I hardly trust any &quot;make money&quot; website statistics.

&gt; Every auto driver and worker in india ha YouTube on through their entire work shift.Meanwhile in Canada, our wireless telecoms have convinced the government that this level of bandwidth consumption should cost hundreds a month otherwise the cellular network would crash.

The CPM figures are in the blog post:- USA: $6.98- India: $0.62

Absolutely. Every auto driver and worker in india ha YouTube on through their entire work shift. I would not be surprised if their ad impression is valued at a thousand times less than an average American moms ad view..

Something interesting I found out during my ad-tech time was that one of the most expensive ads to buy is car companies targeting people who are about to have a lease end and need to purchase a new car.

What he didn&#x27;t add is that YouTube will typically seed your content in the country you upload in. The privilege of birthplace continues to be a huge influence in our lives, even with algorithms on the internet running the show

Super interesting - one thing to keep in mind is advertising CPM rate can be wildly different by audience.A quick google shows a range of $0.03&#x2F;cpm to $13.00&#x2F;cpm depending on category.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stashvine.com&#x2F;most-profitable-youtube-niches&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stashvine.com&#x2F;most-profitable-youtube-niches&#x2F;</a>

I think Linus recently mentioned (probably on LAN show) that they are positioned soon to make more money from merchandise than what their YT channel generates - because of their huge drops of the new backpack and screwdriver.

I don&#x27;t think this is true in general. I think it&#x27;s a lot closer to 50&#x2F;50 for most. Obviously a lot of variability between channels, but YouTube ad revenue is not trivial.

LTT uploaded at least a couple of videos explaining how they make money:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-zt57TWkTF4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-zt57TWkTF4</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Rh5hL47z2us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Rh5hL47z2us</a>

It&#x27;s not. He&#x27;s made videos of their revenue breakdown before and from what I remember AdSense still accounts for ~30% of revenue, which is significant.E: seems like I was a bit off. AdSense accounted for 18% of their 2021 revenue. Still a significant portion though. 30% might be closer to their 2020 AdSense revenue given the growth of their merch over the last few years.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linustech&#x2F;status&#x2F;1486918784401088515" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linustech&#x2F;status&#x2F;1486918784401088515</a>

I own a small career related channel (135k subs) and adsense account for roughly 5-7% of our revenue. The majority of revenue coming from sponsorships. It depends highly on what niche you are in, as some other channels have much higher % accounting for ad revenue

For the larger channels such as LTT, the YouTube ad revenue is likely approaching rounding error compared to their sponsorship&#x2F;merch&#x2F;platform revenue.

There’s a few things in there:- Sponsorships may pay a bunch more than YT ads. This Chanel doesn’t do them(?).- More videos means (potentially) more total views means more revenue. This channel doesn’t post as often as some big channels- Some people are more desirable to advertisers. If those people are in your audience, you get paid more. So some channels get paid more per view than others

(Also this is not counting their sponsorships, merch sales, etc.)

&gt; Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff?Linus Tech Tips posted their youtube revenue just the other day[0]. For posterity, it&#x27;s about 4.6 million, and only shows March-December. I can&#x27;t find the original tweet that is the source of this information.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LinusTechTips&#x2F;comments&#x2F;100fmgx&#x2F;linus_posted_his_earnings_for_2022_probably_only&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LinusTechTips&#x2F;comments&#x2F;100fmgx&#x2F;linu...</a>

&gt; only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk&#x2F;stressnonsense, not having to deal with corporate life is easily worth $50k on its ownno dumb meetingsno imbeciles imposing their will on you just because they started before youno moronic company brainwashing, thought-policing, bossware etc etc

I would expect tax to be substantially lower. There are lots of things you can deduct as business expenses, like part of your house used for filming.

&gt;&gt;Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech TipsI am pretty sure their YT Ad Revenue is a small fraction of their over all revenue. That is what the successful channels do, Merch and Internal Ads (not YT Ads) are WAY more profitable than YT Ads

Pewdiepie mentioned how annoying British VAT tax estimate prepayments were because based on his career category and income it expects him to have a bunch of employees that’d pay substantially more tax. So he’d prepay a ton of taxes as he was legally obligated to do then get a huge refund every year.It makes sense that the tax code hasn’t yet caught up with “YouTube personality” as a career.

Linus recently mentioned on the WAN show that he expects merch sales to become the biggest revenue stream this year.

I literally forgot that it was a name of a video service... I was hoping he was also a bush pilot. Is it doing OK?

On The Wan show (their conversation show they record live on Friday nights) Linus has said the company is close to making more on the LTTStore than from youtube.He also has a lot of sponsorships and sponsored videos as well. He also has Floatplane but I don&#x27;t know how much money that makes.

It&#x27;s not 65 videos per year. It&#x27;s 65 videos total, since December 2017. So divide your numbers by five.

He claims $90 an hour which sounds good but that ends up being the gross income. His net is 22.5% (150&#x2F;664), and the hours he&#x27;s quoting for working on a video are either wrong or insane, because he&#x27;s claiming to be working for 17.8 hours a day which either means pernicious sleep deprivation or sitting at the computer every waking moment except to pee and eat food that takes no time to prepare. If it&#x27;s really 100 hours per video 65 videos a year he&#x27;s making just over $20 an hour which is is just madness.

Lets not forget LTT store sold 60,000 screwdrivers @ $69.99 USD in a few hours on launch day!

Who&#x27;s to say getting a tech job is even in his options though.

They&#x27;re leaving a lot of money on the table. No merch, no sponsored videos, no affiliate links, etc. They could be making a lot more if they added additional monetization.

I think that&#x27;s the hot take here. $150k&#x2F;yr for that much work and future instability compared to an office job with a ton of benefits... Hmmmm... For non-techies maybe this is the golden goose, but for people in the tech world for more than a decade it would probably be a no go, it would be for my family.

So they make around $150K&#x2F;year but likely pay more tax, higher overheads, and have to fund their own benefits out of that. Depending on where they live this could either be a very good income or only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk&#x2F;stress. That&#x27;s on 2M-6M viewers too.Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff? I have to imagine revenue from their other sources (e.g. their merchandise, sponsors, other?) is the majority of their income if this is what we can expect from YouTube.Regardless thanks for sharing.

Many years ago you were prohibited from sharing warnings by virtue of YouTube monetisation being through AdSense but, as far as I know, there’s no longer such a restriction. Lots of people publish their earnings nowadays, very common amongst finance channels.

Linus tech tips did a video sharing their YouTube earnings last year

A YouTuber who goes by the handle kofuzi just released a video that goes into the fine details and analysis of his channel&#x27;s metrics with full transparency. He&#x27;s easily among the top 3 video content makers who focus on running, running shoes, and running events. Despite putting out high-quality videos, his channel isn&#x27;t nearly as popular as OP (probably due to his focus being more niche).

This is not true. There are quite a few large (and also some smaller ones) youtubers who shared their ad-sense revenue.

I don&#x27;t think YouTube allows you to make videos showing your revenue, but I could be wrong

It may be common knowledge for people that already have a channel, but I’ve never seen anyone give exact revenue numbers to outsiders before.

&gt; I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticedThis is pretty common knowledge for monetized or high viewership (sponsored&#x2F;paid for outside of Google) channels.

I immediately noticed a dark dynamic based on the analytics. Lucky for OP, they are making Lego videos. However, if you are in the business of selling your opinion or sexuality, and you start to see that people click on certain hot takes or less-clothes on, you will start to morph to cater to that traffic. I wonder how this destroys a person (the greed).Totally taking the convo in the darker direction, but you can see this dynamic in play with Rogan‘s podcast. He’s a liberal, but those hot button right wing takes are probably what brings in the clicks. Every trans critique he makes caters to that traffic, so he milks that audience often.What does one become when you effectively sell out to the analytics?Your thoughts and perspective are no longer driven by your convictions or experience, but by this shit.

&gt; (this) information is extremely valuableEstimating earnings based on views&#x2F;subs is helpful to prospective youtubers, letting them make wise decisions about whether they pursue that path or do something else with their time (it will probably dissuade more than it will encourage, but that&#x27;s a good thing if in aggregate people are making sounder career decisions).

They are not exactly what one would call unnoticed.

The vast majority of published scientific progress is completely devoid of value outside their specific field of study, and those in their specific field of study know where to look for it and are(?) giving its due value.If anything I&#x27;d prefer less interest of the general public on specific papers because the way it ends up is with people misunderstanding it to fit whatever the journalist&#x2F;redditor that peddled it wanted it to mean, maliciously or not.

&gt; I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticedBasically every scientific progress which gets published on peer reviewed journals (a lot of them open). Some books also are online.

RE: valuable yet unnoticedThis issue, in this case, is information dispersal. This sort of information is highly analyzed, almost certainly, by google&#x2F;youtube. They have all the data, so there&#x27;s a lot more you can get out of analyzing it.If ever channel&#x27;s youtube data was released to the public like this, there would be a lot more notice.Transparency doesn&#x27;t just need to overcome secrecy, they need to overcome obscurity.

I&#x27;d say its the opposite, you&#x27;re talking about a channel that gets 10M views average per video while being kid friendly and targeting probably the audience with the most spending power(middle aged males in the US), you&#x27;d think they&#x27;d make far more than 100k&#x2F;year.

It&#x27;s valuable in the sense of giving some sort of feedback. The way many streaming services compensate people lacks any transparency and is basically making them compete to generate product blindly.

One data point from a successful YouTuber is interesting but I&#x27;m not sure about the extremely valuable part. If anything, it probably leads to a lot of people thinking they can make &gt;$100K&#x2F;year making YouTube videos and they almost certainly won&#x27;t.

I like to think that most of the valuable information is generally unnoticed. Most of the things I make are very valuable to the people who want it, but any one of those things are pretty useless to the majority of people who would find it.A huge part of the phenomenon comes through how fashions form. Hype collects around emotionally-charged things. By their very nature, their spectacle is compromising some of the sincerity and value to maximize reach. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts.HN is a perfect example of this: looks like a chat forum from 1998, but is very much current and edgy with the cool kids.

The transparency of this is really amazing; big respect. It&#x27;s interesting to think that this information was quietly posted to their low-traffic blog with little notice, meanwhile the information contained is actually extremely valuable (and itself would have probably made a highly valuable youtube video itself with 10s of millions of views).I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticed

technically correct, but a range of more than an order of magnitude makes it hard to use.

Interesting to compare this to SocialBlade, which estimate a range of $55k - $887k per year.

While 65 is pushing it, middle age does not mean ”half way to death”[1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Middle_age" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Middle_age</a>

&gt; 65 is only middle-aged if you plan to live to 130...60 is a more usual endpoint, but...It&#x27;s a range. The middle of that range is 55, so following that math it would be 110, not 130.But as the other reply points out, it&#x27;s the middle section of being an adult. So if you take that 45-65 range, and treat it as the exact middle of your adult life, then you get 92, which is a bit high but not crazy. If you take that 45-65 range and assume old age will be the same length, you get 85, which is pretty close for wealthy non-US countries.

65 is only middle-aged if you plan to live to 130...

&quot;Modern social scientists generally agree that midlife begins around 35 to 40 and ends around 55 to 60.&quot; (Wikipedia)But you are right that his peak earning range was 25-34 (so less than middle age) and his second highest range was 18-24.So yes I&#x27;d agree this isn&#x27;t middle-age.

The real error is probably that some fraction of this is children of those men, as in many family homes men are the ones who login to YouTube on the TV or other devices. That may or may not be beneficial depending upon whom the advertisers think they&#x27;re bidding on.

&gt; mostly middle-aged malesNo, most viewers were 18-44.&quot;Middle-aged&quot; is 45-65.

&gt; Wow how’s you get such a huge jump in views?It happens when your video reaches the frontpage of Youtube.

&gt; Wow how’s you get such a huge jump in views?I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it reached &quot;the front page of YouTube&quot; like the sibling post suggested or it would have millions.Somehow it must&#x27;ve got suggested to a few people and maybe it had a high engagement rate (likes and comments?) which was somehow taken positively. I&#x27;m purely guessing though.It really isn&#x27;t an impressive video though it does have a 99% like ratio. I&#x27;m a bit embarrassed to self promote here so I&#x27;ll email you based on your HN profile site contact page.

Wow how’s you get such a huge jump in views?my best video has 8k views, coming in at between 100-1000 per month depending how many impressions the algorithm decides to allot to me.

This is fantastic information and very sobering for those of us with smaller channels. I had 10-50 views per month until two weeks ago and I got 200k views suddenly thanks to the algorithm, but it&#x27;s already peaked so I expect I can&#x27;t make more than a few dollars per month. See what happens though!

You touch upon an important point, Luck is a major part of success.You can do everything right and still lose, if you&#x27;re not lucky.

&gt; While I have found success on YouTube...Considering HN biased towards startups, I wonder can the same reasoning be applied to starting a company. Starting a SAAS company sounds the same:- the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable- subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm (product-market fit)- strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience&gt; You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.Probably this one is not that harsh as it seems, Ludwig made an experiment &quot;I made a secret YouTube channel to prove it&#x27;s not luck&quot;. Many creators are using multiple platforms and income sources, so it&#x27;s not all YT in the end.

To highlight just how crazy things can get, my highest-earning YouTube video has earned well-over $100,000 in AdSense revenue.But that’s not the end of the craziness.About a year ago, that video was suddenly and inexplicably deemed by YouTube as unsuitable for all advertisers. I appealed, but they stuck with their decision.In the year since, that video has brought in ~$80.While I have found success on YouTube, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience. YouTube is the most saturated market on the planet, and and at the end of the day, you are subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm. It is not possible to succeed on YouTube without significant effort, but significant effort doesn’t guarantee success. Moreover, the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable, and it’s sometimes not there at all. You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.People understand that high-quality content is necessary for success on YouTube, but they often lose sight of the fact that it is not sufficient. Not only do you have to create quality content, but you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them on YouTube - which is obviously very, very hard.

$10000&#x2F;video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content.It&#x27;d be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).

Subs on YT don&#x27;t mean revenue... they&#x27;re just people who may watch your videos later. It&#x27;s more a hueristic than anything.

$90&#x2F;hour is real nice money, but for some reason i assumed a channel with that many subs would make more money. For every million plus channel, there’s probably a million+ channels with no subs.Basically have a day job before you go all in as a content creator.

It&#x27;s $90&#x2F;hour, which is great, but it is also 100 hours per video, and depending on what your release schedule is that could be an insane amount of work. They list 65 uploads, which is a little more than once a month for 5 years.

I think that might be the average hourly rate since they started the channel. I think it would make more sense to calculate it on a monthly basis. It was probably close to $0&#x2F;hour for the first few years, and it must be much higher now.

Most interesting number to me is the 90$ per hour. Seems like solid money. And since the channel might grow more this might not be the end.But I guess it&#x27;s hard hard work to grow a channel to this size and also not a guaranteed success.

The YouTube Partner program doesn’t pay people to do any sort of work, though. It is a revenue sharing program.Usually a wage or salary is a payment in exchange for doing something. Which this isn’t.I would imagine most places treat this similarly to the way something like a book publishing agreement works.

&gt;&gt; An employer cannot prohibitThis is my biggest pet peeve with YouTubers. THEY ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF YOUTUBE.employment laws do not apply to a youtuber, unless they are employed by some other company, but they do NOT have an employment relationship with YouTube, they are not &quot;employees&quot; of YouTube, and Susan Wojcicki is not &quot;their boss&quot;

Where do people get the idea that they are either employees of or contractors to YouTube? Do Amazon affiliates and bloggers monetizing with AdSense have the same, false idea?

I think such policy is illegal in many countries. An employer cannot prohibit workers from discussing salaries. This is often a measure to combat against gender discrimination at a workplace. I’m not sure how this affects contractors, but I would be surprised if these laws wouldn’t cover contractors as well.

It is against ToS I&#x27;m pretty sure, I don&#x27;t remember YouTube ever doing anything about it ever though since a lot of people really do share this information publicly.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s right. A lot of YouTubers make videos detailing their YouTube earnings and post them to YouTube (for example [1]). If it were against the ToS, you&#x27;d think YouTube would at least remove those videos.From memory, the issue is publicly disclosing CPM among some other things (at least it was 4+ years ago).I actually wonder if posting it off-platform is even allowed, I&#x27;ve seen Twitch enforce their platform exclusivity for 24 hours for Partners.

Yeah, I’ve seen lots of these videos. I’d expect YouTube would want creators to do this since viewers see it and get inspired to become YouTube creators.The same logic applies to most tech jobs. I would expect more big tech companies would want to broadcast their comp numbers to encourage more people to pursue those careers and apply to those companies. The average joe probably assumes SWEs at Google make $100-150K MAX. If more people knew they could make doctor-like numbers without going to grad school (or even going to college at all in some cases), more people would go into tech. But I guess companies have done the math and determined its better to conceal that information best they can to keep their advantage during negotiations.

I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s right. A lot of YouTubers make videos detailing their YouTube earnings and post them to YouTube (for example [1]). If it were against the ToS, you&#x27;d think YouTube would at least remove those videos.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3Rm-ElJPDJk">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3Rm-ElJPDJk</a>

That guy is Matt Parker from StandUpMaths

Dunno about YouTube, but Adsense used to prohibit that but then reversed that policy.I remember emailing someone that said they “didn’t share how much they made because it’s against TOS” after the policy changed and they still declined.I think it might have been the “I made my Christmas lights controlled by anyone on the internet” guy.It was a long time ago.

Linus Media Group has at least ten full time employees and rents a fairly large office&#x2F;warehouse&#x2F;studio space in the Vancouver suburb area of Surrey&#x2F;Langley BC.Their payroll and overhead costs probably eat up a significant part of that 4.6m.

That used to be the case but it changed at some point I think about 2 years ago - couldn&#x27;t find a quick reference to exactly when it changed but I remember seeing quite a few channels start publishing their earnings once it changed.This quora post quotes the terms:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Am-I-allowed-to-show-my-earnings-to-my-audience-on-YouTube-I-really-wanna-show-people-how-much-they-can-make-Is-it-against-the-rules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Am-I-allowed-to-show-my-earnings-to-my...</a>&quot;HOWEVER, YOU MAY ACCURATELY DISCLOSE THE AMOUNT OF GOOGLE’S GROSS PAYMENTS TO YOU PURSUANT TO THE PROGRAM&quot;Linus Tech Tips has published their earnings for the past couple of years. One detailed video here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4</a>Linus also posted his adsense of ~$4.6million for the last 9 months a couple of days ago:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linusgsebastian&#x2F;status&#x2F;1609468262219403264&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linusgsebastian&#x2F;status&#x2F;16094682622194032...</a>

Is this really so hush-hush, secret or amazing? It seems pretty run of the mill... there must be millions of people with access to these reports for various channels.

I could be wrong but I don&#x27;t think YouTube TOS allows publicizing this kind of information.  I would be afraid of my channel being de-monetized.  I believe they have a similar policy for AdSense.

Well, of course it was, nobody is hiding it - you can see the timer in the pool part and the graph showing seconds in the beginning.

The submarine video looks cool but I think the video speed has been manipulated.

The first video I watched on this channel was the Lego submarine. Quite a cool channel. The format of minimal talking and to-the-point and normal thumbnails is refreshing. Cool that one can make this much on their hobbies.

Makes me wonder what those super low-effort channels like Crafty Panda etc. make

It would also be interesting to see what his per hour is, after expenses.I&#x27;m pretty sure those videos take a LONG time to make.

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.

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

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.

&gt; It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titlesI 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.

One channel I really like that reminds me of BEC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;mymechanics">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;mymechanics</a> (mymechanics)

&gt; Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2&#x2F;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?

You have a point, and of course not everything should live and die by its channel. In particular the incentives to have regular uploads and consistent videos should be fought back, it&#x27;s crushing so much creativity, brings burnout and I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;re missing on otherwise good videos that are nver made because to long to take, or shelved because it doesn&#x27;t match the channel.Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don&#x27;t pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view.I kinda want it both ways to be honest.

It’s probably because advertisers demand that their ads are not placed on “bad” content. By limiting ads to 1000+ subscriber channels, it’s much more likely the content isn’t in violation of the YouTube rules.

&gt; repair my Neato vacuum cleanerHey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on&#x2F;off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.

&gt; 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...But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.Why wouldn&#x27;t you post something just because you won&#x27;t make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had?What&#x27;s the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort.I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should&#x2F;have&#x2F;will stop sharing with each other unless they&#x27;re getting paid is strange. It&#x27;s the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That&#x27;s how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.

Since when has the internet not been channelized?Gopher was channelized.
IRC was channelized.
Usenet was channelized.
Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls.The entire &quot;search&quot; thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.

&gt; Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers.I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let&#x27;s say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.

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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

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

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&#x2F;video production for brands- presenting work for commercial YouTube channels

Patreon works, but only as a monetization platform; while it&#x27;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&#x27;s something critical, patrons will wait until it&#x27;s on youtube anyway (citation needed).Onlyfans doesn&#x27;t do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn&#x27;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 &#x2F; 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 &#x2F; boxing matches.I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that&#x27;s mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.

I get the feeling that the day it gets wiped away he&#x27;ll move to another job (he&#x27;s been a software engineer for a while apparently) and not look back.The way it&#x27;s managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there&#x27;s so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.

&gt; still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.That&#x27;s the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships&#x2F;ads won&#x27;t help, they&#x27;d die with the channel.I&#x27;m not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo?How does one minimize risk to this $150k&#x2F;year revenue stream?

Isn&#x27;t that basically any job? I&#x27;d you&#x27;re a software engineer and your company decides to outsource or otherwise contract out development work...

&gt; 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&#x27;s scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube&#x27;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&#x27;s an insane imbalance of power.

&gt; still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I&#x27;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&#x27;t even trying?I&#x27;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: &quot;why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!&quot; 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&#x27;t experiment with it.

I&#x27;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&#x27;s what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation

&gt; kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the mostI 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.

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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;BrickExperimentChannel">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;BrickExperimentChannel</a>

Okay, after watching some of the videos, I think he deserves it, good stuff.

But both are very much comparable since you pay a form of &quot;income tax&quot; to the platform owner.

He states this is the amount that google deposits in his bank account, it is ad revenue not app sales or anything like that

From my experience youtube takes about half. Around 40-50%

How many % does YouTube keep? Is that comparable to Apple&#x27;s 30% in the App Store?

Exactly. SSD storage alone can cost $5,000+. A nice camera is around $2,000 and lenses around $1,500 each.

I&#x27;ll post this as a reply to your comment because I think other people will have this concern when it comes to content creation.You do not need a really beefy computer to edit videos especially when you&#x27;re starting out. A Canva Pro subscription is a couple of hundred dollars and will let you upload all your footage and then edit it within the browser meaning you don&#x27;t need to have a powerful computer. If you grow your channel and your needs change then just cancel Canva and buy that bigger machine you need. Use your phone or something on the cheaper end (of cameras) like a GoPro to record.

Some of the cost might come from buying a computer suitable for video editing, which I can imagine could be a couple of thousand dollars.

He has multiple cameras, some of them mini ones for attaching to models and putting them underwater:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-cameras&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-c...</a>He&#x27;s also in Finland, so the cost of gear might not be as cheap as in the US.

&quot;pro grade&quot; cameras are at least ~$2,500 (say, a BMPCC) plus a another thousand or so for each professional lens. Storage media, monitors, lighting, stands, audio, and more and it eventually adds up.

Perhaps the $20,000 he spent on film equipment helped propel him to 2.9 million subscribers, 705 million video views, and $664,000 total earnings by allowing him to produce a grade of video that is better than other lego videos on YouTube.

You can spend US$5 pretty easily on one very good tripod (but something enough for this kind of production $2K would be fine). For a decent mirrorless camera you&#x27;re looking at $3K body only, so then you have to think about lenses, B cameras, rigging, lighting, etc. which all adds up. Good audio equipment is expensive too, so I think for the size of the channel here, $20K is a pretty moderate spend.

How did he spend $20K on film equipment? A few pro-grade tripods and a solid camera shouldn&#x27;t be more than a quarter of that.

From the article:&gt; Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.

&gt;Now also talk about production costs, staff salaries, and taxes.Per the article...&quot;Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.&quot;Taxes would be pretty simple to approximate given he lives in Finland and gives a rough average of his monthly revenue.

He talks about production costs. He doesn&#x27;t have a staff. He mentions he pays taxes on the money but not how much.I recommend reading the article before commenting.

Now also talk about production costs, staff salaries, and taxes.

For a slightly different Lego experience, I recommend the Brick Bending channel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickBending&#x2F;videos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickBending&#x2F;videos</a>

&gt; I&#x27;m sure Google &#x2F; YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me!I am sure the smart folks in Google will know who is watching based on the videos being watched and show appropriate ads at that time or maybe show generic ads about products which they know parents with young kids want.

Doesn&#x27;t matter. Even for kids&#x27; ads, the parents are the target

This is a good point, YouTube on my smart TVs is logged into my account, my kids are forever mangling my search history with Roblox, Minecraft, squishies &amp; other random things kids are into. I&#x27;m sure Google &#x2F; YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me!

Yes - my son and I both enjoy that one. Some of the other speed builds are more his taste than mine.

This channel in particular is less about Lego than mechanics and experiments, so adults have plenty to enjoy from the videos.There’s a video about building a quadcopter for instance, and bricks are used for the frame but he’s also be soldering to have what he needs on the chip. Same for the submarine ones, where the radio control will have nothing to do with Lego.And you’ll see magnets, metal axles, non Lego controllers, survolting etc. Highly recommend for anyone curious about funny practical experiments.

I wonder how often “middle-aged males” means an adult LEGO fan, of whom there certainly are many, versus a parent letting their kid watch YouTube. My son has notably shifted my recommendations towards LEGO and&#x2F;or trains.

&quot;successful&quot; Lego channels are an avg of 9 years old is interesting. It shows difficult it is for new creators to break in. This is why social networks seem to have a natural lifecycle - new platforms offer an opportunity for a network reset. This was one of the keys to tiktoks rise (also their distribution is much more engagement based).

I follow a runner on YouTube who just posted his channel&#x27;s earnings as well:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;QfkUM4hBge8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;QfkUM4hBge8</a>

I use Ko-fi and receive $1.64&#x2F;month from one recurrent fan who pays $2. It&#x27;s been that way for about two years.

I find it depressing because I’m in such a niche that I’ll never be able to monetize my channel. I think the path for me is to sell a course online or do a patreon.

Thanks. As a creator with not even 1000 subscribers yet, I find this very valuable

If you know of other similar yt earnings and stats breakdowns then please share them.

&gt; Why does Indian viewers cause this?Not a lot of Indians are going to buy your product even if they the cost of the product will probably be lower for Indians so the advertiser makes less money

&gt; Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?No, that would mathematically make no sense.His average RPM drops because of views from India but he still makes some money from the extra 200 million views.I&#x27;m Indian. The reason Indian views make less money is simply that the advertisers who advertise to Indian audiences have lower budgets due to PPP. So the amount they pay to YouTube is less than what a US advertiser would pay. In turn, the channel&#x27;s share of the revenue (supposedly 55% of it) is also less.

Advertisers bid on ad spots, based on the viewer. It&#x27;s all algorithmic and real-time.Advertisers can target ads based on various demographic info, e.g. age, gender, location. Cookies etc allow for even more targetting.So you can imagine an advertising bidding high for ad spots shown to 20-30 males in London (i.e. relatively rich westerners who can afford your product), and bidding low for poorer nations where people do not have as much money to spend (so are not your target customer - e.g. imagine you are trying to sell iPhones etc)

I&#x27;m not a youtuber, but I&#x27;m trying to understand the RPM.Based on my understanding, RPM is directly proportional to the amount of money you make.So, how does a lot of views from India cause a lower RPM?In the post the author even says this:&gt; When I see my RPM drop suddenly, it is usually because my videos are being watched a lot in IndiaLike, say you have a billion views, and 200 million of those views were from India. Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?Why does Indian viewers cause this? I mean, they too see ads, right? Or is it because in India it costs less (??) to put up an ad?

I came here to say that, based on my experience, his RPM is really low, but then he points out that he gets lots of views from India. We get around $4, for a niche, but primarily English speaking niche.It makes me see now more why Mr. Beast is getting his content translated....

&gt; the time and effort that goes into video editing isn&#x27;t funI’ve seen YouTubers comment that they got in to it just because they loved video editing. Not planning to make money, just to share content and work worth the tools to create it.

The most impressive thing to me is the initial period of 2-3 years, maybe more if the graph doesn&#x27;t show the full history, with very little traction and negligible income. Of course that&#x27;s expected, but sticking with it for so long without profits is not something most people can do, both emotionally or financially. Even if you love the topic you&#x27;re making content on, the time and effort that goes into video editing isn&#x27;t fun.

For reference, most gaming channels in the US have an RPM of $4-$5. I&#x27;m guessing their RPM is $1 because the channel owner is based in Europe. I imagine toy channels have higher RPMs in the US.

I&#x27;d like to hear more about this. What is &quot;VFed&quot;? How many platforms&#x2F;accounts have you tried? What does &#x27;traction&#x27; look like in terms of raw numbers?

Does anyone know any good tricks to bypass visibility filtering to earn that kind of money? When I start to see traction (exponential) on most platforms, I get VFed before I hit 1000.Do I need to go as far as dedicated computer and register new account with fake ID&#x2F;SIM card or is VPN enough?

Well, all we can really know is that it&#x27;s a machine learning-based black box.

Sadly that secret sauce has become fairly poor. Recommendation issues is the biggest problem with YouTube right now.I can open YouTube on any given day and will be given recommendations for things I&#x27;ve never shown the slightest bit of interest in.For example, right now I&#x27;ve got:- A clip for the big bang theory - Never watched anything on that show on youtube- &quot;Why does italy have 6000 ghost towns (Hidden Italy)&quot; - Absolutely no idea why it thinks that would interest me, never been to Italy or watched any kind of travel based videos.- &quot;I hitchhiked Onto A Private Jet To Werever It&#x27;s Going&quot; - Again, I couldn&#x27;t give a damn- &quot;The Legendary World of Spyro Games - Caddicarus&quot; - I have no idea what that is, or why it thinks it interests me.- &quot;Singapore welcomes 2023 with New Year fireworks at Marina Bay&quot; - Ok, and? Never been there, never watched any content about the place.- &quot;I called every U.S. Representative in the country. Here were the responses I got.&quot; - I&#x27;m not American, and give absolutely zero f&#x27;s about US politics.- &quot;I&#x27;ve Been Living In A Ghost Town for Almost 3 YEARS!&quot; - Good for you, I don&#x27;t care.- &quot;Dark Secrets of the World’s Most Isolated Island&quot; - Nope.It has improved slightly from the looks of things. Usually I get videos about minecraft, or some twat gorping with their mouth wide open trying to make a mundane and uninteresting topic seem like something I should be interested in whilst remembering to smash the like button and click the bell.The platform has so many problems.

The most important secret sauce is the recommender system. It takes into account transcripts, color historgrams of frames, actions and activities recognized in videos, frame cuts frequency, key personalities and entities recognized and what not. That&#x27;s my humble guess.

&gt; it’s only in the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate what a great medium it has become.I also love YouTube as there is a lot of high-quality content. But I&#x27;m sometimes a bit disappointed with the more recent phenomenon of professional YouTubers (sponsoring of videos, &quot;please comment below&quot;) and also a lot of them getting uninspired after some time. Now that I think of it, I don&#x27;t know if professional YouTubers are those who add more value to the platform.

Recently I was considering auditing a class from a masters in public health program because I’m starting a niche population health management company and I need to better understand the economics. To my amazement the professor of the course that I wanted to take put all of her lectures on YouTube and I was able to watch them for free.

there&#x27;s Vimeo but it never really picked up.

Agree on both points. It&#x27;s become fashionable to speak ill of youtube, but it&#x27;s one of the very few major things that has truly changed the world for the better; not just entertainment but all fields related to education or life-long learning, or science vulgarization, etc.And yes, YT should have worthy competitors, and it&#x27;s surprising that it doesn&#x27;t. YT is obviously very profitable; why don&#x27;t other big competitors don&#x27;t give it a try, with a similar angle? TikTok is wildly different, and so is Twitch; but a version of Twitch that would directly compete with YT doesn&#x27;t seem that hard to implement if you&#x27;re Amazon?

&gt; That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.Yeah, some hybrid of web forums but with videos would be great. No idea how I&#x27;d put these two ideas together design- product-wise though.

IDT that youtube should get credit for creating &quot;The Medium.&quot; Online, shareable videos were always going to exist, somewhere. They just had the deep pockets to finance the hosting of youtube and win a monopoly over it.That&#x27;s not to diminish the medium, or it&#x27;s benefits over traditional, one-2-many mass media. It&#x27;s also not meant to diminish youtube&#x27;s role, before or after google acquired them. Certainly not to diminish creators. I just think it&#x27;s worth thinking about where it all came from. Is it a quasi-inevitability brought on by technologyI think a lot of modern tech giants occupy spaces where it&#x27;s hard to tell if they are building a thing, or squatting.

&gt;That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.If you worked in the SEO world after Google acquired YT it was a common hack to use YT videos to rank for hard keywords because it was proven Google gave YT favorable positions, even compared to other video sites. There were dedicated tools for quickly creating spam videos on topics and then linking people to your website.YT wasn&#x27;t completely dominant until they were acquired by Google and had their growth boosted via monopoly tactics using Google Search

I wouldn&#x27;t give Google too much credit here.   Almost all of my love for Youtube is based on the creators which are on the platform.  The platform itself is quite user-hostile, has bad UX, gives poor recommendations, and has too many overly obtrusive repetitive poorly-targeted advertisements.  To me, Google is fully responsible for all of the bad, but can claim little of the good.

Just a personal note of praise for YouTube itself. I’ve watched videos on YouTube since it began, but it’s only in the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate what a great medium it has become. By allowing people to share content on all sorts of niche subjects and potentially make money at it, YouTube has become a fantastic resource for both education and entertainment. For someone like me who grew up with access only to television, radio, newspapers, and other mass media, it is a great advance.That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.

It&#x27;s illegal without a permit or a written notification to a police department, it seems:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poliisi.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;money-collections" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poliisi.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;money-collections</a>

In the case of donations, soliciting donations in any way is illegal in Finland for private persons and companies. That also makes things like YouTube&#x27;s sponsor button, GitHub Sponsors, etc. nonstarters.

&gt;I have never done sponsorship, affiliate links, received donations, or anything else.He is leaving a lot of money on the table. Most youtubers make more money from sponsorships that from ad rev.

Wow; I love this. Thank you for posting it!USD$90&#x2F;hr on making content that you love ain&#x27;t a bad haul. I wonder how much OP would continue to make from their top 10 most popular videos if they decided to throw in the towel and stop making new content.(I wonder if the USD$90&#x2F;hr estimation includes 1099 taxes?)Also, 38.5% average retention seems to suggest that people have really crappy attention spans OR there&#x27;s so much else on the Internet to barely consume!

Really interesting. I have been making videos for a couple years (I review movies. Link is in my profile).I don&#x27;t want to make it a full time job but even at my much, much smaller scale I see the analytics pushing me to review certain genres of films because those films get more views.If I was trying to make money from it, I would certainly be tempted to pivot into only reviewing a specific genre. So it is no wonder that larger channels end up doing so much clickbait stuff: whatever pays the bills.

For &quot;how viewers find my videos&quot;, what about people who find the videos from subscription? I can&#x27;t imagine that being too small.. Is it in &quot;other youtube features&quot;? &lt;1.2% seems way too small.Edit: I just opened YouTube Studio myself, it looks they&#x27;re counted as &quot;Browse features&quot;:&gt; Traffic from the homepage&#x2F;home screen, the subscription feed, and other browsing features.

Really good money. Publishers on YouTube making more than ever post-Covid due to surge in insurance , cloud&#x2F;team software&#x2F;aps,  drug companies ads and other high CPM advertisers.

They like their special interest + they like sharing it + they like making videos.

Can you actually monetize this when you don&#x27;t own the music?

I make lyric music videos with images generated from Midjourney (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;syntopikon">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;syntopikon</a>). I do it because its fun and, as I&#x27;m working through Rolling Stones Top 500 Albums list, jives well with it. Maybe one day it&#x27;ll make money (~1,330 subs, but not monetized), but until then, its a relaxing, fun project.

&gt; 99.9% of them make nothing.most creative endeavors are like this. I think it&#x27;s fine, as long as those 99.9% aren&#x27;t relying on their creative endeavors to make their living.

At some point, people have other motivations besides the obvious. Maybe they just like making neat videos for themselves and YouTube&#x27;s a nice place to store them. Maybe they have one or two people they&#x27;re sharing with because they know each other in real life and just like to show off to those people. Maybe they hope to strike it rich one day but don&#x27;t have the resources to pursue it.I pretty regularly think about the Twitch streamers that spend hours streaming to literally zero viewers. They stream for months and even narrate what they&#x27;re doing, but nobody&#x27;s watching. You wonder if it&#x27;s a learned behavior from watching Twitch for so long.

yes except here the view counts are dreadfully public reminders that hours of your work can go to get like 10 views if it doesnt please the algorithm… do what makes you happy i guess but i dont get it

&gt; i dont know what drives people to want to make videos when the odds are like thatI used to write tech How To articles on my site around 15 years back, just to help other people. Then adsense came along and I made some money but the primary motivation was to learn and share my knowledge with others.

Whats the competition? If you are otherwise looking at a service industry job, or other forms of low wage kind of shit employment then I guess this sort of thing becomes increasingly desirable.

Same reason people try and be soccer players and rock stars.

I have made some videos and they rarely break 1000 views.
But they have contributed in me getting multiple jobs in my field as they demonstrate that I actually know some of the stuff I claim to. The videos also make it clear I can express myself clearly in english amd communicate technical concepts. So not every channel needs a huge audience, sometimes the right few viewers are enough.

For the fun of it, I think. I started a YouTube channel back in 2017 and had some degree of &quot;success&quot;. The goal of the channel was to share what sorts of things I was working on and what I learned.I kept putting more and more work into my content. Some videos did well, and some got practically no views. At some point into it, I realized that I was doing projects to create YouTube content and that I didn&#x27;t enjoy the process of editing videos. I was spending 30-40 hours editing a 10 minute video because my production standards kept getting higher and higher. So I stopped.Sometimes I get the urge to make a video and when I do I try to limit myself to a couple of hours to get it done. My last video (published in October) I spent around a day recording and editing because I was pretty proud of the project. It had pop-culture discoverability, and I thought people would find it interesting and valuable. I posted it around on social media a bit, but didn&#x27;t get too much traffic from social media. I posted it at the end of October and so far it has only gotten 100 views.By contrast, my most popular video got that amount in the past day. It is what YouTubers call an evergreen video. That single video makes up about 80% of my channel revenue which is down to about $25&#x2F;month now. At the channel&#x27;s peak, I was making up to $200&#x2F;month from ad revenue on the channel.I will continue to make occasional videos when I feel like it, but I am not trying to make anything from my content.

It&#x27;s 6500 hours since the start of the channel in 2017, not just in a single year.

Something doesn&#x27;t add up. They said they worked 6500 hours (100 hour per video). Is that just the one person? There are only 8760 hours in a whole year!

You basically can&#x27;t expect to film yourself talking and put it on YouTube and expect to get lots of views. OP spent 100 hours making each video that&#x27;s several minutes long.

Some people love video the medium.I tried doing a video of myself talking off the cuff on a topic. Watching myself, it was painful. I obviously needed to write myself a script, do editing, etc. I would rather just write the text, and skip the video bit. :)

Sad? How is it sad that I don&#x27;t earn $600k when I put up a video on YouTube of a bird on my balcony?The 99.9% don&#x27;t earn as much because their content isn&#x27;t as highly viewed. That appears completely fair to me.

&gt; There are many, many creators who release Lego videos continuously and have no subs and get no views. Too many. Hundreds, maybe thousands of such creators. It is kind of heartbreaking to see people put so much time and effort for (supposedly) nothing.this is the saddest part. he is in the top 0.1% of his genre and making $90 an hour, but 99.9% of them make nothing. i dont know what drives people to want to make videos when the odds are like that

I am interested by the gender split of viewership here, and wonder how heavily the various factors of intrinsic gender differences in interest, societal perceptions of Lego as a boy&#x27;s toy, and confounding factors (&quot;Dad set up the YouTube account that child Emily is watching from&quot;, Mom has less leisure time) contribute to each of these. I also note that the themes of the most popular videos (&quot;BIG vortex&quot;, &quot;tank&quot; &quot;car&quot;) are often associated more with traditionally masculine than feminine themes, perhaps making it hard to pull any Lego-specific insights from this.Certainly my nieces are no less interested in Lego than my nephews, and growing up my sisters weren&#x27;t less interested than my brothers (although there did seem to be a difference in focus in construction vs Sims-like play).

Key information here is&gt; But don’t think filming Lego will guarantee you high earnings. There are many, many creators who release Lego videos continuously and have no subs and get no views. Too many. Hundreds, maybe thousands of such creators. It is kind of heartbreaking to see people put so much time and effort for (supposedly) nothingOP got lucky to get a lot of subscribers and made themselves known in the subject, 10 M views per video in average is a good performance.

I&#x27;d bet his ad revenue is higher than normal. Lego sounds like a perfect subject for ad supported.Inexpensive (somewhat), easy to buy on line, always another kit to buy.Take 3blue1brown. Fantastic content, but what ads relate? (Probably Lego, but that might just be me).

Not necessarily. If you stop uploading, views will fall off a cliff sooner than you’d think. Even for old content that had been consistently attracting views. It kinda sucks.

His content is quite &quot;evergreen&quot; though, so even if he were to stop making content today, money would keep rolling in for quite some time.

$90 is not much for all that. As an employee, that&#x27;s pretty good, but as someone who probably had to invest thousands of hours before he knew if he&#x27;d see any revenue, that&#x27;s a pretty meager return!It would be interesting to see his revenue graphed over time. Pretty sure he didn&#x27;t make 12k&#x2F;mo for the first few years. Which means he&#x27;s making more Than that, now.

Over 95% of discovery on Youtube is incesutous? Kinda sad to see but I&#x27;m sure Susan is happy.

Thanks to people like you - and a network like Hacker News people are coming to know the truth and the future of a career like YouTube. This saves people an invaluable amount of time and expertise to finally know whether this is worth it or not.This explains a lot about how YouTube gains most of their money, I mean like for the content you&#x27;re making they get most of the monetization.

As a YouTube addict, I&#x27;m not surprised. There&#x27;s a whole other advertising revenue stream that BEC is just not doing, because they have the monster viewcounts to avoid it and still make a living: in-video sponsorships.I follow a lot of smaller full time YouTubers, nearly all do sponsored advertising within their videos.That is where advertisers are indeed paying more for quality content highly targeted to their consumers - directly to the creators, not through Google&#x27;s platform.Those deals can be very lucrative because audiences are more receptive to advertising that comes from, and directly supports, the creators they follow.I&#x27;ve seen creators I respect take somewhat dubious sponsorships and still be supported by their fans. The recent Established Titles controversy was a good example of that. [1][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;rcna59518" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;rcna59518</a>

It&#x27;s not very surprising, as other mentioned on this thread (and in the blog itself) this channel&#x27;s popularity is only organic growth, they do not do $$$ sponsorships, they do not employ clickbait practices (which work, sadly), and the audience is relatively niche compared to your random trend-setting garbage youtuber like Mr. Beast.

Is nobody else surprised the amount is so low? If you look at his video catalogue, basically every video is a &quot;hit&quot; even if upload frequency is relatively low. Youtubers making 20 videos a month with &lt;1M views&#x2F;video make considerably more money, i.e., is better to upload less quality videos and have &quot;moderate&quot; views that to make high quality infrequent videos with a lot of views. You&#x27;d think advertisers should pay more per ad on a high quality video than on a trash one. The extreme example of this is Mr. Beast, who makes &quot;high&quot; quality videos (at least in the sense of production) but uploads pretty frequently (specially considering he has multiple channels).

On YouTube impression is whenever the thumbnail is loaded in the user browser, anywhere in the page.Impressions CTR means 5.9% of the users shown the thumbnail&#x2F;title&#x2F;video clicked on it.With 10.8m views and a CTR of 5.9%, it means that specific video had about 180m impressions.

&gt; impressions click-through rate: 5.9%What does this mean? That 5.9% of users who were shown an ad, clicked the ad (and thus left the video to pursue catfood?)

My Youtube earnings