Hacker News Reader

Comment by subpixel | Hacker News Reader

I subscribe to a woman in India who posts awesome Indian food recipes. She has 2+ million subscribers, and I can tell from the upgrades to her kitchen and the traveling she's doing that Youtube has made a significant improvement to her income.

Edit: what the hell, I'll show her some love. This recipe is killer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzT1AQcGqk

View on HN

And honestly, if you are producing content that really engages people, YouTube advertisements is the least efficient usage of your brand. Someone like her could probably launch a food book, or patreon, or any number of parallel branding ventures where she would get a much higher cut of the revenue.

If you're someone on YouTube who just puts out viral cat videos, you're probably going to struggle much more with parallel branding.

I agree there’s the potential for a greater audience based on the content, but the audience is an equally important factor. I suspect the vast majority of this creator’s audience is in India - how is the Patreon adoption there? What brands are looking to connect with home cooks of the suncontinent? I don’t know, I’m way outside the market. It might be the case that YouTube ads are her most solid and repeatable opportunity.

But I do hope for her sake that she finds as much success as possible.

As far as I Know there is no patreon/Kickstarter for India.

I suspect this is likely due to banking rules, as well as rules for remittance of foreign currency being difficult.

But this is an educated guess on my part.

The other options could be that this is India and some totally unexpected effect has already taken over the market and I haven't recognized it. Maybe Kitty parties (A type of savings club)

Alternatively she makes money from endorsements and covert advertising on her channel.

(Similar to many hardware review tech channels.)

Yeah, that normally works really well for any channel with alot of customer products associated with it. Hardware + cooking are great examples.

That's true I guess; I was assuming she was a Maangchi like figure.

And this is an area where globalism excels. There is a demand for good indian cooking recipes in the US, and a supply of excellent indian cooks willing to share their secrets in india. Win/Win really.

Kabita's kitchen is no doubt good youtube channel for Indian food recipes. But I prefer Nisha Madhulika. Reminds me of Mom :)

How apropos of the Bloomberg article it is that when I search for her in YouTube the top results are targeted at people wondering how much she earns.

My wife has been watching Village Food Factory on youtube for a while now (The old Indian man with 6 fingers on one hand). You can see where the youtube revenue has increased the quality of life for the content creator. They now have enough money to regularly feed the local villagers.

I've read that YT changes the $ on the views based on country. USA being the highest amount paid for viewers from that country.

YouTube don't directly determine how much ad revenue a creator receives. Advertisers bid to place their ads next to content based on keywords and viewer demographics; the creators receive a 55% share of whatever the advertiser paid.

American viewers are generally the most lucrative, in part because of the share of YouTube Red revenues that creators are eligible to receive. A great deal depends on other contextual and demographic factors. YouTube do indirectly influence the revenue that creators receive by tagging certain videos as "not suitable for most advertisers". This is a substantial bone of contention in the YouTube creator community.

Who ever wants to play an ad bits for it against others who want to play ads for the same target group. Youtube takes its share and pays out the share of the content creator based on this price. Higher $ for content creators in the US just means that who ever wants to run ads in the US has to pay more money in the first place.

It’s all about supply and demand for ads.

Cost of living is significantly lower in India than in the US. If she is making even $1000/mo there, it’s like 6 figures here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com