7 ms·

The True Costs of Being on YouTube

84 points by exolymph 2y ago

shabgzer 2y ago
While I appreciate her being so open about the financial side, one has to wonder: > If we roll with the average Adsense income, here’s the bottom line: $14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s a lot to sink into a channel that is barely moving book sales and not getting me a TV deal. Simply put, it’s completely unsustainable from a business perspective. Why carry on doing that for so long?
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Not only why did she continue losing $10k/month, but how? That's a lot of money to sink in
  - shabgzer 2y ago
    I suspect it's from the staff she hired
- whoitwas 2y ago
  Agreed. Why not make videos within budget instead?
- chriscjcj 2y ago
  Or why not start with a more modest production budget? It takes longer to shoot, but with the right equipment, you can shoot this stuff yourself. Watch one of Mend It Mark's videos (1). He does the whole thing all by himself and it looks absolutely fantastic. Then, if you get a couple million subscribers, hire some people and go big time. Because you can afford to. (1) https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos
  - reassess_blind 2y ago
    Agreed. She approached it backwards. A YouTube channel doesn’t have to be like a VC startup where you lose money until you hopefully make it back later. Just start small, DIY and then hire help later if it’s making money.
- levocardia 2y ago
  >Why carry on doing that for so long? Because her publisher told her to! "It's important for authors to have a social media presence!" "You can't have unprofessional videos, viewers won't like that!" ...and other falsehoods.
- stuart78 2y ago
  I don't know her or her content, but the theme that comes up over and over in that post is the elusive 'big deal' from a streamer or network. I get the impression that she thought this production approach would lend itself to that kind of transition. Her background seems more 'traditional media' than 'DIY native', and I would guess that framed her perception of what a production looked like. In contrast, somebody like Maangchi took the opposite approach. Her earliest videos are still up and you can see the truly homemade approach. Granted, she was in early and it is surely massively more competitive now.
- earnesti 2y ago
  It was mentioned later in the text. Sponsorship deals. Overall it was about break-evwn, for whatever reason she didn't include sponsors in the financials.
- jsnell 2y ago
  > Why carry on doing that for so long? They weren't actually losing money. If you read further, it turns out that the channel was profitable thanks to video sponsorships.
  - reassess_blind 2y ago
    Right, but a penny saved is a penny earned and this could’ve been profitable if she hadn’t set the production quality bar so high (food stylist?) from the jump.
samspenc 2y ago
> It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength. I thought the split was something like 55-45 for Youtube vs the creator. This sounds more like 66-33, is this typical for other creators / influencers as well?
- lostmarbles2d 2y ago
  It is 55-45. I suspect the author read some data incorrectly (the YouTube analytics page can be a bit confusing). The RPM she achieved is excellent (average in many niches is $1-$2), she could have been incredibly successful if she trimmed down her production cost.
  - dreghgh 2y ago
    She could never have been incredibly successful by cutting costs. She posted a video a week which cost $3,500 to make and brought in $1,000. If production had cost her nothing she would only have made $1k a week, for something that would have taken up half of her time. There are very successful people making high budget video and very successful people making shoestring video on YT. She didn't really have the following to do either. The success that she had on YouTube was driven by her following elsewhere, and she only continued losing money for so long because she was motivated by non-YouTube goals.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
reassess_blind 2y ago
Can’t help but think the expenses were overboard. $3500 spent per video, including a producer, DP, food stylist, and editor? Surely videos of very similar quality could be made with a fraction of that budget if the fat was trimmed and it was approached more bootstrap-y instead of a full production.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  I think this is an increasing trend in opinions (trim the fat, fire the do-nothings, it can't possibly cost that much to produce <insert product>, etc). It makes sense - the amount that something costs to make always sounds like a lot (especially media, music, film, etc). But, while I have no authority of experience at all, my personal lifetime heuristics tell me that, if you could define the number of dollars something should cost to produce, where spending more isn't worth the quality bump and spending less isn't worth the quality dip, that number would probably be closer to what people are actually spending than whatever number the "that sounds like too much" crowd would come up with. I mean, it's of course pretty subjective (you can make content at varying levels of quality with equal justifications for each). I just tend to lean toward the "things cost more than you think" direction. I could be wrong in this case. I don't know. $3500 seems like it's in that range to me (where it sounds like a lot, but might not be for the production level she's aiming for).
  - blitzar 2y ago
    5 videos shot at a time + editing. $17,500 for 2 days of shooting and 5x10 minute edits sounds like a lot to me. No idea what the breakdown would be - $5k per day shooting, $1,500 per edit? Best guess everyone is being paid $250/hr.
- al_borland 2y ago
  Making YouTube videos costs as much as someone wants it to cost. All anyone needs is an smartphone, and maybe a computer if they don't want editing to be annoying. Doug DeMuro is a great example of this. It's him, wearing whatever he was going to wear that day, looking however he looks, in whatever lighting the weather gives him, with a tripod for a main camera, and an iPhone for interior shots. He hasn't really scaled up production value as he's gotten popular, and I think people appreciate the authenticity. Even if she had ambitions for high production values, starting simple and scaling up when the channel can financially support it, seems to make much more sense. My guess is she was used to the production and budget of Bon Appétit, where she used to make videos, and was looking to fast track to a similar setup where she just had to care about the cooking.
gkanai 2y ago
The mistake was for the expenses to be so high. It's because she previously worked at corporate channels that had those positions so she hired for those roles without understanding that a new channel in a crowded segment (cooking) will take many years to build an audience. If she had done more of the work herself, it may have meant longer time between each video but more potential for the channel to be profitable. Profitable channels, and there's not that many of them, usually take many years to get to profitability- or some semblance of being able to live off YT. Without that patience and keeping costs down while income is low, is a recipe for an unprofitable channel.
- brudgers 2y ago
  My longer-term goal was to sell a cooking show, or get cast on an existing production. To me, that explains the psychology.
  - DoesntMatter22 2y ago
    Yeah. I don't think she understands how it works at all. People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      "People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)" Those are contradictory.
      - DoesntMatter22 2y ago
        Not at all. If you are going to sell your channel then typically you won't be on it anymore, so the people who were watching to see you specifically won't be there anymore.
        DidYaWipe 2y ago
jsnell 2y ago
> To advertise on my channel, that number [CPM] is about $29 per thousand views. > My RPM is around $10 > Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? You can't combine those two stats like this. CPM is the cost to the advertiser per ad view. RPM is the payout to the creator per video view. But it's not the case that every video will result in exactly one ad view. Sometimes the viewer is blocking ads. Sometimes there's no ad in the inventory for that specific view event.
- dreghgh 2y ago
  It's a perfectly reasonable rule of thumb though. Ad blockers typically leave the YouTube service thinking that an ad has been watched, otherwise they wouldn't get far. These bogus views are counted in the thousands of views, and the proportion that aren't watched is baked into the price.
sour-taste 2y ago
The creators I see on YouTube are EXTREMELY lean. Typically it's them and an editor. Some video game creators stream on twitch and record the YouTube videos live on stream. Pass the content to your editor and do light editing work and you have a video. You also collected ad revenue from the stream. Also shorts are pretty important promotional tools and if you're making the videos anyway cutting out a good 15 second chunk for a short is pretty doable. I get that the author wants to be a chef and that's fine but I don't think YouTube really rewards high production costs as much as pushing out frequent content.
- throw8494499 2y ago
  [flagged]
- motoxpro 2y ago
  I think this is the main thing. Because you have billions of people competing, the people that make it do EVERYTHING themselves (until you get to 2-3+ million subscribers). This is why pretty much everyone burns out. It is probably the single most competitive market in the world, so unless your cost structure is 0 AND you're incredibly talented, it doesn't really pencil out.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  Youtube rewards content that gets interactions more than anything else. Likes, subscribes, comments, shares, pauses, rewinds and replays all hold incredible sway over what gets promoted by the algorithm.
- dreghgh 2y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of YouTube creators who spend a LOT on videos. Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it. When he was barely known, he still did stunts which were staggering costly, given his then level of success. A different example is storytime animation. People telling cute, short stories about their lives used self produced animations to do so. This is literally hundreds of times more labor-intensive than vlogging to camera. They weren't paying money to others but they were using weeks instead of minutes of their own time to produce somewhat similar content. Several of these animators became huge on YouTube, to the point where they now hire artists and engineers. Lots of other creators have got success by doing things much more ambitious than the norm. The slo-mo guys did something like lots of others but much much more professionally. Jazza tested more art products than anyone else, for example one of every alcohol marker set in the world, and the scope made his content stand out. Of course if you aren't successful with an expensive project you will lose a lot of money but that's just a tautology. YouTube has literally millions of low-budget channels who also didn't come near to recouping their costs.
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
Wow. Go big or go home I guess. I couldn't imagine spending $14k a month on trying to put out a TV quality cooking show on YouTube.
wiether 2y ago
The only Shorts I watch on YouTube are actually cooking ones. I just want quick and clear instructions. We were used to thousands words long cooking blogs where the actual recipe was buried in personal anecdotes/psychological therapy. 10+ minutes long cooking videos for a simple recipe are even worse. Someone like @BakingHermann mastered the Shorts : all the instructions are here, few anecdotes, few tips, done. No multiple focus on their face or their appliance. Just the essential. Wunderbar! The result is they don't need to spend $3500 for each video.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  > No multiple focus on their face or their appliance. Just the essential. Wunderbar! The result is they don't need to spend $3500 for each video. How are you going to get paid if you don't focus on the actual products sponsoring you? The True Costs of Being on YouTube (to Sponsor Products)
throw8494499 2y ago
Maybe it is the content. It is missing some very basic hygiene! There is no hairnet, dogs in kitchen, touching food with face ("most epic BTS ever" clip), tasting sause then putting used spoon back to boiling sause...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Tomte 2y ago
  Wait till you see Jamie Oliver…
blitzar 2y ago
Everyone wants to be an influencer, nobody wants to do the work to become influential in the first place.
- motoxpro 2y ago
  Her numbers are top .001% of all creators. Plus she published a #7 new york times best seller.
ageitgey 2y ago
This is a very instructive story of how much the media landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 15 years due to the explosion in content, the lower costs of production, and the change in audience tastes. It used to be that people made homemade videos with the hope of graduating to 'Real' TV'—think Andy Samberg & friends getting picked up by SNL or the guys from Big Brother magazine filming themselves on VHS and getting picked up as Jackass after a bidding war. 15 years later, and now Real TV is a hollow shell. The viewership and ad money evaporated. Outside of sports and news, cable TV is fully dead, showing Pawn Stars on a 24/7 loop. Live news has never had lower production values with the guests Zooming in from their spare rooms and the hosts just showing screenshots of tweets as news. Check the viewership on your favorite cable TV channel. The numbers are comically low and far below even niche YouTubers: https://ustvdb.com/networks/ https://ustvdb.com/networks/ TV (and before it, music) used to be INCREDIBLY lucrative. TV shows used to get 10s of millions of viewers on a weekly basis. The ad money was incredible. Everyone had mansions and vacation mansions. Except for sports and news, that is all gone now. This creator is coming from Bon Appetite and going solo. A monthly budget of $14k to produce 4 cooking shows IS comically low compared to the old BA world. That's $3500 to produce, film, edit, and post a full 30min+ Food Network-style cooking show. $3500 is a shoestring budget for any kind of professional production. It's pocket money. The response here is that "my favorite youtuber straps a GoPro to their head or films with their iPhone - why should anyone spend more than that?". That take is economically correct. The absolute flood of content is making it unsustainable to produce anything more expensive than that unless you can appeal to a Mr. Beast-sized audience. But that goes for YouTube AND TV. In the old days, everyone who wanted cooking content would watch Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay. But now there are hundreds of people around the world making cooking content in all shapes and sizes and genres, but the total audience is still roughly the same size. The pie is getting sliced smaller and smaller and the type of content that people want has evolved. Unless you look at the numbers, it's hard to comprehend how much the media landscape has shifted in the past 15 years. All the subconscience assumptions people still hold are wrong. By viewership, Fox News is just a moderately large Youtube channel that happens to reach a demographic that actually votes and buys products from ads. Many, many Youtubers and podcasts reach a lot more people. Broadcast and cable TV still account for ~45% of total TV viewership, but the vast majority of people under the age of 35 now NEVER watch traditional TV and only use streaming services or social media. The audience for traditional TV is almost entirely 40+, and the entire business is obviously on borrowed time. The author of this post got out there and tried something to see if it would work, which is commendable. It didn't work. But the problem wasn't so much that they spent too much money to make Youtube videos. Spending $35 per episode instead of $3500 wouldn't have achieved their goals. The problem is that using a Youtube channel to "get a TV show" is chasing a goal that just doesn't exist in 2025. There is no more TV show to get. The people making Youtube videos and the people making Food Network shows are both surviving on shoestring budgets and ever-dropping income. It's just as bad over there as it is over here.
sieste 2y ago
In the article she keeps bringing up her separation, and how it negatively effected her ability to produce the channel. Given the full-disclosure-of-the-true-costs spirit of the article I would have been interested to know if there were any negative effects or costs in the other direction as well. this channel sounds like an expensive hobby with a small chance of financial success, that requires a very patient and supportive partner...

84 points by exolymph 2y ago

While I appreciate her being so open about the financial side, one has to wonder: > If we roll with the average Adsense income, here’s the bottom line: $14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s a lot to sink into a channel that is barely moving book sales and not getting me a TV deal. Simply put, it’s completely unsustainable from a business perspective. Why carry on doing that for so long?

readthenotes1 2y ago
Not only why did she continue losing $10k/month, but how? That's a lot of money to sink in
- shabgzer 2y ago
  I suspect it's from the staff she hired
whoitwas 2y ago
Agreed. Why not make videos within budget instead?
chriscjcj 2y ago
Or why not start with a more modest production budget? It takes longer to shoot, but with the right equipment, you can shoot this stuff yourself. Watch one of Mend It Mark's videos (1). He does the whole thing all by himself and it looks absolutely fantastic. Then, if you get a couple million subscribers, hire some people and go big time. Because you can afford to. (1) https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos
- reassess_blind 2y ago
  Agreed. She approached it backwards. A YouTube channel doesn’t have to be like a VC startup where you lose money until you hopefully make it back later. Just start small, DIY and then hire help later if it’s making money.
levocardia 2y ago
>Why carry on doing that for so long? Because her publisher told her to! "It's important for authors to have a social media presence!" "You can't have unprofessional videos, viewers won't like that!" ...and other falsehoods.
stuart78 2y ago
I don't know her or her content, but the theme that comes up over and over in that post is the elusive 'big deal' from a streamer or network. I get the impression that she thought this production approach would lend itself to that kind of transition. Her background seems more 'traditional media' than 'DIY native', and I would guess that framed her perception of what a production looked like. In contrast, somebody like Maangchi took the opposite approach. Her earliest videos are still up and you can see the truly homemade approach. Granted, she was in early and it is surely massively more competitive now.
earnesti 2y ago
It was mentioned later in the text. Sponsorship deals. Overall it was about break-evwn, for whatever reason she didn't include sponsors in the financials.
jsnell 2y ago
> Why carry on doing that for so long? They weren't actually losing money. If you read further, it turns out that the channel was profitable thanks to video sponsorships.
- reassess_blind 2y ago
  Right, but a penny saved is a penny earned and this could’ve been profitable if she hadn’t set the production quality bar so high (food stylist?) from the jump.

samspenc 2y ago

> It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength. I thought the split was something like 55-45 for Youtube vs the creator. This sounds more like 66-33, is this typical for other creators / influencers as well?

lostmarbles2d 2y ago
It is 55-45. I suspect the author read some data incorrectly (the YouTube analytics page can be a bit confusing). The RPM she achieved is excellent (average in many niches is $1-$2), she could have been incredibly successful if she trimmed down her production cost.
- dreghgh 2y ago
  She could never have been incredibly successful by cutting costs. She posted a video a week which cost $3,500 to make and brought in $1,000. If production had cost her nothing she would only have made $1k a week, for something that would have taken up half of her time. There are very successful people making high budget video and very successful people making shoestring video on YT. She didn't really have the following to do either. The success that she had on YouTube was driven by her following elsewhere, and she only continued losing money for so long because she was motivated by non-YouTube goals.

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

reassess_blind 2y ago

Can’t help but think the expenses were overboard. $3500 spent per video, including a producer, DP, food stylist, and editor? Surely videos of very similar quality could be made with a fraction of that budget if the fat was trimmed and it was approached more bootstrap-y instead of a full production.

happytoexplain 2y ago
I think this is an increasing trend in opinions (trim the fat, fire the do-nothings, it can't possibly cost that much to produce <insert product>, etc). It makes sense - the amount that something costs to make always sounds like a lot (especially media, music, film, etc). But, while I have no authority of experience at all, my personal lifetime heuristics tell me that, if you could define the number of dollars something should cost to produce, where spending more isn't worth the quality bump and spending less isn't worth the quality dip, that number would probably be closer to what people are actually spending than whatever number the "that sounds like too much" crowd would come up with. I mean, it's of course pretty subjective (you can make content at varying levels of quality with equal justifications for each). I just tend to lean toward the "things cost more than you think" direction. I could be wrong in this case. I don't know. $3500 seems like it's in that range to me (where it sounds like a lot, but might not be for the production level she's aiming for).
- blitzar 2y ago
  5 videos shot at a time + editing. $17,500 for 2 days of shooting and 5x10 minute edits sounds like a lot to me. No idea what the breakdown would be - $5k per day shooting, $1,500 per edit? Best guess everyone is being paid $250/hr.
al_borland 2y ago
Making YouTube videos costs as much as someone wants it to cost. All anyone needs is an smartphone, and maybe a computer if they don't want editing to be annoying. Doug DeMuro is a great example of this. It's him, wearing whatever he was going to wear that day, looking however he looks, in whatever lighting the weather gives him, with a tripod for a main camera, and an iPhone for interior shots. He hasn't really scaled up production value as he's gotten popular, and I think people appreciate the authenticity. Even if she had ambitions for high production values, starting simple and scaling up when the channel can financially support it, seems to make much more sense. My guess is she was used to the production and budget of Bon Appétit, where she used to make videos, and was looking to fast track to a similar setup where she just had to care about the cooking.

gkanai 2y ago

The mistake was for the expenses to be so high. It's because she previously worked at corporate channels that had those positions so she hired for those roles without understanding that a new channel in a crowded segment (cooking) will take many years to build an audience. If she had done more of the work herself, it may have meant longer time between each video but more potential for the channel to be profitable. Profitable channels, and there's not that many of them, usually take many years to get to profitability- or some semblance of being able to live off YT. Without that patience and keeping costs down while income is low, is a recipe for an unprofitable channel.

brudgers 2y ago
My longer-term goal was to sell a cooking show, or get cast on an existing production. To me, that explains the psychology.
- DoesntMatter22 2y ago
  Yeah. I don't think she understands how it works at all. People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    "People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)" Those are contradictory.
    - DoesntMatter22 2y ago
      Not at all. If you are going to sell your channel then typically you won't be on it anymore, so the people who were watching to see you specifically won't be there anymore.
      - DidYaWipe 2y ago

jsnell 2y ago

> To advertise on my channel, that number [CPM] is about $29 per thousand views. > My RPM is around $10 > Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? You can't combine those two stats like this. CPM is the cost to the advertiser per ad view. RPM is the payout to the creator per video view. But it's not the case that every video will result in exactly one ad view. Sometimes the viewer is blocking ads. Sometimes there's no ad in the inventory for that specific view event.

dreghgh 2y ago
It's a perfectly reasonable rule of thumb though. Ad blockers typically leave the YouTube service thinking that an ad has been watched, otherwise they wouldn't get far. These bogus views are counted in the thousands of views, and the proportion that aren't watched is baked into the price.

sour-taste 2y ago

The creators I see on YouTube are EXTREMELY lean. Typically it's them and an editor. Some video game creators stream on twitch and record the YouTube videos live on stream. Pass the content to your editor and do light editing work and you have a video. You also collected ad revenue from the stream. Also shorts are pretty important promotional tools and if you're making the videos anyway cutting out a good 15 second chunk for a short is pretty doable. I get that the author wants to be a chef and that's fine but I don't think YouTube really rewards high production costs as much as pushing out frequent content.

throw8494499 2y ago
[flagged]
motoxpro 2y ago
I think this is the main thing. Because you have billions of people competing, the people that make it do EVERYTHING themselves (until you get to 2-3+ million subscribers). This is why pretty much everyone burns out. It is probably the single most competitive market in the world, so unless your cost structure is 0 AND you're incredibly talented, it doesn't really pencil out.
spiderfarmer 2y ago
Youtube rewards content that gets interactions more than anything else. Likes, subscribes, comments, shares, pauses, rewinds and replays all hold incredible sway over what gets promoted by the algorithm.
dreghgh 2y ago
This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of YouTube creators who spend a LOT on videos. Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it. When he was barely known, he still did stunts which were staggering costly, given his then level of success. A different example is storytime animation. People telling cute, short stories about their lives used self produced animations to do so. This is literally hundreds of times more labor-intensive than vlogging to camera. They weren't paying money to others but they were using weeks instead of minutes of their own time to produce somewhat similar content. Several of these animators became huge on YouTube, to the point where they now hire artists and engineers. Lots of other creators have got success by doing things much more ambitious than the norm. The slo-mo guys did something like lots of others but much much more professionally. Jazza tested more art products than anyone else, for example one of every alcohol marker set in the world, and the scope made his content stand out. Of course if you aren't successful with an expensive project you will lose a lot of money but that's just a tautology. YouTube has literally millions of low-budget channels who also didn't come near to recouping their costs.

zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago

Wow. Go big or go home I guess. I couldn't imagine spending $14k a month on trying to put out a TV quality cooking show on YouTube.

wiether 2y ago

The only Shorts I watch on YouTube are actually cooking ones. I just want quick and clear instructions. We were used to thousands words long cooking blogs where the actual recipe was buried in personal anecdotes/psychological therapy. 10+ minutes long cooking videos for a simple recipe are even worse. Someone like @BakingHermann mastered the Shorts : all the instructions are here, few anecdotes, few tips, done. No multiple focus on their face or their appliance. Just the essential. Wunderbar! The result is they don't need to spend $3500 for each video.

intelVISA 2y ago
> No multiple focus on their face or their appliance. Just the essential. Wunderbar! The result is they don't need to spend $3500 for each video. How are you going to get paid if you don't focus on the actual products sponsoring you? The True Costs of Being on YouTube (to Sponsor Products)

throw8494499 2y ago

Maybe it is the content. It is missing some very basic hygiene! There is no hairnet, dogs in kitchen, touching food with face ("most epic BTS ever" clip), tasting sause then putting used spoon back to boiling sause...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Tomte 2y ago
Wait till you see Jamie Oliver…

blitzar 2y ago

Everyone wants to be an influencer, nobody wants to do the work to become influential in the first place.

motoxpro 2y ago
Her numbers are top .001% of all creators. Plus she published a #7 new york times best seller.

ageitgey 2y ago

This is a very instructive story of how much the media landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 15 years due to the explosion in content, the lower costs of production, and the change in audience tastes. It used to be that people made homemade videos with the hope of graduating to 'Real' TV'—think Andy Samberg & friends getting picked up by SNL or the guys from Big Brother magazine filming themselves on VHS and getting picked up as Jackass after a bidding war. 15 years later, and now Real TV is a hollow shell. The viewership and ad money evaporated. Outside of sports and news, cable TV is fully dead, showing Pawn Stars on a 24/7 loop. Live news has never had lower production values with the guests Zooming in from their spare rooms and the hosts just showing screenshots of tweets as news. Check the viewership on your favorite cable TV channel. The numbers are comically low and far below even niche YouTubers: https://ustvdb.com/networks/ https://ustvdb.com/networks/ TV (and before it, music) used to be INCREDIBLY lucrative. TV shows used to get 10s of millions of viewers on a weekly basis. The ad money was incredible. Everyone had mansions and vacation mansions. Except for sports and news, that is all gone now. This creator is coming from Bon Appetite and going solo. A monthly budget of $14k to produce 4 cooking shows IS comically low compared to the old BA world. That's $3500 to produce, film, edit, and post a full 30min+ Food Network-style cooking show. $3500 is a shoestring budget for any kind of professional production. It's pocket money. The response here is that "my favorite youtuber straps a GoPro to their head or films with their iPhone - why should anyone spend more than that?". That take is economically correct. The absolute flood of content is making it unsustainable to produce anything more expensive than that unless you can appeal to a Mr. Beast-sized audience. But that goes for YouTube AND TV. In the old days, everyone who wanted cooking content would watch Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay. But now there are hundreds of people around the world making cooking content in all shapes and sizes and genres, but the total audience is still roughly the same size. The pie is getting sliced smaller and smaller and the type of content that people want has evolved. Unless you look at the numbers, it's hard to comprehend how much the media landscape has shifted in the past 15 years. All the subconscience assumptions people still hold are wrong. By viewership, Fox News is just a moderately large Youtube channel that happens to reach a demographic that actually votes and buys products from ads. Many, many Youtubers and podcasts reach a lot more people. Broadcast and cable TV still account for ~45% of total TV viewership, but the vast majority of people under the age of 35 now NEVER watch traditional TV and only use streaming services or social media. The audience for traditional TV is almost entirely 40+, and the entire business is obviously on borrowed time. The author of this post got out there and tried something to see if it would work, which is commendable. It didn't work. But the problem wasn't so much that they spent too much money to make Youtube videos. Spending $35 per episode instead of $3500 wouldn't have achieved their goals. The problem is that using a Youtube channel to "get a TV show" is chasing a goal that just doesn't exist in 2025. There is no more TV show to get. The people making Youtube videos and the people making Food Network shows are both surviving on shoestring budgets and ever-dropping income. It's just as bad over there as it is over here.

sieste 2y ago

In the article she keeps bringing up her separation, and how it negatively effected her ability to produce the channel. Given the full-disclosure-of-the-true-costs spirit of the article I would have been interested to know if there were any negative effects or costs in the other direction as well. this channel sounds like an expensive hobby with a small chance of financial success, that requires a very patient and supportive partner...