How history/tech YouTube channel Asianometry reached 270K subscribers, $5K/month

removed

Entirely depends on your tastes.

The countryside in peru.

The author's equipment isn't all that expensive.

Taiwan (where the author lives) has lower cost of living than the US, but 1000 USD per month isn't quite luxury even there.

i watch this channel because the videos are not just trash topics solely engineered to gain ad revenue.

A lot of his topics in the video are not related to any advertising, and thus the CPM is low. I'm glad he's stuck through it, because the content is excellent.

i'm glad to hear that majority revenue actually comes from patreon - this means people do realize the value of the video, and there's enough willing to donate.

Yep, CPM for finance/fintech ads are among the highest.

> hire a video production team

That's a good way to kill the authenticity of a channel, and race to the bottom creating flashy but shallow content. I don't begrudge a youtuber merely hiring a cameraman, but the more people they hire on a permanent basis, the more pressure there is to optimize for monetary success. This means flashy well produced videos, but very shallow content that is more accessible to a wider audience.

> Yup. Generally speaking, people value content like this as pretty much having, well, no value at all. They don't want to pay for it, and they'll go out of there way to make sure they pay as little as possible for it.

A lot of the blame goes to the content creators, though.

They were the ones who set the expectations for "free content" by giving their creation away for "free". And in that context, making $5k a month is pretty good. If I have a garage sale, put $0 price tags on everything, and end up with $5k afterwards, then that's amazing.

> In fact, I would even go further and suggest that many people feel that all jobs, except for whatever job/industry they are in, as having little to no value and should be done for nothing.

That seems a little far fetched.

This rings true even for clearly necessary fields - I've had clients balk at pricing for a complete revamp of their network. Do you think I googled 'How to setup Company Network Safely' and went to work? Years of knowledge etc; that a lot of these guys don't care to understand

Most people chose to be ignorant in this manner. They'd rather spend as little as possible and denounce your skill rather than understand why xyz costs as much as it does.

How so? Google gives 55% of the ad revenue to the creator and pays for all the hosting and administrative costs itself. And none of the Patreon revenue goes to Google.

In the article it said that the creator makes around 60% of their income from AdSense, 40% from Patreon (which Google sees nothing from).

A quick search says that Google pays the publisher/creator 68% on the AdSense revenue.

So how does Google make an order of magnitude more of this channel than the content producer?

> without youtube, users would be seeking out this content, like they did with blogs before facebook.

Would they really though? His top viewed videos are "Why the Soviet Computer Failed" and "What Eating the Rich Did for Japan". If those were headlines for a personally-hosted video blog, the biggest group I can see eating that up is the Twitter mob, which, all things considered, doesn't generate much value and is unlikely to translate into a dedicated follower base.

In addition, those are kind of two different interest groups: I'd imagine less than 50% of people interested in the Soviet Computer topic are interested in viewing/reading a pro-"eat the rich" content piece. With YouTube, their recommendations allow the user to only be fed the content that correlates with what they want to see (and this is more apparent in other parts of YouTube, eg. Channel Awesome[0] where anything that's not in their Nostalgia Critic or Untitled Review Show series tends to get comparatively few views).

0: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChannelAwesome/videos

I think you’re wildly underestimating the value of centralized discovery with a heavy user base.

It depends on the type of content, really.

Someone who is reviewing tools could be hurt by getting sponsored by a tool brand, because of the obvious possible conflict of interest.

But that same person getting sponsored by one of the damn VPN providers might affect it less.

It also depends on where they put the sponsorship and how easy it is to skip.

It depends on the type of sponsorship. A friend turned [cooking in a niche cuisine tiktoker] does sponsorships where for example if the cooking step is to fry something in a pan, you just include the 1-2 seconds of adding the oil so that viewers see what type of oil (and brand) you're using. They get stuff sent to them like, use our toaster in your video and all you literally have to do is show yourself putting the bread in the toaster if you're making a video about like avocado toast or something. If they scaled it up properly they could easily clear $3k/month before counting the amount of growth that comes from uploading frequently (they've experimented with how much they grow per video but kinda get tired of doing it).

I do see other tiktokers do it poorly, like having a long lingering shot on the label that makes you realized the video is an ad. Somehow they still get views but their videos are really really boring.

I always wonder what his returns would be if he just stopped posting but kept the old videos up.

I realize it probably declines faster than you'd think - but imagine over the course of 5 years he'd prob still hit 100k in residual value. Which must be a nice safety blanket to have.

Assuming your time is worth minimum wage - you haven't even broken even yet.

This is a very, very long term play.

You have to bank on YouTube still being a dominate market, not getting too greedy with it's algorithms or revenue sharing, and your old videos continuing to attract a large number of views.

If any one of those goes wrong - you're basically working for below minimum wage.

And also you'll continue to make money off of previous work.

That video you did two years ago will still contribute Adsense revenue.

Yes. But the median person who is as smart and motivated as the author of Asionometry makes a lot more.

So where else would asianometry content fit?

By that standard, there's no such thing as monopoly. If you think there is one, you're always free to start your own country.

I am subscribed too.

He's sometimes a bit too (economically) left-wing for me, but I generally sticks to well-researched facts, so it has never been an issue that would impair my enjoyment.

The thing to remember is that it's a two-way door: current audiences move on, but we keep making more humans, and they keep "discovering" what youtube recommends to them, so realistically the threat is "leveling out" rather than "losing viewers" if you run a quality channel that isn't built on slagging others off.

Plus, we're already seeing alternatives (or rather, in-parallels) becoming quite established, most notably Floatplane and Nebula as created-by-youtuber(s)-who-wanted-an-off-platform-alternative.

This is an important point… I purchased a website about 3D printing at the beginning of this year and have been steadily improving the content quality and posts… Only for a recent Google update to obliterate 90% of my traffic overnight.

Two months later it’s starting to recover but that’s not the bedrock of a business you’d like to build upon.

sorry are you saying that $60,000 is not a lot? Because even in the US, that's a lot.

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He also gets corrected very often, no need to cherry pick your impressions to make it sound its perfect or something.

When you only have access to third party sources there is no way you can get everything right.

That exists too but most backers are going to want either some sort of privileged access to content or a parasocial relationship with the creator.

In some sense it is.

Lots of people want to be content creators. Just like lots of people want to be musicians or athletes (or pet vets or work with kids.) Or write novels or create video games.

Many of these people are willing to take somewhat lower pay in return for doing something they love.

Supply and demand do the rest.