Took me around 5 years of posting a video a week to get here. Now I finally make a living. Started working full time about a year ago. Before that 15-20h per week for years. I talked to some other youtubers, and I think my "path" to making a living from youtube, and my income breakdown, is pretty standard.
Key takeaway here is that youtube is a looong game. You will be unlikely to succeed unless you love making the videos so much, that you are happy to do it almost for free, consistently, for years. And the money is not in adsense, but in brand deals and affiliate links (which are often part of brand deals).
Here's my channel if anyone is curious: https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell
This was actually so hard for me in the beginning, that I avoided talking directly to the camera for a long time. Instead I recorded footage of me doing things and then did a voiceover track to put over that.
But it is mostly a matter of practice and becoming used to, and comfortable with, that situation.
After 1-2 years of weekly videos it didn’t feel weird anymore for me. And nowadays I can talk just as naturally to the camera as to a friend.
But yeah definitely a big hurdle for many people I have talked to as well.
I think what I nowadays do, without thinking about it, is I imagine the camera is a person in my core audience.
Really wasn't expecting you to pop up on hn!
Regarding the weekly video, are you saying you’d spend about 15-20 hours per week on that one video to get to the status you were at last year?
I’ve heard that regular releases are important for a channel to be picked up properly by “the algorithm”. Is this your experience, and is that a critical to keep up the cadence of one video per week?
I make music videos (basically myself playing keyboards) and have never really gotten a good long-term traction with “the algorithm” yet. Sometimes I get a burst of impressions for a few days with corresponding views and subscribes, but these come and go. I release ever few weeks, though some of my videos are shorts, or just a few mins long for a single song.
I think a weekly release would be a real challenge, but maybe that’s what is needed to get to the next step? For me the real time sink is all the time arranging and practicing to get to a point I’m confident to even film myself playing.
I think of every video like a lottery ticket. I know a certain percentage of them will become "hits", ie. give me 100k+ views. And I know the more videos I make, the more of these hits I get. I also know that over time I will get better and better at my craft, and increase the likelyhood of any video to become successful. I never had a schedule, and I don't beat myself up if I don't post a particular week. I just keep working on my videos a little every day, and post the video as soon as it is done. It has resulted in 1-2 videos per week over time.
I know that it is probably best to keep a schedule with strict times, because then the audience will show up once they learn the schedule. But I am always too eager and can't bring myself to not post immediately, and it has worked okay for me :) Most important thing I think is that you don't take long breaks of several months. I think your audience cares about consistency, but not the algorithm.
Schedules are important for fans, it's easier to grasp that they can check youtube at a certain day and see your new video over hoping they enable notifications. However if the schedule is far too much for you to handle, don't force a weekly schedule! There are plenty of channels doing great on a more spaced out release timing, but perhaps it's best to encourage some sort of schedule on yourself just to keep producing stuff.
As you said though you have to get to a point of feeling confident to even film yourself playing. That's your #1 over scheduling. Maybe livestreaming your practices could help with that, on the plus you would also have a bunch of livestreamed content you can edit down into future videos. Doesn't suit everyone and livestreaming is definitely its own challenge/realm, so it's just a suggestion! But I could see it being good for getting over that whole perfectionism angle we get ourselves into.
For music content specifically, it seems a lot of it revolves around the hopes of getting people aware of your content through fan stuff, and then pushing original stuff alongside it. So piano covers of video game music (for example) and then they also release original music; the former is easier to create/tag/practice, the latter establishes uniqueness amongst the sea of channels.
I'm curious, do you adjust or renegotiate your brand deals periodically based on anything like metrics, value of their new campaigns, etc.?
In general just curious about how those contacts work out for you. Not in the game but have worked around it a lot, away from YouTube.
Typically the deals are only on a video-for-video basis, even if I had contracts lasting up to 5-6 months at most. So it is easy to ask for a new price when you negotiate the next deal.
At the channel's peak, I was trying to publish a DIY video where I would build something two or three times a month. I started the channel because I enjoy making stuff and thought I would be able to do more of it and maybe get paid to do it.
As I continued, I worked hard to polish my production style and I realized I was prioritizing the video production over doing what I loved. Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped.
I still post videos from time to time, but I try to do everything in a single take and not spent more than an hour editing it. Last year I finished a project I was pretty proud of and spent about 20 hours working on a video and it only got 100 views after the initial posting. For me, it takes a lot of self promotion to get the algorithm to recognize the video as a good video and have it be shown to more people. The self promotion part is something I really dislike doing.
YouTube is great for people that love the process of making videos because it's a win whether someone watches your video or not. Editing can be fun, but for me it gets tedious and I prefer doing a lot of other things.
Check out Kenji Lopez-Alt [1]. He’s an award-winning chef who makes cooking videos by strapping a GoPro to his head and going to work in his home kitchen. He has basically none of the fancy production you see on cooking TV shows. Yet his videos are very popular because he’s a great chef and he tells you the why in addition to the what and how.
I’m pretty sure he’s made his setup just about as close to optimal as possible in terms of minimizing the time he spends on the video production part while still looking great. I think his one bit of fancy production is that he has a nice spot by the window to set a cooked dish for his thumbnail photograph. I think a bunch of his cooking videos also do double duty to supply photographs for his cookbooks, but that’s unnecessary for the vast majority of video creators.
His reputation is almost exclusively from his superb cooking articles (and recipes). The Youtube channel is a side dish, not the main course.
This channel is amazing. I learn best by simply watching others do, and this will surely help me advance my culinary art!
On the other hand, I could try to build projects that might be more mainstream for the better views, but then I’m spending time creating stuff I don’t want to make.
Your interest being niche may not matter as much as you may think.
You can't build a Youtube channel by highlighting what you've built. You have to explain how and why it's built the way it was. The end result is maybe 5% of the value.
Isn't that why a lot of YouTubers (or content creators, whatever the name is), hire a videographer to do that work for them?
It isn't all that different from other arts: If I paint, I might be lucky enough to pay a gallery, either through commission (often 40-60%) or through renting space (often, monthly payment plus a lower commission). You might be able to rent space. But most folks just have to do all the small stuff themselves. It isn't uncommon for artists to spend more time doing social media/advertising/mundane stuff than they do creating art, if you are trying to make money.
I'm not as intimate with the music scene, but it seems a lot of folks do similar stuff.
So it's probably like, $1-2K per video if you want someone else to take care of the editing and thumbnail design aspects. Hence you'll likely have to do this stuff yourself for the few hundred thousand or so subs, at least if you don't have FAANG/trust fund money on the side.
So presumably by "one take" hahamrfunnyguy means he:
* Stopped recording driving to pick up materials, placing orders where there's a wait for parts to come in, and suchlike.
* Stopped recording things speculatively, just in case he decides to make a video later.
* Stopped worrying about 'narratives' and 'thumbnails' and 'the algorithm' when working.
* Stopped cleaning off his hands and fussing with camera settings to get the perfect shot of every step on every machine.
* Stopped trying to make point-of-view videos and keeping an eye on the camera screen, so he didn't need the tripod between him and the workpiece.
* Stopped retaking any time he messed something up or flubbed his lines or the audio came out bad.
* Stopped worrying about set dressing like having a picturesque, tidy background for every shot
Then the editing process is just editing several hours of video down to a few minutes and maybe recording a voiceover.
you're probably thinking of streaming, which involves less work, but you have to do it in real time with OBS or whatever. maybe you're talented and can do it yourself, but sometimes that involves a second person at the controls.
sure you can just upload a raw video straight from your device. but this is exceedingly rare, because you've grown accustomed to at least the basic round of editing - you likely don't even realize what edits have happened. raw video is incredibly boring. will anyone watch it? if not, then what are you even doing that for?
you should try both sometime, it's not quite as easy or fast as it sounds.
For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful...
I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!
I picked a video on the utility and challenge of test engineers because of all the thumbnails that the subject I had more familiarity with.
The content is good IMO. I can’t tell if great but it’s not garbage.
But you are right that it’s not educational per se. It seems akin to a podcast of Software lifecycle.
Eg What do the people that run Kurzgesagt look like? I have no idea, because almost all their content is animated. Other YouTube stars choose to share some things, like what they look like, but most don't give away enough serial to be stalked, and with good reason!
If you get to Mr. Beast level of recognizability, then you have a whole slew of other problems, but you're not gonna get there, so I wouldn't worry about those problems just yet.
This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers.
So I can definitely back up this point from the article:
> Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge.
Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then.
Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills.
But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.
From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.
The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.
If you can get those working for you, you can definitely get by on a few hundred thousand subs, and I know lots of creators in exactly that situation.
But yeah the challenge there is definitely building enough of a community that people are willing to pay you for that stuff, which is more difficult than just posting videos would be. Especially given that your niche has a huge effect on how easily you can make money from those things, and whether your community is going to be 'loyal' enough to support you that way. Creator focused and topic focused channels have very different routes and possibilities for monetisation...
I think MrBeast could be compared to a Jay-Z of this content-creator era. What I think is noble about MrBeast, and a handful of other creators, is their trying to give back.
Someone may love making videos, has a reliable core audience and good views from western audience (and thus high pay rate). However if it costs them 1k to make a vid and the algo is hit/miss as to whether it gets demonetized or not then that becomes a show stopper issue. If you make 3 vids a month and are unlucky then you've got a -3k cashflow...so you're not eating that month.
I've seen some move to Twitch as a result since core audience will follow and subs are a bit more predictable (or rather not as all or nothing)
But gamers are able to publish a video nearly, a contrast from the kind of youtuber that spends 1k on a video like you mentioned.
Just one example of their copyright shenanigans:
A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music". Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload.
Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public? The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with.
So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever. And 10 times the earnings of the video.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/12/santa-ana-p...
It's time for copyright to adapt to the 21st century.
In this case, it's the same reason that $BLOCKBUSTER_FILM needs to license $HIT_POP_SONG as the montage or mood-setting music for part of their film. It's possible that there's a viable fair use defense in this case, but defending it would likely cost several orders of magnitude more than the lifetime revenue of the video, and to be frank, even the fair use defense ultimately seems weak to me.
So each time a three minute song is played you’ll get £300.
Now, obviously, the chances of an independent artist without the mechanisms of big record labels may struggle to get the music into the hands of the gatekeepers who make the decisions about what is played, but it does happen.
I agree though that the copyright implementation around incidental use of what is essentially stock music in a wider creation is something that can seem a bit out of whack. The biggest issue is around metadata and the way information identifying rights holders passes through the digital supply chain. Unless a video creator was able to clearly identify the rights holders in incidentally music then the blunt instrument of “this is copyright material, block/monetise/rev share” is currently really the only thing that prevents “bad actors” exploiting copyright music for their benefit.
Well, me for one. Honestly this sounds like a rookie mistake.
I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped
1. Youtube is a monopoly. 2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation. 3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions. 4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S. 5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work.
If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.
Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example.
Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns.
All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).
Sure. And the same has been about Amazon in retail. But the scoreboard for the tech companies is not earnings; it is return to shareholders, mostly share price appreciation. If the stock prices are high in relation to income, that suggests that the monopoly power is somehow valuable, probably in expectation that the monopoly can be significantly monetized in the future or used to help other parts of the business.
Monopolies may have multiple downsides even when they do not extract extortionate profits. Google must obtain plenty of positive feelings from the public for providing so much amusement via youtube, maybe so much good feeling that no one even tries to assess the consequences of their other monopoly (search).
Somehow, when I see a huge company like Alphabet (Google) based on a niche like search, which has a single winner, and they offer a service like youtube that looks so grass-roots inclusive inviting everyone to join in and get happy, rich and famous, but only a very small fraction do, where success is based so much on what youtube itself recommends, I suspect that there may be some implicit bias working in favor of unequal results that maybe google has something to do with.
We should be looking for alternative models and finding ways to reverse the trend to single-winner markets. I grew up when all the significant cities in the USA had multiple local newspapers, all of which hired writers, and when very many more musicians made a living than do so now. I cannot think of a good reason why anyone should have expected that vast improvements in communications technology would destroy that or why we should just let that go. Monocultures do not find global optimums.
Overall the video lives up to its title. I was in fact surprised by how much guitarists actually make. The surprise worked both ways--some of the ways guitarists might make money paid much worse than I expected, and some paid much more.
Content creation payments are fueled by advertising dollars and it's easy to see that the advertising market has started to contract, as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding, driven in much part by loss of advertising revenues.
Which time frame are you talking about here? I had the impression news outlets folded during the last 20 years because ads went online?
From 173,000 views
> and my content went viral several times
Clearly there is misunderstanding of the platform, its scale, and how to use it if you are seeing this as viral.
That said he seems to be off to a good start. It’s just a slog to get going unless you are going to go truly viral with shorts but that won’t happen with topics like software, etc
173k views though... wouldn't have been viral since at least 2008.
1. Monthly hits at 35k 2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now!
The key seems to be advertising in sm in the right numbers. When I increase my sm posting to fully daily and multiples using video slide strategy I tend to get the right number of impressions to drive traffic to my medium articles. In my case I need to post 500-1000 postings a month and then I will see my earn per month multiply by 10 to 100.
Impressions will always be the highest but with ads you have it reversed in that you get paid for a distraction which is a different set of metrics. This is good yt creators follow that up with some market product to sell that the yt acts as ad for. In my case my books act as the market piece that my medium articles and yt reels advertise for.
I fully expect to be at 500k in the next 6 months using a modification of GaryVee's content strategy and that is concurrently with my current code and book writing schedule. So yes it is possible even if you have a day job.
And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.
How do you find the time to post on social media 15-30 times a day and create the extrapolated content? How do you create quality social media content from based on your main content?
I am working FT on a startup and social media has been a stumbling block for me because it takes a lot of time and I am having trouble balancing building the product and marketing/advertising it.
I'm interested in reading about this
I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week.
The devrel / dev content niche is hardly a niche anymore - thinking about a market is everything and as others have said building an audience you can market to with brand partners is where most of the $$ comes from these days.
UK it's 24% -- https://listentotaxman.com/?ingr=79000
It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
I imagine if you have a popular channel to with anything around money (banking, gambling, investing etc) or high value/margin goods like makeup, cars, etc. then you make significantly more than niche interest channels.
For people who multiplatform, how does youtube compare to other platforms, and how does monetization differ on those platforms?
His main channel is about wood-working: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel and he has another one where he tinkers with stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221
But for me these platforms like YouTube have a big problem, they force content creators to accept that everything in life have a trade off, which in this case is quality x quantity. YouTube values quantity in the end, while it's users values quality in a strange way. Because of this, niche channels like yours, gets less attention than it should be.
There are thousands of videos it could put in these slots, so they'll be ranked and only the very best (based on metrics and your interests) will make the cut.
Video #11 might have been great, but wouldn't get suggested to you merely because it had a few seconds lower average watch time. Because of this I'd expect a 10% better video (like %, watch time) would improve its views by some huge nonlinear factor (maybe double?).
How much you make via advertising is directly proportional to audience size and geographic distribution. Niches with large audiences include video games, superhero movies/IP, makeup, gadget review videos. And even then, ad revenue usually needs to be supplemented by adding affilliate links and in-video sponsorship messages.
Would be neat if someone else enjoyed it.
Maybe I’ll try.
