The True Costs of Being on YouTube
carlalallimusic.substack.com
carlalallimusic.substack.com
If she had done more of the work herself, it may have meant longer time between each video but more potential for the channel to be profitable.
Profitable channels, and there's not that many of them, usually take many years to get to profitability- or some semblance of being able to live off YT. Without that patience and keeping costs down while income is low, is a recipe for an unprofitable channel.
Basic technical competency in the video is tablestakes but most of that can be achieved with some minimal initial investment and gruntwork. But after that it's your charisma that makes you succeed. If you have none then that's on you.
There is a lot of bad content on YouTube that’s very successful. I think it’s more about getting into people’s daily routine and occupying mindshare, than having explosions every few seconds like Mr beast.
To me, that explains the psychology.
You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)
Those are contradictory.
In that interpretation, the two statements are contradictory and puzzling.
It’s a common failing of those coming from bigger companies to completely underestimate what it takes and how lean you have to be to launch a new company. The result is things like Quibi where a bunch of big execs think they can just hit product market fit and have revenue immediately.
I get that the author wants to be a chef and that's fine but I don't think YouTube really rewards high production costs as much as pushing out frequent content.
Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it. When he was barely known, he still did stunts which were staggering costly, given his then level of success.
A different example is storytime animation. People telling cute, short stories about their lives used self produced animations to do so. This is literally hundreds of times more labor-intensive than vlogging to camera. They weren't paying money to others but they were using weeks instead of minutes of their own time to produce somewhat similar content. Several of these animators became huge on YouTube, to the point where they now hire artists and engineers.
Lots of other creators have got success by doing things much more ambitious than the norm. The slo-mo guys did something like lots of others but much much more professionally. Jazza tested more art products than anyone else, for example one of every alcohol marker set in the world, and the scope made his content stand out.
Of course if you aren't successful with an expensive project you will lose a lot of money but that's just a tautology. YouTube has literally millions of low-budget channels who also didn't come near to recouping their costs.
> My RPM is around $10
> Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go?
You can't combine those two stats like this. CPM is the cost to the advertiser per ad view. RPM is the payout to the creator per video view. But it's not the case that every video will result in exactly one ad view. Sometimes the viewer is blocking ads. Sometimes there's no ad in the inventory for that specific view event.
Ad blockers typically leave the YouTube service thinking that an ad has been watched, otherwise they wouldn't get far. These bogus views are counted in the thousands of views, and the proportion that aren't watched is baked into the price.
Surely videos of very similar quality could be made with a fraction of that budget if the fat was trimmed and it was approached more bootstrap-y instead of a full production.
Doug DeMuro is a great example of this. It's him, wearing whatever he was going to wear that day, looking however he looks, in whatever lighting the weather gives him, with a tripod for a main camera, and an iPhone for interior shots. He hasn't really scaled up production value as he's gotten popular, and I think people appreciate the authenticity.
Even if she had ambitions for high production values, starting simple and scaling up when the channel can financially support it, seems to make much more sense. My guess is she was used to the production and budget of Bon Appétit, where she used to make videos, and was looking to fast track to a similar setup where she just had to care about the cooking.
1 tripod camera and him wearing one that gets a top down view of what he is doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q8M60LXMtY
The quality of the content is very good, even though the production is simple. He has a fancier setup now, but he only moved to that after his channel became popular.
I watched one of her videos and the sound effects were annoying, so cut those. Skip the color grading. Stick to 1 or 2 stationary cameras. At least attempt to learn how to edit audio and video. No idea what a food stylist is, probably cut that out too.
I would probably learn how to shoot the content over editing (slash the crew to 0/1 person on filming days) - however learning how to edit (the basics) teaches you how to shoot and how to review final output.
I think he did have a good camera early on, but that's more of a one time 1k-2k purchase, not 3500 a video.
I do know that there are many profitable cooking YouTube channels that didn’t have a separate producer and food stylist from day 1, and probably still don’t.
The mistake is thinking YouTube content needs to be quality to be successful.
It makes sense - the amount that something costs to make always sounds like a lot (especially media, music, film, etc). But, while I have no authority of experience at all, my personal lifetime heuristics tell me that, if you could define the number of dollars something should cost to produce, where spending more isn't worth the quality bump and spending less isn't worth the quality dip, that number would probably be closer to what people are actually spending than whatever number the "that sounds like too much" crowd would come up with.
I mean, it's of course pretty subjective (you can make content at varying levels of quality with equal justifications for each). I just tend to lean toward the "things cost more than you think" direction.
I could be wrong in this case. I don't know. $3500 seems like it's in that range to me (where it sounds like a lot, but might not be for the production level she's aiming for).
No idea what the breakdown would be - $5k per day shooting, $1,500 per edit? Best guess everyone is being paid $250/hr.
> If we roll with the average Adsense income, here’s the bottom line: $14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s a lot to sink into a channel that is barely moving book sales and not getting me a TV deal. Simply put, it’s completely unsustainable from a business perspective.
Why carry on doing that for so long?
In contrast, somebody like Maangchi took the opposite approach. Her earliest videos are still up and you can see the truly homemade approach. Granted, she was in early and it is surely massively more competitive now.
They weren't actually losing money. If you read further, it turns out that the channel was profitable thanks to video sponsorships.
Because her publisher told her to! "It's important for authors to have a social media presence!" "You can't have unprofessional videos, viewers won't like that!" ...and other falsehoods.
I thought the split was something like 55-45 for Youtube vs the creator. This sounds more like 66-33, is this typical for other creators / influencers as well?
The RPM she achieved is excellent (average in many niches is $1-$2), she could have been incredibly successful if she trimmed down her production cost.
If production had cost her nothing she would only have made $1k a week, for something that would have taken up half of her time.
There are very successful people making high budget video and very successful people making shoestring video on YT. She didn't really have the following to do either. The success that she had on YouTube was driven by her following elsewhere, and she only continued losing money for so long because she was motivated by non-YouTube goals.
It used to be that people made homemade videos with the hope of graduating to 'Real' TV'—think Andy Samberg & friends getting picked up by SNL or the guys from Big Brother magazine filming themselves on VHS and getting picked up as Jackass after a bidding war.
15 years later, and now Real TV is a hollow shell. The viewership and ad money evaporated. Outside of sports and news, cable TV is fully dead, showing Pawn Stars on a 24/7 loop. Live news has never had lower production values with the guests Zooming in from their spare rooms and the hosts just showing screenshots of tweets as news.
Check the viewership on your favorite cable TV channel. The numbers are comically low and far below even niche YouTubers: https://ustvdb.com/networks/
TV (and before it, music) used to be INCREDIBLY lucrative. TV shows used to get 10s of millions of viewers on a weekly basis. The ad money was incredible. Everyone had mansions and vacation mansions. Except for sports and news, that is all gone now.
This creator is coming from Bon Appetite and going solo. A monthly budget of $14k to produce 4 cooking shows IS comically low compared to the old BA world. That's $3500 to produce, film, edit, and post a full 30min+ Food Network-style cooking show. $3500 is a shoestring budget for any kind of professional production. It's pocket money.
The response here is that "my favorite youtuber straps a GoPro to their head or films with their iPhone - why should anyone spend more than that?". That take is economically correct. The absolute flood of content is making it unsustainable to produce anything more expensive than that unless you can appeal to a Mr. Beast-sized audience. But that goes for YouTube AND TV.
In the old days, everyone who wanted cooking content would watch Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay. But now there are hundreds of people around the world making cooking content in all shapes and sizes and genres, but the total audience is still roughly the same size. The pie is getting sliced smaller and smaller and the type of content that people want has evolved.
Unless you look at the numbers, it's hard to comprehend how much the media landscape has shifted in the past 15 years. All the subconscience assumptions people still hold are wrong. By viewership, Fox News is just a moderately large Youtube channel that happens to reach a demographic that actually votes and buys products from ads. Many, many Youtubers and podcasts reach a lot more people. Broadcast and cable TV still account for ~45% of total TV viewership, but the vast majority of people under the age of 35 now NEVER watch traditional TV and only use streaming services or social media. The audience for traditional TV is almost entirely 40+, and the entire business is obviously on borrowed time.
The author of this post got out there and tried something to see if it would work, which is commendable. It didn't work. But the problem wasn't so much that they spent too much money to make Youtube videos. Spending $35 per episode instead of $3500 wouldn't have achieved their goals. The problem is that using a Youtube channel to "get a TV show" is chasing a goal that just doesn't exist in 2025. There is no more TV show to get. The people making Youtube videos and the people making Food Network shows are both surviving on shoestring budgets and ever-dropping income. It's just as bad over there as it is over here.
Another aspect which the author touched on but which you didn't mention is that YouTube is optimized for people who watch a lot of YouTube. Both technically and culturally it's set up to work well if you fit in with that world, rather than if you just see it as a platform to plug something else on. One example is the fact that her subscriber count grew so slowly. If course: people who are just on YouTube to watch a particular video linked from somewhere else do not like, comment or subscribe, without which building virality is incredibly hard. And people who are on YouTube all the time will not like the aesthetic, will not care about the book, substack, or Instagram content, will not include you in YouTube discourse which makes celebrities.
Similarly, other social media will penalise stuff that links outside their network to YouTube video content, as mentioned by the author. Your followership there will be effectively neutralised if you try to use it to build success on another platform.
I just want quick and clear instructions.
We were used to thousands words long cooking blogs where the actual recipe was buried in personal anecdotes/psychological therapy. 10+ minutes long cooking videos for a simple recipe are even worse.
Someone like @BakingHermann mastered the Shorts : all the instructions are here, few anecdotes, few tips, done. No multiple focus on their face or their appliance. Just the essential. Wunderbar!
The result is they don't need to spend $3500 for each video.
How are you going to get paid if you don't focus on the actual products sponsoring you?
The True Costs of Being on YouTube (to Sponsor Products)
There is no hairnet, dogs in kitchen, touching food with face ("most epic BTS ever" clip), tasting sause then putting used spoon back to boiling sause...