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.
The mistake is thinking YouTube content needs to be quality to be successful.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.