate for actors, but don't talk about average yearly earning per actor for acting. I doubt most actors work full time as an actor and most aspiring actors certainly have other jobs. They talk about the advertising revenue per year for the top 3% of channels, but don't consider the amount of time put in by the creators per channel. What percentage of that top 3% are full time compared to the bottom 97%? The only actually interesting statistic in the whole article "In 2006 the top 3 percent accounted for 63 percent of all views. Ten years later, the top YouTubers received 9 in every 10 views, he found." completely fails to account for the factors that might be driving this change besides "it's getting harder to make it on youtube". How many of that bottom 97% are active channels still producing content? Does the top 3% of channels actually produce 90% of the videos on youtube?
- ebbv 9y agoThe basic proposition of the article is true (not many people make much money off AdSense from YouTube) but it’s really poorly written and full of misinformation and omissions. One horribly incorrect point: > Buying the same equipment used by Casey Neistat, a popular YouTuber, would cost $3,780. Not even close. That would but you one decent professional 4K camera. Not remotely “the same equipment he uses”. He and other top creators use tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. But you don’t need all that to get started, you can get started with your phone as many do. The big thing this article barely touches on is this; there’s more and more creators who are successful by basically treating AdSense revenue like a Christmas bonus. They rely on Patreon, merchandise (shirts, etc) and sponsorships. You can find sponsored videos on channels with less than 100k subscribers. The real story to me is if things keep going this way, what’s the incentive to even enable AdSense on your channel? Just stay ad free and earn money elsewhere like James Townsend & Sons channel.
- partycoder 9y agoSome forms of revenue from videos in addition to the ad revenue are Patreon as well as product placement / referrals. Now, consider that even old videos continue to make revenue over time. In my case, if I was going to use YouTube as a source of income I would see it as passive income to supplement an existing income rather than a full time occupation.
- vatotemking 9y agoFrom what I know, even without Patreon, YouTubers earn more money as "influencers". Companies pay them to promote their products (brand ambassadors) and influence viewers to buy it.
- yhavr 9y agoMove to a cheap country and problem is solved.
- VBprogrammer 9y agoI think what this article misses is the fact that for some people it is both fun to produce the videos (like a hobby) and that the income is nearly 100% passive. At least for my dad who has his own YouTube channel both of these things hold true. He has one or two videos which have gone viral (6 million views for the biggest one). His best ad revenue income was around £700 in a month. Its not give up the day job money but it is definitely better than nothing. I'm sure many of us dream of having a passive income SaaS business generating that kind of money.
- monsterwimp 9y agoI can tell you that these figures are extremely low and not accurate. Channels that are nowhere near the top 3% making 50k/m easily.