Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified.

* His Youtube channel is his main platform

* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there

* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex

* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts

* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed

* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates

* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down

* He runs a large subreddit for his following

So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)

Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.

As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.

CGP Grey is strange, so to say. He effectively abandoned Hello Internet. They once mentioned that they have 900K subs. Grey fully controlled HI, and it was way more popular than Cortex. If he wants to diversify so much abandoning project like this just doesn’t make sense.

Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.

I've watched both Grey's and Haran's videos since their early years on YouTube, and I'd be curious to know what the story is behind the disappearance of their podcast. It seemed like an odd development to me in view of how engaged they both appeared to be with their audience.

I know that Haran eventually posted a brief comment on Reddit acknowledging the hiatus, but it struck me as a strangely subdued way to announce the end of a regular series that had been very successful for several years.

I think especially for podcasters in recent years there have been some.... issues with community management.

I would say in particular lots of these people started doing "community slacks/discords" and then they realized that being able to produce podcast episodes doesn't make you a good community manager.

There's been specific drama with Relay and people around that extended universe as well, so lots of podcast hosts in that space are basically done with fan interaction.

I'm being a bit glib but I totally get it. If you have the choice to just walk away from dealing with CM stuff then it's a pretty nice proposition.

> I think especially for podcasters in recent years there have been some.... issues with community management.

A show that I listen to skipped a week during the early stages of the pandemic. I was concerned that one of the hosts was ill / possibly dying. It was some planned thing, like a vacation or something. A little notice would have been nice.

Sure, these are strangers and my emotional investment is a bit like teen girls crying when they saw the Beatles play: “Really?”. But I love the show and would have missed it, so I was anxious about its (possible) demise.

I think you’ve nailed it with this.

> A show that I listen to skipped a week during the early stages of the pandemic. I was concerned that one of the hosts was ill / possibly dying. It was some planned thing, like a vacation or something. A little notice would have been nice.

I’d imagine it can be a real grind, endlessly producing a podcast week after week. If it’s anything more than walking up to a mic and talking stream of consciousness, the prep work must take hours.

Most podcasters have other jobs. On one hand, I’m surprised that we don’t see people taking a seasonal approach, to give themselves a break, recharge, and maybe put in work writing and researching in the down time. On the other, it seems so many are afraid to walk away, even temporarily, for fear of losing an audience.

> A little notice would have been nice.

Serious question: why? So an episode doesn't show up in your feed one week. I doubt I would even notice in the first place, much less jump to being concerned about the hosts' health or much less jump to feeling put out by the lack of warning.

The difference is exactly that you wouldn't notice and the other person would. There's a difference between a recurring piece of media being a drop in the bucket and having a specific thing you look forward to watching or listening to every week. If one week you're waiting for it to drop and it's mysteriously absent you might suspect something is wrong.

Seems reasonable to me.

What are the issues around Relay you’re referring to?

I enjoyed HI but the community on Reddit always seemed super weird to me. People just competing over who’s most in on the joke and endless posts “Brady would love this...” I can imagine it being tiresome to try to “manage” that. Other podcast communities don’t seem to suffer from same kind of super fans as much.

This might explain why the disappearance was a surprise to me. I never paid much attention to the Subreddit, other than checking to see why there had been an unannounced absence of new episodes for several months.

I remember that both the hosts encouraged audience engagement in different ways — several episodes featured long discussions about topics on the Subreddit, and they solicited audience participation in various projects.

I dunno, it’s his and Brady’s to do with as they wish. There’s a financial penalty to letting it lay fallow, but that’s their choice to make.

They stopped it right when the pandemic hit. That messed up podcast advertising for a while, and also the usual stuff they talked about.

Meanwhile they both have other projects and may have decided their time or energy was better spent elsewhere. Who knows?

A little unusual not to say anything but hey, they end episodes without goodbye so not a giant surprise. And Brady has said they’re on a break and on good terms so it isn’t totally secret either.

I enjoyed it while it was around and wish them well, but I don’t think they owe us anything. I subbed to Goodbye Internet to give a small incentive to them restarting, and that’s it.

But to my larger point, it is still an asset. If the community atrophies 40% while they’re gone...it’s still 60% of a great asset.

> But to my larger point, it is still an asset.

But he already burned a lot of good will by doing it so glib. For example, I don’t click “like” on his videos anymore, and I’m not subscribing to his paid director’s commentary. It only applies to Grey, we all know it’s not Brady’s fault.

He's probably quite wealthy and established already. It doesn't strike me as strange that he might burn out on some projects and not feel as motivated to continue as someone with no online profile.

It’s not the point - he should have said “it’s done”, and not leave listeners hanging.

That would involve confronting the end of the podcast, which is the sort of emotional thing that people typically procrastinate on.

It's hard for us to visualize since having such an audience sounds like a responsibility we'd take seriously. But to Grey it's just a small income stream on the side. He doesn't have an actual relationship with the members of the audience, even if the audience might believe otherwise.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that considering the change of perspective is an interesting exercise.

Brady put out a short blog post on the status of Hello Internet about 5 months ago. I felt a bit betrayed as an avid listener that they so suddenly and without any notice for several months stopped putting out episodes, but at least this blog seems to indicate that they simply have their focuses elsewhere for now.

https://www.bradyharanblog.com/hello-internet

The problem with this blog post is that it doesn’t really clarify anything.

I liked Hello Internet as much as anyone, but I don't think creators really owe fans anything. Also, you shouldn't be too surprised. Brady and Gray talked about if they ever ended HI, Gray probably wouldn't announce that it was over to anyone.

Sure, content creators don't necessarily owe more content to fans, but it's a two way street. In my opinion content creators should more or less clearly state if something is on hiatus (or ended, or whatever) rather than leaving it ambiguous, at least in the case of a regularly recurring kind of content. It's a simple but effective gesture to keep fans's trust.

Slight tangent but podcasting is an interesting counterpoint. Right now the business is pretty distributed. There's no youtube for podcasts although Apple is easily number one. There is now an absolute street fight between Apple and Spotify with Google, Amazon and some other wannabes fighting to own the walled garden. And crazy consolidation for creator tools and monetization. It'll be interesting to see if a "winner" emerges or if the space stays open.

All other podcast networks still use Apple for discovery, so the situation isn't that far from how Youtube still is essential for creators to be discovered.

Spotify is the first serious challenger, but so far the only ones to go Spotify exclusive as the really big ones that are paid handsomely to do it.

From my own point of view, I've entirely abandoned and forgotten about the existence of 3 podcasts that went Spotify only. The app on both iOS and windows is a terrible implementation of podcasts, appears broken and is lacking tons of features.

I have a podcast app (Overcast) which I use for everything, and nothing that I can't subscribe to in that will ever get my ears.

IIRC in the first 10 episodes they did say that if the podcast ever ended it would be like this.

HI ending was kinda expected. CGP Grey seems to be a guy who is trying to minimize his personal public presence and the show was going from general internet culture discussions between two creators to Brady the Interviewing Genius trying to get Grey the Reclusive Weirdo to say something interesting. That dynamic is obviously not sustainable.

Compare that with Cortex where Gray can talk productivity systems and his unanswered love for Apple all day long. Endless content there, as you can never overthink it too much.

Also he has a channel on Nebula, a streaming service set up as a clear hedge against YouTube doing bad things.

He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.

I thought he started standard.tv, or did that become Nebula?

Standard.tv is Nebula

> However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there

Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.

It’s probably an assumption based on the fact that CGP Grey is one of the highest paid creator on Patreon

The thing I've heard is "1,000 views = $1". I don't know how true that is anymore but it's my metric.

Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!)

When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per subscriber if people feel your content is worth it.

Youtube ad rates seem really high for the personal finance dudes. Graham Stephan and Andre Jikh come to mind.

I think that genre allows for showing those scammy get rich quick motivational guru type ads, which pay well. Everyone else has to be sponsored by ExpressVPN and CuriosityStream.

And ridge wallet, apparently.

Adds are based on the viewer, I occasionally get adds for Bentley when I watch back the streamed AP games I play in.

I also get a lot of Farage's new presumably penny stock product adds ( just let those play out to maker sure he's paying out)

What strikes me as odd is those super low quality portrait videos with uncanny valley synthesised like I am going to buy that crap?

Just a guess knowing how low Youtube ad rates are and how Grey has mentioned he switched over his income from ad sponsorships to patreon. And Patreon income is public.

You can hide the metrics on your public Patreon page.

> So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)

Not really.

There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.

Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:

- google ads, low effort low reward - brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward - patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward - tips and super chats and twitch - sometimes brave BAT rewards

Eh. If you count revenue streams:

- podcast ads - podcast subscriptions - merch - sponsorships - YouTube ads - nebula subscriptions

That’s pretty diversified and it includes paying for content three times.

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