My Youtube earnings
brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com
brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com
I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticed
https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
Of course he has other income streams - sponsorships, lttstore.com, commissioned videos etc.
This is pretty common knowledge for monetized or high viewership (sponsored/paid for outside of Google) channels.
They both have private communities where people freely share a lot of good info (especially Project24).
There are many others that I have heard good things about but have not checked out myself.
Estimating earnings based on views/subs is helpful to prospective youtubers, letting them make wise decisions about whether they pursue that path or do something else with their time (it will probably dissuade more than it will encourage, but that's a good thing if in aggregate people are making sounder career decisions).
Totally taking the convo in the darker direction, but you can see this dynamic in play with Rogan‘s podcast. He’s a liberal, but those hot button right wing takes are probably what brings in the clicks. Every trans critique he makes caters to that traffic, so he milks that audience often.
What does one become when you effectively sell out to the analytics?
Your thoughts and perspective are no longer driven by your convictions or experience, but by this shit.
Is he?
"USA: the primary use of the term liberal is at some variance with European and worldwide usage. In the United States today, it is most associated with the definition of modern liberalism, which is a combination of social liberalism, public welfare and a mixed economy,[12] which is in contrast to classical liberalism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_parties_by_country#The...
This assumed cultural hegemony by some US citizens is frustrating as hell; they are incredibly quick to assume (or demand even) the rest of the world knows their cultural references/idioms/etc., yet make zero effort to discover what the rest of the world is doing. Unfortunately they are also loud and so it's easy to come to the false conclusion all US citizens are like that.
I used to believe this as well. I was thaught a lesson... In fact, now I understand that liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
> liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
Is your complaint an actual example of that? I've never actually heard the argument - I've heard "billionaires should not exist", but never "we should have a 100% tax on those making more than $100m", so I don't know if the claim you're making is as popular as you're making it out to be, nor do I believe is it an example of totalitarianism.
I also don't see actual examples of liberal governments doing that. People say lots of crazy stuff online, but "liberals say the darndest thing" is not the claim here.
These conversations never go anywhere. The battlelines are already drawn. It just becomes a semantic debate around loosely defined terms like totalitarianism.
Republican = social restrictions + economic freedoms
"Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.[10] Until the Great Depression and the rise of social liberalism, it was used under the name of economic liberalism. As a term, classical liberalism was applied in retronym to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism.[11] By modern standards, in the United States, simple liberalism often means social liberalism, but in Europe and Australia, simple liberalism often means classical liberalism.[12][13]
...
In the United States, classical liberalism may be described as "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal". Despite this context, classical liberalism rejects conservatism's higher tolerance for protectionism and social liberalism's inclination for collective group rights, due to classical liberalism's central principle of individualism.[14] Classical liberalism is also considered closely tied with right-libertarianism in the United States.[15] In Europe, liberalism, whether social (especially radical) or conservative, is classical liberalism in itself, so the term classical liberalism mainly refers to centre-right economic liberalism.[16]
"
"Liberal" in the US -> some social freedoms, but restricted in certain ways + economic restrictions.
"Liberal" outside the US -> social freedoms + economic freedoms.
I learned this as an American abroad when someone called me, who would generally be seen as conservative / libertarian in the US, "very liberal" when discussing gay rights (pro), gun rights / armed self-defense (pro), and abortion rights (pro-choice).
Again, it's just a fine point when discussing in an international context (like on HN). When speaking only with Americans, you'll never need this distinction, it's just good to be aware of it when discussing with non-Americans or when reading about foreign politics (e.g. FDP in Germany is a "liberal party" in the European sense of the word, but their policies are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If an American reads "liberal party", they would be surprised to learn that they campaign on cutting taxes, pro free market, privatization, etc., yet are also pro gay marriage and are for legalizing marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Democratic_Party_(Germany...)
Supporting gay rights and being pro-choice is seen as conservative??
These are many large quantitative changes, that are going to have qualitative implications.
For instance, given the small scale of each offering, post, etc., most creators won’t have developed deeply held individual visions to be compromised with a focus on adapting
I’m guessing (but not willing to check although it’s easily empirically proveavle) that the variance in view count per episode more than outweighs any “trans conversation premium” if that even exists. At acquisition Spotify mentioned Joe was the most searched query in their search bar they don’t have.
The value of his podcast is the massive audience of humans who watch his 2 to 3 hour multiple times a week diatribes, it’s probably not the little clips that anger people. If you’re clicking at a trans clip and foaming of the mouth, you’re probably going to be super disappointed to listen to 10 hours of rogan and find no salacious topic included.
Plus I’m biased once but he swung by my ju jitsu gym once and he seemed like one of the most normal humans every and super humble.
It’s probably either: how he speaks, his takes in general, how others view him, how others reamplify him, or something else, but I really doubt he’s beating the drum on transgender rights since he’s he seems to in favor of all socially liberal topics in general.
To me it was clear he had an axe to grind in regards to the subject, though, and took out that axe out semi-regularly.
[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-crazy-man-have-you-ever...
These are the questions that cut across the entire political spectrum, as there are plenty on the left questioning the excesses of this activist movement too.
I agree they are reasonable, but it’s kind of like a cock tease dog whistle (maybe a less crude way to put it is a feint dog whistle).
If you take a Kanye, and he says ‘I love Hitler’, that’s a blow horn. But if you say, ‘There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, and look at all that stuff that’s going on in Palestine’, now we’re angling. Everything you are saying is reasonable, but you are reconnoitering around the rim of a specific demographic.
I guess the question is, is this subtle play going past you, or are you letting it get a pass?
He’s keeping one foot in the ring because it’s a pragmatic way of acknowledging the existence of those viewpoints.
I’m not saying black people commit a lot of crime, but look at this shoplifting video. Proceeds to show black people looting. We need to do something about crime.
There are ways to hold that audience without being an outright demagogue.
I like Rogan, but this manipulation in the interest of holding that broader audience smells a little. Integrity is the word I guess.
We know what happens... you get Mr. Beast. He's known for hyper optimizing the metrics. Watch one of his interviews. His Joe Rogan interview was an eye opener.
Basically every scientific progress which gets published on peer reviewed journals (a lot of them open). Some books also are online.
If anything I'd prefer less interest of the general public on specific papers because the way it ends up is with people misunderstanding it to fit whatever the journalist/redditor that peddled it wanted it to mean, maliciously or not.
This issue, in this case, is information dispersal. This sort of information is highly analyzed, almost certainly, by google/youtube. They have all the data, so there's a lot more you can get out of analyzing it.
If ever channel's youtube data was released to the public like this, there would be a lot more notice.
Transparency doesn't just need to overcome secrecy, they need to overcome obscurity.
At the end of the day there's already huge amounts of youtubers showing their mansions or whatever to influence the gullible viewers, the ones who would miss the nuance of his situation would most likely fall for them anyway. There's already an abundance of blatant "false hope" being peddled far harder and wider, the chance of his objective analysis being misinterpreted by people is as far as i'm concerned insignificant.
A huge part of the phenomenon comes through how fashions form. Hype collects around emotionally-charged things. By their very nature, their spectacle is compromising some of the sincerity and value to maximize reach. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts.
HN is a perfect example of this: looks like a chat forum from 1998, but is very much current and edgy with the cool kids.
I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc.
The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest.
IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of.
I'm pretty sure those videos take a LONG time to make.
Primitive Life, Primitive Tools, Primitive Technology Ideas…
Youtube should take those channels down or force them to change name due to how SOE works.
But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing!
In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away.
Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this.
> SOE
Do you mean "seo"?
I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.
For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.
Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok.
Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero.
Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on.
Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs.
Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.
What methods did you use to monetize your blog?
Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s
I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution.
You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone.
Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued.
Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM.
The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors.
It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now?
/thread hijack
Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view.
I kinda want it both ways to be honest.
That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on.
Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
Likely it was a decision based on analytics that Google, and no one else, has.
Imagine we are talking a cable TV platform instead, and your analytics show that most people flip through channels most of the time, as opposed to actually watching something specific. You make a rule to only share revenue with channels if the viewer is engaged longer than 120 seconds. People are still watching TV, you are still monetizing, but the channels aren't getting fully paid and only you know the money involved.
Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
That's not even the half of it. Unless your channel is big enough to be considered a "partner", you are basically fucked when it comes to content strikes, DMCA, AI/contractor driven "community standards" issues, random demonetization, etc. There's no real "support".
The demonetizing thing is particularly funny, I know of channels where their videos get demonetized for content guidelines violations, but viewers still see advertisements. Happens a lot with firearms related content.
If they can keep spam out of my inbox, I’m sure they can figure out what’s objectionable to advertisers beyond “unpopularity”.
Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.
Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had?
What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort.
I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.
In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
Why does anyone do anything? There needs to be an incentive.
But of course there are more intrinsic motivations like wanting to give back to the community, practising their hobby, etc. Those would be equally valid reasons to make youtube videos.
You usually have to go up to "serious amateur" level before you make even token amounts of money (which still doesn't cover your tools much less your time), and 1k subscribers for a video hobbiest is a low bar for that.
Gopher was channelized. IRC was channelized. Usenet was channelized. Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls.
The entire "search" thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.
The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"
It’s always disappointing when a channel I enjoy goes into the “reaction video”, YouTube drama, clickbait type spiral :(
That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel.
I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo?
How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?
- branded merchandise
- endorse or develop your own products - write a book
- other platforms(TikTok, Instagram etc.)
Or use your experience and brand value to do things your YouTube fans might not even notice:
- public speaking
- consulting/video production for brands
- presenting work for commercial YouTube channels
Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar.
Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches.
I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.
Don't leave out cryptocurrency scams.
The video will be on youtube from the start, but as a private video. From there a part of their patreons might get very early access (e.g. CGP Grey has a tier for spell checking and gross errors spotting), and then all patreons get access to the final video. But still private (and/or exposed to channel paying members)
After a short time (a day at most) the video gets public and is fully dispatched to everyone on Youtube.
The way it's managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there's so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.
That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse.
It's an insane imbalance of power.
More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production.
The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying?
I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious.
The algo just didn't experiment with it.
I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.
That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.
I can open YouTube on any given day and will be given recommendations for things I've never shown the slightest bit of interest in.
For example, right now I've got:
- A clip for the big bang theory - Never watched anything on that show on youtube
- "Why does italy have 6000 ghost towns (Hidden Italy)" - Absolutely no idea why it thinks that would interest me, never been to Italy or watched any kind of travel based videos.
- "I hitchhiked Onto A Private Jet To Werever It's Going" - Again, I couldn't give a damn
- "The Legendary World of Spyro Games - Caddicarus" - I have no idea what that is, or why it thinks it interests me.
- "Singapore welcomes 2023 with New Year fireworks at Marina Bay" - Ok, and? Never been there, never watched any content about the place.
- "I called every U.S. Representative in the country. Here were the responses I got." - I'm not American, and give absolutely zero f's about US politics.
- "I've Been Living In A Ghost Town for Almost 3 YEARS!" - Good for you, I don't care.
- "Dark Secrets of the World’s Most Isolated Island" - Nope.
It has improved slightly from the looks of things. Usually I get videos about minecraft, or some twat gorping with their mouth wide open trying to make a mundane and uninteresting topic seem like something I should be interested in whilst remembering to smash the like button and click the bell.
The platform has so many problems.
It started approx 2 years ago and has gradually gotten worse to the point where some users see no recommendations relevent to them at all.
Don't take my word for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/search?q=recommendations&re...
Until I did that, the algorithm was too good at showing me things similar to what I had already watched. I wanted a more varied feed.
I also love YouTube as there is a lot of high-quality content. But I'm sometimes a bit disappointed with the more recent phenomenon of professional YouTubers (sponsoring of videos, "please comment below") and also a lot of them getting uninspired after some time. Now that I think of it, I don't know if professional YouTubers are those who add more value to the platform.
And yes, YT should have worthy competitors, and it's surprising that it doesn't. YT is obviously very profitable; why don't other big competitors don't give it a try, with a similar angle? TikTok is wildly different, and so is Twitch; but a version of Twitch that would directly compete with YT doesn't seem that hard to implement if you're Amazon?
Yeah, some hybrid of web forums but with videos would be great. No idea how I'd put these two ideas together design- product-wise though.
That's not to diminish the medium, or it's benefits over traditional, one-2-many mass media. It's also not meant to diminish youtube's role, before or after google acquired them. Certainly not to diminish creators. I just think it's worth thinking about where it all came from. Is it a quasi-inevitability brought on by technology
I think a lot of modern tech giants occupy spaces where it's hard to tell if they are building a thing, or squatting.
If you worked in the SEO world after Google acquired YT it was a common hack to use YT videos to rank for hard keywords because it was proven Google gave YT favorable positions, even compared to other video sites. There were dedicated tools for quickly creating spam videos on topics and then linking people to your website.
YT wasn't completely dominant until they were acquired by Google and had their growth boosted via monopoly tactics using Google Search
Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff? I have to imagine revenue from their other sources (e.g. their merchandise, sponsors, other?) is the majority of their income if this is what we can expect from YouTube.
Regardless thanks for sharing.
Christine (host) now sells what appears to be a very successful boutique nail polish line. So successful, she and her SO basically spend more time BSing with their fans (customers) on YT Live and Twitch than making new content
E: seems like I was a bit off. AdSense accounted for 18% of their 2021 revenue. Still a significant portion though. 30% might be closer to their 2020 AdSense revenue given the growth of their merch over the last few years.
- Sponsorships may pay a bunch more than YT ads. This Chanel doesn’t do them(?).
- More videos means (potentially) more total views means more revenue. This channel doesn’t post as often as some big channels
- Some people are more desirable to advertisers. If those people are in your audience, you get paid more. So some channels get paid more per view than others
Linus Tech Tips posted their youtube revenue just the other day[0]. For posterity, it's about 4.6 million, and only shows March-December. I can't find the original tweet that is the source of this information.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/100fmgx/linu...
However his sponsorships are really well placed and match the content. Also listening t these ads is not as painful as Linux Tech Tips, so probably he makes more from sponsorships than average.
Yes, so there are YouTube ads and sponsorship segments and people still watch it
nonsense, not having to deal with corporate life is easily worth $50k on its own
no dumb meetings
no imbeciles imposing their will on you just because they started before you
no moronic company brainwashing, thought-policing, bossware etc etc
I am pretty sure their YT Ad Revenue is a small fraction of their over all revenue. That is what the successful channels do, Merch and Internal Ads (not YT Ads) are WAY more profitable than YT Ads
It makes sense that the tax code hasn’t yet caught up with “YouTube personality” as a career.
He also has a lot of sponsorships and sponsored videos as well. He also has Floatplane but I don't know how much money that makes.
There are people who contract and then just take a few months off between contracts. If you can work the health insurance it’s okay.
I think there’s a world where contracting houses have certain specialized individuals who work 15 hours a week on three projects, but if those places exist I haven’t worked for any of them. In that hypothetical environment you should be able to get 30 or 20 hours a week if you wanted. Or 55 for that matter.
this is the saddest part. he is in the top 0.1% of his genre and making $90 an hour, but 99.9% of them make nothing. i dont know what drives people to want to make videos when the odds are like that
most creative endeavors are like this. I think it's fine, as long as those 99.9% aren't relying on their creative endeavors to make their living.
I pretty regularly think about the Twitch streamers that spend hours streaming to literally zero viewers. They stream for months and even narrate what they're doing, but nobody's watching. You wonder if it's a learned behavior from watching Twitch for so long.
I used to write tech How To articles on my site around 15 years back, just to help other people. Then adsense came along and I made some money but the primary motivation was to learn and share my knowledge with others.
Now whenever I interview people in my professional life (I'm a CTO and have to interview people for top level positions), they routinely tell me, they had their best interview. For long, I couldn't trace it back to the podcast. After many people compliment me, I asked one what made it a better interview. He said, you let me explain my project and you listened. That is when it clicked. Those are the skills I learned as a podcast host.
I paused the podcast last year, because I got covid and for other personal reasons. With this feedback, I'm going to restart the podcast.
Not all creative projects have to make money directly. There could be 2nd order benefits, which we may not see immediately.
It was still doing hundreds of downloads per month a year after the last episode (podfaded unfortunately, my co-host didn't have any more free time after having a kid). The folks clicking the ad seemed to enjoy the show and from there word of mouth took over.
Like you say not everything needs to make money, but that worked for me(tm) in terms of growing the audience. YMMV ofc, could have just been lucky.
The biggest thing I got out of it (aside from dopamine in the moment of course) was the speaking skills. Just being able to project my voice better, better formulate my thoughts, etc. Well worth doing in hindsight.
E: Aye, this one. Timestamped but I'd recommend the entire video if you're interested in YT nerd stuff https://youtu.be/6pMhBaG81MI?t=472
I kept putting more and more work into my content. Some videos did well, and some got practically no views. At some point into it, I realized that I was doing projects to create YouTube content and that I didn't enjoy the process of editing videos. I was spending 30-40 hours editing a 10 minute video because my production standards kept getting higher and higher. So I stopped.
Sometimes I get the urge to make a video and when I do I try to limit myself to a couple of hours to get it done. My last video (published in October) I spent around a day recording and editing because I was pretty proud of the project. It had pop-culture discoverability, and I thought people would find it interesting and valuable. I posted it around on social media a bit, but didn't get too much traffic from social media. I posted it at the end of October and so far it has only gotten 100 views.
By contrast, my most popular video got that amount in the past day. It is what YouTubers call an evergreen video. That single video makes up about 80% of my channel revenue which is down to about $25/month now. At the channel's peak, I was making up to $200/month from ad revenue on the channel.
I will continue to make occasional videos when I feel like it, but I am not trying to make anything from my content.
I tried doing a video of myself talking off the cuff on a topic. Watching myself, it was painful. I obviously needed to write myself a script, do editing, etc. I would rather just write the text, and skip the video bit. :)
The 99.9% don't earn as much because their content isn't as highly viewed. That appears completely fair to me.
A quick google shows a range of $0.03/cpm to $13.00/cpm depending on category.
Meanwhile in Canada, our wireless telecoms have convinced the government that this level of bandwidth consumption should cost hundreds a month otherwise the cellular network would crash.
India got a massive bandwidth bump precisely because a new player (Jio) came and gave unprecedented bandwidth at literal pennies per GB and changed india forever. Not saying this company or it’s runners are nice people or aren’t corrupt but it helps even if corruption has a level of monopoly protection I suppose!
What's the government got to do with mobile data prices?
- USA: $6.98
- India: $0.62
I am sure the smart folks in Google will know who is watching based on the videos being watched and show appropriate ads at that time or maybe show generic ads about products which they know parents with young kids want.
There’s a video about building a quadcopter for instance, and bricks are used for the frame but he’s also be soldering to have what he needs on the chip. Same for the submarine ones, where the radio control will have nothing to do with Lego.
And you’ll see magnets, metal axles, non Lego controllers, survolting etc. Highly recommend for anyone curious about funny practical experiments.
I follow a lot of smaller full time YouTubers, nearly all do sponsored advertising within their videos.
That is where advertisers are indeed paying more for quality content highly targeted to their consumers - directly to the creators, not through Google's platform.
Those deals can be very lucrative because audiences are more receptive to advertising that comes from, and directly supports, the creators they follow.
I've seen creators I respect take somewhat dubious sponsorships and still be supported by their fans. The recent Established Titles controversy was a good example of that. [1]
Usually a wage or salary is a payment in exchange for doing something. Which this isn’t.
I would imagine most places treat this similarly to the way something like a book publishing agreement works.
This is my biggest pet peeve with YouTubers. THEY ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF YOUTUBE.
employment laws do not apply to a youtuber, unless they are employed by some other company, but they do NOT have an employment relationship with YouTube, they are not "employees" of YouTube, and Susan Wojcicki is not "their boss"
Everytime there is a YT Change (like happen recently) there is all these videos where YT often try to compare their experience with employment, how their "boss" Susan did something, or how they are being "Fired" if they get banned, or other such non-sense. That is my peeve.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if some countries define employee differently.
I would be surprised if any nation classified a person uploading videos on to a platform with the hopes of having a revenue share on ads the 3rd party sells on those videos is in anyway an "employee" of any kind.
I would also be surprised if any country has laws where 2 parties could not agree to non-disclosure of the terms of their business contract (which is the basis for this comment thread). that is pretty standard really
I would also be surprised since most of the time when you upload a video you have to agree you will be governed under the Laws of the US, and even more specific the laws of California
I would be surprised in some countries dont change their laws at some time to account for this digital sharecropping (from Youtube and iOS App Store to Uber, etc), and set some rules (like with employment) to this wild west of making a living that affects millions...
Any country or group of people is welcome to spin up their own data centers and content moderations teams to make their own YouTube.
The point is is no one else in the world wants to make the enormous investment required to create a YouTube, so why should they get to make the rules?
It is not technically hard to make a YouTube alternative, just expensive.
"Someone rich could make a new ecosystem" is unrelated to whether the current ecosystem resembles sharecropping.
They can always do that too, but I'm also full for them inconveniencing those businesses.
Businesses should be whiped and forced to play responsibly in society. They can innovate on tech and features, they don't have to innovate on milking people and erroding working rights.
There are and were multitudes of video hosting and serving websites. It is just ridiculously expensive.
Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure what you mean. That it's not rocket science? Well, yes, it isn't. It's not the technology: money (and to a second extend, entrenchment and network effects, and ties with Android, and many other non-tech things) IS of course the huge, sky-high, bar, to building an alternative YouTube.
>Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.*
Well, it was quite a lot of mobility in the feudal ranks. Any competent mercenary could rise to be a higher ranking soldier, and any compenent and cunning higher ranking soldier could, and often did, take on some existing feudal lords, and get their own smaller or bigger fiefdom. After some point, even succesful merchants could get their own armies and castles and be feudal "nobility". Tons of stories from the feudal times (that was what all of cross-feudal fighting was about), and thousands of castles and fiefdoms - and that's just in Europe.
Whereas Youtube? That's one service of its size/scale in the world, covering multiple billions of people.
That would be more like trying to get something competitive not to a feudal lord (which were a dime a dozen), but to the whole of an empire.
This has to stop. People are making products which one company uses to profit. This company is buying their labor—albeit in a really roundabout way. We’ve heard this gaslighting from e.g. Uber, where their workers weren’t employees but “gig workers”, or some other thing.
The only reason companies do this is to get their labor for cheaper. No, these are YouTube workers, their labor is bought by YouTube, and YouTube should obey all labor laws when they buy their labor and profit from their work.
furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
I understand it is a rhetorically powerful phrase, digital sharecropper, but unfortunately as often happens with analogies it falls apart with all the ways it does not fit.
How is this a useful distinction? It's about how you can sell the product, but doesn't change the fact that you don't own your lot, that you pay a percentage share to the owner of the place, that they can change the terms or even crush you anytime they like, and so on.
>furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
What you paid to the landowner was a percentage of your lot's production, same as with YouTube.
No, this is an even further stretch.
There are various tests that apply to contractors in the U.K. to work out if you’re an employee or a Lego mate contracting company, as it makes a difference to how taxes and benefits are calculated. Fro my understanding YouTube nowhere near meets that criteria of employee/employer. Companies like Uber and deliveroo are far closer.
As there are in most of the world. Most of them were made for the factory and office era, and despite "updates" still within the old spirit, are antiquated in 2023 when it comes to addressing many new work scenarios...
That is, I wonder if the the deregulation era of the 1980s also deregulated labor practices to the extent that companies can now jump through these hoops in order to avoid labor laws.
From memory, the issue is publicly disclosing CPM among some other things (at least it was 4+ years ago).
I actually wonder if posting it off-platform is even allowed, I've seen Twitch enforce their platform exclusivity for 24 hours for Partners.
The same logic applies to most tech jobs. I would expect more big tech companies would want to broadcast their comp numbers to encourage more people to pursue those careers and apply to those companies. The average joe probably assumes SWEs at Google make $100-150K MAX. If more people knew they could make doctor-like numbers without going to grad school (or even going to college at all in some cases), more people would go into tech. But I guess companies have done the math and determined its better to conceal that information best they can to keep their advantage during negotiations.
I remember emailing someone that said they “didn’t share how much they made because it’s against TOS” after the policy changed and they still declined.
I think it might have been the “I made my Christmas lights controlled by anyone on the internet” guy.
It was a long time ago.
This quora post quotes the terms: https://www.quora.com/Am-I-allowed-to-show-my-earnings-to-my...
"HOWEVER, YOU MAY ACCURATELY DISCLOSE THE AMOUNT OF GOOGLE’S GROSS PAYMENTS TO YOU PURSUANT TO THE PROGRAM"
Linus Tech Tips has published their earnings for the past couple of years. One detailed video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4
Linus also posted his adsense of ~$4.6million for the last 9 months a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094682622194032...
Their payroll and overhead costs probably eat up a significant part of that 4.6m.
https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
Source on employee count: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
my best video has 8k views, coming in at between 100-1000 per month depending how many impressions the algorithm decides to allot to me.
It happens when your video reaches the frontpage of Youtube.
I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it reached "the front page of YouTube" like the sibling post suggested or it would have millions.
Somehow it must've got suggested to a few people and maybe it had a high engagement rate (likes and comments?) which was somehow taken positively. I'm purely guessing though.
It really isn't an impressive video though it does have a 99% like ratio. I'm a bit embarrassed to self promote here so I'll email you based on your HN profile site contact page.
I’ve seen YouTubers comment that they got in to it just because they loved video editing. Not planning to make money, just to share content and work worth the tools to create it.
But I guess it's hard hard work to grow a channel to this size and also not a guaranteed success.
Basically have a day job before you go all in as a content creator.
Right on. I always tell people that I can’t pay my employees with subs and likes.
For most videos, an overwhelming majority of views come from traffic suggested by YouTube in some manner (home page, sidebar, after a video). I have millions of subscribers across a few channels. Subscriber notification and feeds invariably account for a very-low-single-digit percent of video views.
It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).
But that’s not the end of the craziness.
About a year ago, that video was suddenly and inexplicably deemed by YouTube as unsuitable for all advertisers. I appealed, but they stuck with their decision.
In the year since, that video has brought in ~$80.
While I have found success on YouTube, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience. YouTube is the most saturated market on the planet, and and at the end of the day, you are subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm. It is not possible to succeed on YouTube without significant effort, but significant effort doesn’t guarantee success. Moreover, the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable, and it’s sometimes not there at all. You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
People understand that high-quality content is necessary for success on YouTube, but they often lose sight of the fact that it is not sufficient. Not only do you have to create quality content, but you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them on YouTube - which is obviously very, very hard.
You can do everything right and still lose, if you're not lucky.
Considering HN biased towards startups, I wonder can the same reasoning be applied to starting a company. Starting a SAAS company sounds the same:
- the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable
- subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm (product-market fit)
- strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience
> You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
Probably this one is not that harsh as it seems, Ludwig made an experiment "I made a secret YouTube channel to prove it's not luck". Many creators are using multiple platforms and income sources, so it's not all YT in the end.
It makes me see now more why Mr. Beast is getting his content translated....
Based on my understanding, RPM is directly proportional to the amount of money you make.
So, how does a lot of views from India cause a lower RPM?
In the post the author even says this:
> When I see my RPM drop suddenly, it is usually because my videos are being watched a lot in India
Like, say you have a billion views, and 200 million of those views were from India. Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?
Why does Indian viewers cause this? I mean, they too see ads, right? Or is it because in India it costs less (??) to put up an ad?
Not a lot of Indians are going to buy your product even if they the cost of the product will probably be lower for Indians so the advertiser makes less money
No, that would mathematically make no sense.
His average RPM drops because of views from India but he still makes some money from the extra 200 million views.
I'm Indian. The reason Indian views make less money is simply that the advertisers who advertise to Indian audiences have lower budgets due to PPP. So the amount they pay to YouTube is less than what a US advertiser would pay. In turn, the channel's share of the revenue (supposedly 55% of it) is also less.
Advertisers can target ads based on various demographic info, e.g. age, gender, location. Cookies etc allow for even more targetting.
So you can imagine an advertising bidding high for ad spots shown to 20-30 males in London (i.e. relatively rich westerners who can afford your product), and bidding low for poorer nations where people do not have as much money to spend (so are not your target customer - e.g. imagine you are trying to sell iPhones etc)
> But don’t think filming Lego will guarantee you high earnings. There are many, many creators who release Lego videos continuously and have no subs and get no views. Too many. Hundreds, maybe thousands of such creators. It is kind of heartbreaking to see people put so much time and effort for (supposedly) nothing
OP got lucky to get a lot of subscribers and made themselves known in the subject, 10 M views per video in average is a good performance.
Certainly my nieces are no less interested in Lego than my nephews, and growing up my sisters weren't less interested than my brothers (although there did seem to be a difference in focus in construction vs Sims-like play).
USD$90/hr on making content that you love ain't a bad haul. I wonder how much OP would continue to make from their top 10 most popular videos if they decided to throw in the towel and stop making new content.
(I wonder if the USD$90/hr estimation includes 1099 taxes?)
Also, 38.5% average retention seems to suggest that people have really crappy attention spans OR there's so much else on the Internet to barely consume!
Yes, I'm in the target audience: middle age male in US.
I think this is the perfect example of a niche area with an whale/long-tail distribution. It demonstrates the futility - to me - of doing any serious "YouTubing" as a professional plan - its something you have to strike luck and then build on.
Sadly, I keep getting recommended clips from these mindless "let's build a big lego technic thing to do something, without much cleverness applied at all" videos. It wouldn't surprise me if they earn much more than this clever channel.
If I was trying to make money from it, I would certainly be tempted to pivot into only reviewing a specific genre. So it is no wonder that larger channels end up doing so much clickbait stuff: whatever pays the bills.
He is leaving a lot of money on the table. Most youtubers make more money from sponsorships that from ad rev.
* Max 10,000 € per round
* Max 3 months per round
* Max 2 rounds per year
* Needs a group of at least 3 persons to organise
I wonder how much more money their (or any) channel would make and how long it would take to taper off?
I suppose the main reason would be algo changes on recommendations, then age after a number of years, and possibly other channels potentially 'recycling' the content. Perhaps the popularity of lego and YT itself also.
What does this mean? That 5.9% of users who were shown an ad, clicked the ad (and thus left the video to pursue catfood?)
Impressions CTR means 5.9% of the users shown the thumbnail/title/video clicked on it.
With 10.8m views and a CTR of 5.9%, it means that specific video had about 180m impressions.
No, most viewers were 18-44.
"Middle-aged" is 45-65.
60 is a more usual endpoint, but...
It's a range. The middle of that range is 55, so following that math it would be 110, not 130.
But as the other reply points out, it's the middle section of being an adult. So if you take that 45-65 range, and treat it as the exact middle of your adult life, then you get 92, which is a bit high but not crazy. If you take that 45-65 range and assume old age will be the same length, you get 85, which is pretty close for wealthy non-US countries.
But you are right that his peak earning range was 25-34 (so less than middle age) and his second highest range was 18-24.
So yes I'd agree this isn't middle-age.
Edit: I just opened YouTube Studio myself, it looks they're counted as "Browse features":
> Traffic from the homepage/home screen, the subscription feed, and other browsing features.
This explains a lot about how YouTube gains most of their money, I mean like for the content you're making they get most of the monetization.
It would be interesting to see his revenue graphed over time. Pretty sure he didn't make 12k/mo for the first few years. Which means he's making more Than that, now.
Middle aged traditionally is 40-60.
The fact that middle aged is defined as 40-60 is weird in the same way that the "mid-western" United States being almost entirely east of Mississippi river is.
It is interesting to see the difference in RPM for different kinds of content. My channel RPM is $3.52, highest video is $7.01. I get around 8,000 views per month for all my videos.
subscribers: 2.9 million
video views: 705 million
uploads: 65
total earnings: 664 000 USD
Average number of views per video: 10 millions (!)
Views per subscriber: 200-250 (also a lot!)
It's a super successful channel, and it's not easy to emulate those numbers...
It seems like the ones that make megabucks need to do brand partnerships and sponsorships type stuff, which is itself a lot of work to launch and manage.
Inexpensive (somewhat), easy to buy on line, always another kit to buy.
Take 3blue1brown. Fantastic content, but what ads relate? (Probably Lego, but that might just be me).
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1270087-linus-media-group-ma...
Do I need to go as far as dedicated computer and register new account with fake ID/SIM card or is VPN enough?
And we edit on two M1 Ultra Mac Studios, as well as M1 Max MacBook Pros, all fully-optioned.
People vastly underestimate the time and expense involved with “just posting videos to YouTube.”
(If it’s such easy money, why aren’t they doing it…)
You do not need a really beefy computer to edit videos especially when you're starting out. A Canva Pro subscription is a couple of hundred dollars and will let you upload all your footage and then edit it within the browser meaning you don't need to have a powerful computer. If you grow your channel and your needs change then just cancel Canva and buy that bigger machine you need. Use your phone or something on the cheaper end (of cameras) like a GoPro to record.
https://brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com/2022/09/12/my-c...
He's also in Finland, so the cost of gear might not be as cheap as in the US.
> Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.
Per the article...
"Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN."
Taxes would be pretty simple to approximate given he lives in Finland and gives a rough average of his monthly revenue.
I recommend reading the article before commenting.