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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

So they make around $150K/year but likely pay more tax, higher overheads, and have to fund their own benefits out of that. Depending on where they live this could either be a very good income or only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk/stress. That's on 2M-6M viewers too.

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.

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> Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff?

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...

(Also this is not counting their sponsorships, merch sales, etc.)

Which is much higher than ad revenue through Google. I know it because I have a friend with a YouTube channel +5mln and he has external team handling these issues. He told me revenue from sponsorships is 4 times more from what he makes from Google and his viewers are mostly from US.

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

I am a full-time YouTuber. This is spot on, only the figure can be much greater than 4X Adsense.

I'd love to talk to you more about this, can I contact you? My email is in my profile, which gives you my YT Channel.

Not a fan of their ads too, but once Linus said that he prefer to take this wildly disconnected ads than to do something related to tech, because it's less risky. They can easily recommend a impermeable pair of shoes but not a specific gpu brand or something like this.

Are sponsorships the parts of the video where the creator will shoutout a certain product/brand? Do they really pay that much?

^ I can imagine the vast majority of their income is through websites / webshops, sponsorships, referrals, etc. If the channel promotes a product there will be significantly increased sales.

There’s a few things in there:

- 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

On The Wan show (their conversation show they record live on Friday nights) Linus has said the company is close to making more on the LTTStore than from youtube.

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.

I literally forgot that it was a name of a video service... I was hoping he was also a bush pilot. Is it doing OK?

I mean based on their podcast it sounds like Linus’ friend/employee (seems like the line here is pretty blurry) and some remote dev who was originally just a fan criticizing their proposed infrastructure work on it full time and that’s about it, so it’s probably not as expensive overhead as you might assume.

On Friday, Luke said he had ~20 people reporting to him. I believe a few are on the Labs side, but most of them are Floatplane employees. They also maintain LTT Store and build out other projects, so they may not be solely dedicated to Floatplane, but it's a much bigger operation than you suggest.

Ah okay I guess you’re more informed than I am. Thanks for the info!

They have been putting extended cuts and behind the scenes videos on there so I would guess that would drive some subs. It looks like they have a couple dozen creators on there. I would guess it pays for itself if nothing else.

For the larger channels such as LTT, the YouTube ad revenue is likely approaching rounding error compared to their sponsorship/merch/platform revenue.

I think Linus recently mentioned (probably on LAN show) that they are positioned soon to make more money from merchandise than what their YT channel generates - because of their huge drops of the new backpack and screwdriver.

Simply Nailogical did the same thing as did a ton of the beauty vloggers

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

I don't think this is true in general. I think it's a lot closer to 50/50 for most. Obviously a lot of variability between channels, but YouTube ad revenue is not trivial.

LTT uploaded at least a couple of videos explaining how they make money:

https://youtu.be/-zt57TWkTF4 https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us

It's not. He's made videos of their revenue breakdown before and from what I remember AdSense still accounts for ~30% of revenue, which is significant.

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.

https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1486918784401088515

I own a small career related channel (135k subs) and adsense account for roughly 5-7% of our revenue. The majority of revenue coming from sponsorships. It depends highly on what niche you are in, as some other channels have much higher % accounting for ad revenue

>>Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips

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

I think that's the hot take here. $150k/yr for that much work and future instability compared to an office job with a ton of benefits... Hmmmm... For non-techies maybe this is the golden goose, but for people in the tech world for more than a decade it would probably be a no go, it would be for my family.

Lets not forget LTT store sold 60,000 screwdrivers @ $69.99 USD in a few hours on launch day!

They're leaving a lot of money on the table. No merch, no sponsored videos, no affiliate links, etc. They could be making a lot more if they added additional monetization.

I would expect tax to be substantially lower. There are lots of things you can deduct as business expenses, like part of your house used for filming.

Linus recently mentioned on the WAN show that he expects merch sales to become the biggest revenue stream this year.

Pewdiepie mentioned how annoying British VAT tax estimate prepayments were because based on his career category and income it expects him to have a bunch of employees that’d pay substantially more tax. So he’d prepay a ton of taxes as he was legally obligated to do then get a huge refund every year.

It makes sense that the tax code hasn’t yet caught up with “YouTube personality” as a career.

Who's to say getting a tech job is even in his options though.

> only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk/stress

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

He claims $90 an hour which sounds good but that ends up being the gross income. His net is 22.5% (150/664), and the hours he's quoting for working on a video are either wrong or insane, because he's claiming to be working for 17.8 hours a day which either means pernicious sleep deprivation or sitting at the computer every waking moment except to pee and eat food that takes no time to prepare. If it's really 100 hours per video 65 videos a year he's making just over $20 an hour which is is just madness.

It's not 65 videos per year. It's 65 videos total, since December 2017. So divide your numbers by five.

Ah, so then it's $150k a year for less than 25 hours a week. Good work if you can get it.

You can earn a similar deal by getting a part time tech job and buying lottery tickets with some of that.

A part time tech job that paid 150k per year seems dreamy. Is this a real thing? If so, where do I look? What if I'm not risk averse, do contracting gigs that net 150k a year exist? Are they attainable to jr devs?

Only if you live in the Valley, where the house prices are so high you’ll swallow your tongue or just laugh yourself to death.

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.

What I meant is: getting success on youtube requires a lot of luck. Instead earn $60k part time and spend half of your take home on lottery tickets to get the same success/probability distribution as youtubing!

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