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
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
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 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.