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Comment by basseq | Hacker News Reader

> 96.5 percent of YouTubers don’t make enough annual ad revenue to reach the U.S. federal poverty line... $12,140.

I'm surprised it's that low, honestly. May be a question of definition of a "youtuber", which I didn't see in the article. There's a long tail of "influencers" who actually make a living at it—and some a very good living—but I bet it's way less than 3.5%.

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For a system with as insanely long of a tail as YouTube, statistics like this aren't helpful or illuminating.

I have a couple of videos of my kids on YouTube to share with friends. I am technically a "YouTuber", but obviously I make zilch. For every person trying to use YouTube to actually be a video producer, there are hundreds of people who just use it as a video hosting site.

You likely wouldn't be included since you don't meet the lower limit for a monetized channel (I'm assuming).

Ah ha! I think that's it. The denominator could be "people in the YouTube Partner Program", which means 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. So this may be saying that only 3.5% of YouTube Partners make $12k+ from that program.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851#eligibility

Is that what the article means? I wasn't able to find anything that explicitly states that but maybe I overlooked it. Would make the conclusions much more cogent.

Oh, it wasn't clear to me that they were limiting their statistic to monetized accounts.

One also has to take into account other revenue streams that Youtubers will often have. Most channels nowadays will start up a Patreon account once they get a core following, and even a monthly dollar per Patron is more than all the adclicks that viewer would give. Merchandising is also big (1 T-shirt > 1000s of views), and bigger channels (100k+) can get a decent amount of revenue through sponsorship where they give in-video advertisements (like what Squarespace and a lot of VPNs do).

After the instability of Youtube's ad platform this past year ("Adpocalypse 1, 2 and 3"), many on the platform have given up on the idea of depending solely on adclicks as it's just too risky to leave your future to the discretion of a black box algorithm.

I see youtubers with 6 figure followers list each of 'this months patreon supporters' by name every month, they better be donating 3 figure amounts for that to be more than beer money...

Right, I'm not even talking about other revenue streams. In other words, what % of content creators on YouTube earn more than $10k/yr, even including other revenue sources? I bet it's less than 3.5%.

I'd love to see their data, I'd bet that people making six figures or more make up less than 1%.

I'd also love to know how they define a "Youtuber". Is it just total number of users? Total number of survey respondents?

Anecdotally, it's very safe to assume that for every Pewdiepie, there's 10 million accounts making less than $100 a month.

Exactly. There are 1.5 billion monthly active users. So maybe it's just content creators, which is estimated at 50 million[1]. That may be a lifetime number, so let's assume 10%, or 5M in FY17. If this is what it means to be a "youtuber", than the 96.5% stat quoted in the article means 175,000 people are making more than $12,140 in ad revenue alone, or total payouts north of $2B.

That just seems crazy high. Maybe my sense of scale is off, but I suspect their definition of youtuber/influencer is some subset of that: people with a certain number of subs or something.

[1] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/

Thank you very, very much for this data!

We also have to factor in the following, which makes the economics of being a content creator even worse:

1) If you made $12,140 last year ($1,000 a month post tax for sake of whole numbers), how much of that went to recouping production costs? Include food, travel, electricity, amortized hardware cost for cameras and computers, etc.

2) Of the money that's leftover, how many hours went into creating this content? Divide those two numbers (e.g $800 per month / 40 hours per month = $20 effective hourly rate).

If $1,000 a month pays the bills and allows you to live a non-corporate, stress free life, then being one of the 175,000 people making this type of money sounds like a great deal. But I have a feeling the economics of this situation aren't sustainable.

Also check out EEVBlog. He makes about 40k a year on youtube with frequent, family-friendly, profitable-niche content. Decent, but not full-time family supporting money.

The long tail would be the majority that get very low views/revenue, not the 3.5% that make a living.

Depends how you draw the graph. I'm imagining a distribution with income on the x-axis, so people like PewDiePie would be far right and part of the long tail.

Ad revenues only make up a portion (generally small portion) of influencers’ total revenue.

This. Many can soi-disant influencers attract sponsorship dollars, but some research we did in indexing Amazon links in product reviews is that the real earnings are in commissions resulting from consumer purchases.

Right, I'm not even talking about other revenue streams. In other words, what % of content creators on YouTube earn more than $10k/yr, even including other revenue sources? I bet it's less than 3.5%.

Yep. Although I would say the numbers (in % succeeding and in the absolute $ of their success) is much higher outside the walled garden of YouTube. You've got strong affiliate marketing programs, you've got retargeting ad companies, you have "sponsored editorial" copywriting, you have VSCO, etc. Overall the world of "advertising" is probably better than it's ever been. Every time I see a traditional 30 second TV spot these days (rare) it's like a flashback to the early 90s.

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