I'm more of a Patreoner, making around $1000 a month through Patreon and my audio DSP plugins and around $20 a month from YouTube. I have a good sense of why th

I'm more of a Patreoner, making around $1000 a month through Patreon and my audio DSP plugins and around $20 a month from YouTube. I have a good sense of why these people are burning out. The only reason I'm able to do that well (still far below minumum wage, if minimum wage legitimately gave you 40 hours a week which I think generally it won't) is that I spent close to ten years entrepreneurially running the same business as a commercial proposition, all by myself. I made between twice and four times as much selling plugins directly to people, but it was COMPLETELY unpredictable and the Patreon is not nearly as unpredictable: provided they don't implode, it's a slow steady growth curve as more people discover what I do. And going commercial didn't protect me from things imploding: I went to Patreon because I'd been using Kagi as a payment processor, and they imploded. They still owe me two months' pay that I will never see. Patreon was one of those bold intuitive jumps where I went 'I'm happier giving my work away, let's gamble my whole life on this working, and if it fails, whatever, I didn't want to live anyway'. Turned out I was able to survive on it, and the relative predictability of the admittedly-lower income is good for my mental health. That was where keeping up a better-than-monthly grind of product releases got me, when I absolutely depended on having 'hit' products to sell to make up for the ones that fizzled, and never knew what was actually going to hit. It's this which is killing the YouTubers. It's not just that they don't know which videos will go viral, it's that they also don't know what the rules are or will be, and worse, they are subject to being algorithmically handicapped in a way they are blind to. The whole system is set up to goad them on to unrealistic behavior, and appears to silently punish them for failure to comply. All they can do is cling to cargo-cult-like obsessive lowest-common-denominator stuff and double down on what they think will help them, which is never actually confirmed by YouTube. This is a recipe for killing people, in action. Being an entrepreneur and small business owner is already sort of fraught with uncertainty: you can fall back on 'if I work hard and do what I do, I can get through to a certain number of people and build a following'. Being a 'Youtuber' is more than twice as bad, because it's that except that your platform can and does literally stop you getting through to your own people if they want to connect your people to some newer youtuber that they would rather stick in the recommendations. The very act of getting through at all is subject to restriction by the YouTube that you're working for, so it's no wonder people are going insane trying to please YouTube.