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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

have you seen how much youtubers earn?

Picking a random example: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBz...

100k daily views, £17 - £250 estimated daily earnings.

Game of thrones has an estimated 10 million viewers per episode. So, scaling up youtube earnings: £1,700 - £25,000 per episode. The actual per episode budget was around £4 million per episode.

See the gap here?

https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-m...

You're using the example of the top earner to make your case about everyone?

Do all film actors make $60M/year just because Dwayne Johnson does?

Well to be fair the parent was using one of the most popular TV shows to make their case, so using the top YouTuber as a response seems reasonable.

There are multiple youtubers who have gone into depth about the details of how twitch people get paid. From top end to bottom, it's fairly consistent (except for a little subscription margin step at a certain point). Youtube/Google is even less involved in day-to-day, so there's no reason to believe that the scale isn't similarly linear.

My God, no. It's not anything like linear. It's more like exponential: the top earners are totally off the charts, and everybody else is largely jockeying for position.

I hesitate to even call it a scale. These things all follow viral dynamics: if you haven't blown up with billions of views, you're very possibly spending more than you get back.

Pareto explains the curve, but the monetary rewards are linear to where you are on that curve. Perhaps a small example will clarify.

Pareto Curve (more or less) of Y values on index X: [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,10,50,500,7000,9000000]

Index 30 is "off the chart"

Now revenue: $$*index

The correlation is linear (basically). The top youtuber who is a kid who reviews toys, makes the majority of his 22mil from ads, same as you or I would with <100 views per video.

I don't think that is a fair comparison, because people pay money to watch Game of Thrones, while YouTube is completely free. If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels, their viewership would be far lower (and revenue per viewer would be much higher).

> If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels

Actually this exists, it's called Youtube premium and there are some channels that offer some content exclusive to the platform (as far as I'm aware)

I have no idea how it's doing but I also don't have any interest in trying it out, I'd much rather support specific content streams via patreon or other offerings.

I pay for YouTube Premium.

Are there ads?

No.

Not on YouTube (general) but I also pay for YouTube TV and there are loads of ads on their "on demand" content.

Vote with your wallet. I'm about to ditch Pandora b/c they keep advertising pandora super-premium, when I'm already paying for pandora premium.

What should that particular anti-pattern be called?

I already voted with my wallet when I dropped Comcast TV. What I found is that "cutting the cord" is not all unicorns and rainbows. I'm not more reliant on Comcast the ISP, and the speeds I pay for are not the speeds I get.

I also dropped Pandora, because I had/have too many streaming music options and couldn't justify it. I don't remember commercials for their ultra premium offering, maybe its because I've been a paid customer for so long?

Yeah a fair comparison would be high viewership but freely available stuff like SNL.

How did you generate the random example? If you do it again, I'd be shocked if you got a 100k/day example.

I would guess there's a very, very long tail of channels that have a very small number of videos and essentially no views.

That channel is ranked around 20,000... It's in the long tail.

I picked an example of someone who does it full time.

With hundreds of millions of channels, it's pretty darned close to the head.

Sure... but what's the value of a channel with no views in this example?

It won't be monetised, so you can't really compare it to TV?

Earnings is far from a linear function of viewer count.

well I always tought that most youtubers actually make money via "hidden" ads and not via views. most of these 100k daily views channels make way more than 17€ - 250€ juat because they have sponsors and what not. basically it's the same than on free tv. people with the most sponsors and ad network will basically make the most money. (i.e. on german television (sky paid tv) there are ads on the end of game of thrones which makes them probably more money than their subscriber count)

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