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The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algo

The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc. The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest. IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of. [0] https://www.youtube.com/BrickExperimentChannel https://www.youtube.com/BrickExperimentChannel

system2 4y ago
Another example is probably the Primitive Technology channel. Last week I was reading his interview and he mentions $1M savings from his channel.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  It would also be interesting to see what his per hour is, after expenses. I'm pretty sure those videos take a LONG time to make.
  - squintychino 4y ago
    Probably close to 100%. He builds things from nature. And the only editing is cutting video. There's no audio mixing.
- pojzon 4y ago
  He would make a lot more if not ppl blantly copycat’ing him and his work. Primitive Life, Primitive Tools, Primitive Technology Ideas… Youtube should take those channels down or force them to change name due to how SOE works.
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    There’s an interesting video digging into the way these copycats are fake too [1] - if you watch them you can often see things like excavator tracks that haven’t been hidden well enough, and they found somebody involved who talked about how the buildings are built by teams of people on leased land and then just abandoned when the video is done… But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing! 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
  - gretch 4y ago
    You seem to be against this idea of 'copycating' but our society has put a lot of thought into what's Trademark-able and what's not. In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away. Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this. > SOE Do you mean "seo"?
chrisan 4y ago
> It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Yes, many prominent youtubers are pretty explicit about how they’re not happy with it, but tweaking thumbnails and titles gives an actual boost to their videos that doesn’t just translate to people clicking, but actual views and “engagement” throughout their content. For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.
solidr53 4y ago
One channel I really like that reminds me of BEC: https://www.youtube.com/mymechanics https://www.youtube.com/mymechanics (mymechanics)
Scoundreller 4y ago
I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves that problem of content discovery. Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok. Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero. Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on. Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue. I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs. Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.
- realusername 4y ago
  > Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me. What methods did you use to monetize your blog?
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    I made an edit: just Adsense. Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
  - anileated 4y ago
    > Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution. You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone. Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued. Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM. The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors. It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now? /thread hijack
duxup 4y ago
> IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form It’s always disappointing when a channel I enjoy goes into the “reaction video”, YouTube drama, clickbait type spiral :(
_tom_ 4y ago
> still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel. I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo? How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?
- jonp888 4y ago
  You can sell stuff directly to your fans: - branded merchandise - endorse or develop your own products - write a book - other platforms(TikTok, Instagram etc.) Or use your experience and brand value to do things your YouTube fans might not even notice: - public speaking - consulting/video production for brands - presenting work for commercial YouTube channels
  - fsflover 4y ago
    There is also PeerTube.
    - rjmunro 4y ago
      How do you monetise that?
      - fsflover 4y ago
        With in-video advertisements? Should work al least if you already have enough followers.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Patreon works, but only as a monetization platform; while it's a channel that can offer early access to e.g. new videos, in practice the vast majority of views will still be on youtube and unless it's something critical, patrons will wait until it's on youtube anyway (citation needed). Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar. Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches. I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.
jwr 4y ago
> The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse. It's an insane imbalance of power.
- naasking 4y ago
  Isn't that basically any job? I'd you're a software engineer and your company decides to outsource or otherwise contract out development work...
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Then you can presumably go to another company. There isn't another YouTube. More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
    - naasking 4y ago
      Rumble, Patreon, Twitch, Facebook, and more exist. I agree it won't last indefinitely, which is why investment advice is always to diversify.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        None of those are really substitutes for YouTube. But I agree that if someone has stumbled into a somewhat sustainable business that they decide they want to do full-time as long as they can, they should diversify both their content and their channels.
6510 4y ago
> still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production. The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying? I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious. The algo just didn't experiment with it.
majani 4y ago
I've taken a look at the videos. The editing, angles and camera quality tell me that this guy has done quite a bit of research on making good videos and fully intended to make money from them. If you were on YouTube pre-monetization, that's what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation
nerpderp82 4y ago
> kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.

system2 4y ago

Another example is probably the Primitive Technology channel. Last week I was reading his interview and he mentions $1M savings from his channel.

_tom_ 4y ago
It would also be interesting to see what his per hour is, after expenses. I'm pretty sure those videos take a LONG time to make.
- squintychino 4y ago
  Probably close to 100%. He builds things from nature. And the only editing is cutting video. There's no audio mixing.
pojzon 4y ago
He would make a lot more if not ppl blantly copycat’ing him and his work. Primitive Life, Primitive Tools, Primitive Technology Ideas… Youtube should take those channels down or force them to change name due to how SOE works.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  There’s an interesting video digging into the way these copycats are fake too [1] - if you watch them you can often see things like excavator tracks that haven’t been hidden well enough, and they found somebody involved who talked about how the buildings are built by teams of people on leased land and then just abandoned when the video is done… But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing! 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
- gretch 4y ago
  You seem to be against this idea of 'copycating' but our society has put a lot of thought into what's Trademark-able and what's not. In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away. Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this. > SOE Do you mean "seo"?

chrisan 4y ago

> It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.

makeitdouble 4y ago
Yes, many prominent youtubers are pretty explicit about how they’re not happy with it, but tweaking thumbnails and titles gives an actual boost to their videos that doesn’t just translate to people clicking, but actual views and “engagement” throughout their content. For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.

solidr53 4y ago

One channel I really like that reminds me of BEC: https://www.youtube.com/mymechanics https://www.youtube.com/mymechanics (mymechanics)

Scoundreller 4y ago

I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves that problem of content discovery. Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok. Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero. Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on. Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue. I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs. Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.

realusername 4y ago
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me. What methods did you use to monetize your blog?
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I made an edit: just Adsense. Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
- anileated 4y ago
  > Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution. You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone. Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued. Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM. The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors. It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now? /thread hijack

duxup 4y ago

> IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form It’s always disappointing when a channel I enjoy goes into the “reaction video”, YouTube drama, clickbait type spiral :(

_tom_ 4y ago

> still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel. I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo? How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?

jonp888 4y ago
You can sell stuff directly to your fans: - branded merchandise - endorse or develop your own products - write a book - other platforms(TikTok, Instagram etc.) Or use your experience and brand value to do things your YouTube fans might not even notice: - public speaking - consulting/video production for brands - presenting work for commercial YouTube channels
- fsflover 4y ago
  There is also PeerTube.
  - rjmunro 4y ago
    How do you monetise that?
    - fsflover 4y ago
      With in-video advertisements? Should work al least if you already have enough followers.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Patreon works, but only as a monetization platform; while it's a channel that can offer early access to e.g. new videos, in practice the vast majority of views will still be on youtube and unless it's something critical, patrons will wait until it's on youtube anyway (citation needed). Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar. Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches. I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.

jwr 4y ago

> The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse. It's an insane imbalance of power.

naasking 4y ago
Isn't that basically any job? I'd you're a software engineer and your company decides to outsource or otherwise contract out development work...
- ghaff 4y ago
  Then you can presumably go to another company. There isn't another YouTube. More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Rumble, Patreon, Twitch, Facebook, and more exist. I agree it won't last indefinitely, which is why investment advice is always to diversify.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      None of those are really substitutes for YouTube. But I agree that if someone has stumbled into a somewhat sustainable business that they decide they want to do full-time as long as they can, they should diversify both their content and their channels.

6510 4y ago

> still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production. The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying? I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious. The algo just didn't experiment with it.

majani 4y ago

I've taken a look at the videos. The editing, angles and camera quality tell me that this guy has done quite a bit of research on making good videos and fully intended to make money from them. If you were on YouTube pre-monetization, that's what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation

nerpderp82 4y ago

> kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.