Absolutely. Every auto driver and worker in india ha YouTube on through their entire work shift. I would not be surprised if their ad impression is valued at a thousand times less than an average American moms ad view..
> Every auto driver and worker in india ha YouTube on through their entire work shift.
Meanwhile in Canada, our wireless telecoms have convinced the government that this level of bandwidth consumption should cost hundreds a month otherwise the cellular network would crash.
It is absolutely a great example of monopolies playing havoc.
India got a massive bandwidth bump precisely because a new player (Jio) came and gave unprecedented bandwidth at literal pennies per GB and changed india forever. Not saying this company or it’s runners are nice people or aren’t corrupt but it helps even if corruption has a level of monopoly protection I suppose!
Something interesting I found out during my ad-tech time was that one of the most expensive ads to buy is car companies targeting people who are about to have a lease end and need to purchase a new car.
What he didn't add is that YouTube will typically seed your content in the country you upload in. The privilege of birthplace continues to be a huge influence in our lives, even with algorithms on the internet running the show
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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
> 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.
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
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.
^ 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.
>>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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
The transparency of this is really amazing; big respect. It's interesting to think that this information was quietly posted to their low-traffic blog with little notice, meanwhile the information contained is actually extremely valuable (and itself would have probably made a highly valuable youtube video itself with 10s of millions of views).
I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticed
Many years ago you were prohibited from sharing warnings by virtue of YouTube monetisation being through AdSense but, as far as I know, there’s no longer such a restriction. Lots of people publish their earnings nowadays, very common amongst finance channels.
If you've ever watched LTT, you'll know that his business is anything but passive. They own buildings, have employees, HR departments, R&D, and all that stuff. This sort of approach is probably not too different, except in scale, to huge media companies.
There’s very little passive about running a YouTube channel, and if you stop publishing then traffic to your existing videos will start to drop off over time.
I saw a standalone video ad with him the other day (on LinkedIn?) for Supermicro server products. It was clear from his voice that it was a paid promotion (not the same tone as a typical semi-objective modern product demo/review), but I'd guess that would have some reputation cost with some viewers. So I'd guess his company makes good money from that as well.
A YouTuber who goes by the handle kofuzi just released a video that goes into the fine details and analysis of his channel's metrics with full transparency. He's easily among the top 3 video content makers who focus on running, running shoes, and running events. Despite putting out high-quality videos, his channel isn't nearly as popular as OP (probably due to his focus being more niche).
There’s quite a few videos on YouTube sharing that info about their channel. It’s also frequently shared in various YouTube creator/business communities.
They are all private forums/Facebook groups for various YouTube analytics tools or production/business courses. So you would have to spend money to get access to them.
Estimating earnings based on views/subs is helpful to prospective youtubers, letting them make wise decisions about whether they pursue that path or do something else with their time (it will probably dissuade more than it will encourage, but that's a good thing if in aggregate people are making sounder career decisions).
I immediately noticed a dark dynamic based on the analytics. Lucky for OP, they are making Lego videos. However, if you are in the business of selling your opinion or sexuality, and you start to see that people click on certain hot takes or less-clothes on, you will start to morph to cater to that traffic. I wonder how this destroys a person (the greed).
Totally taking the convo in the darker direction, but you can see this dynamic in play with Rogan‘s podcast. He’s a liberal, but those hot button right wing takes are probably what brings in the clicks. Every trans critique he makes caters to that traffic, so he milks that audience often.
What does one become when you effectively sell out to the analytics?
Your thoughts and perspective are no longer driven by your convictions or experience, but by this shit.
"Liberal" in the US used to mean (and still does outside the US) someone with a "live and let live" mentality, where things/actions are generally allowed unless there is a very good reason for restricting them. "Classically liberal" is a better match for the term in modern US English. So things like decriminalizing drugs, allowing gay marriage, being pro-gun/self-defense as a human right, privacy as a human right, etc, all fall under "classically liberal". It might help to read the word "liberal" in a philosophical sense, where it means "liberally applying the idea of freedom for everyone, only restricting that freedom where absolutely necessary, where one persons freedom begins to infringe on the liberty of others".
Joe Rogan is an American commenting almost exclusively in the American political context. Referring to him as a liberal in this context is misleading, as the term here is almost exclusively understood to mean “center-left relative to American politics” and is almost never used in the economic or philosophical sense in mainstream political commentary.
I'm aware of who he is, and the context of "liberal" when referring to him and his views. I'm offering an explanation as to why someone might describe him as "liberal", because if anyone outside the US listened to his viewpoints they would describe him as "liberal". I'd be willing to bet that the original commenter is not American, and that's why they chose "liberal", not to be misleading, but because literally the entire rest of the world uses the word differently.
"USA: the primary use of the term liberal is at some variance with European and worldwide usage. In the United States today, it is most associated with the definition of modern liberalism, which is a combination of social liberalism, public welfare and a mixed economy,[12] which is in contrast to classical liberalism."
> because literally the entire rest of the world uses the word differently
This assumed cultural hegemony by some US citizens is frustrating as hell; they are incredibly quick to assume (or demand even) the rest of the world knows their cultural references/idioms/etc., yet make zero effort to discover what the rest of the world is doing. Unfortunately they are also loud and so it's easy to come to the false conclusion all US citizens are like that.
I'm a Brit, I would no think of Joe as a liberal, and I only read this thread as I was so shocked to hear he might be a left leaning commentator. Obviously reading this, he is not.
I'm also a Brit, and to be honest, the term "liberal" in a political context has lost all meaning for me since everyone seems to have their own definition of what it actually entails.
People usually call Rogan liberal because he occasionally showed(s?) some sympathy for the US left - like him inviting Bernie Sanders on during his primary campaign. I think this is far more likely than applying a non-US definition of liberalism to him - especially since many right-wingers the GGP is referring to are also liberal based on this other definition.
Yeah because many GOP members are liberals. The entire world has a definition for a word. Following that definition which has been the definition for many many years makes sense.
> only restricting that freedom where absolutely necessary
I used to believe this as well. I was thaught a lesson... In fact, now I understand that liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
Agreed with you on "modern liberalism" devolving into totalitarianism. "Classical liberalism" doesn't allow for that though. In practice, I don't think anyone in the US follows the latter strictly enough for prevent the same decay anyway though.
You might find "Why Liberalism Failed" by Patrick Deneen interesting if you haven't read it already. He argues that modern liberalism is the inevitable successor to classical liberalism.
> liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
Is your complaint an actual example of that? I've never actually heard the argument - I've heard "billionaires should not exist", but never "we should have a 100% tax on those making more than $100m", so I don't know if the claim you're making is as popular as you're making it out to be, nor do I believe is it an example of totalitarianism.
I also don't see actual examples of liberal governments doing that. People say lots of crazy stuff online, but "liberals say the darndest thing" is not the claim here.
> nor do I believe is it an example of totalitarianism
These conversations never go anywhere. The battlelines are already drawn. It just becomes a semantic debate around loosely defined terms like totalitarianism.
"Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.[10] Until the Great Depression and the rise of social liberalism, it was used under the name of economic liberalism. As a term, classical liberalism was applied in retronym to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism.[11] By modern standards, in the United States, simple liberalism often means social liberalism, but in Europe and Australia, simple liberalism often means classical liberalism.[12][13]
...
In the United States, classical liberalism may be described as "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal". Despite this context, classical liberalism rejects conservatism's higher tolerance for protectionism and social liberalism's inclination for collective group rights, due to classical liberalism's central principle of individualism.[14] Classical liberalism is also considered closely tied with right-libertarianism in the United States.[15] In Europe, liberalism, whether social (especially radical) or conservative, is classical liberalism in itself, so the term classical liberalism mainly refers to centre-right economic liberalism.[16]
"
"Liberal" in the US -> some social freedoms, but restricted in certain ways + economic restrictions.
"Liberal" outside the US -> social freedoms + economic freedoms.
I learned this as an American abroad when someone called me, who would generally be seen as conservative / libertarian in the US, "very liberal" when discussing gay rights (pro), gun rights / armed self-defense (pro), and abortion rights (pro-choice).
Again, it's just a fine point when discussing in an international context (like on HN). When speaking only with Americans, you'll never need this distinction, it's just good to be aware of it when discussing with non-Americans or when reading about foreign politics (e.g. FDP in Germany is a "liberal party" in the European sense of the word, but their policies are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If an American reads "liberal party", they would be surprised to learn that they campaign on cutting taxes, pro free market, privatization, etc., yet are also pro gay marriage and are for legalizing marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Democratic_Party_(Germany...)
> me, who would generally be seen as conservative / libertarian in the US, "very liberal" when discussing gay rights (pro), gun rights / armed self-defense (pro), and abortion rights (pro-choice)
Supporting gay rights and being pro-choice is seen as conservative??
Performing artists have for centuries had to balance catering for popular opinion and tastes versus a more faithful realisation of their vision in order to make a living. I don't see a difference with this at all.
For online creators, I think the high speed and frequency of material creation, release, consumption and feedback, coupled with vast potential audiences, global competition for the nichiest of niches, the ease of copying ideas, and the extremely high rewards and margins for the winners, … is unlike anything that ever came before.
These are many large quantitative changes, that are going to have qualitative implications.
For instance, given the small scale of each offering, post, etc., most creators won’t have developed deeply held individual visions to be compromised with a focus on adapting
Especially as due to lower cycles you typically created larger units of work: Not just a song, but an album. Not just a poem but a book. So you could do the popular part and also the thing you care about and somehow tie them together.
He’s had (guessing, including multi guest, and the mma pieces) close to 2,000 guests, and probably has spoken about trans a maximum of 5 times? Call it 1%. If you assume a 2 hour podcast length and a 2 minute instagram length clip that’s 0.01%ish? That’s probably at (or maybe significant below) main stream medias coverage of the topic but that’s a wild guess.
I’m guessing (but not willing to check although it’s easily empirically proveavle) that the variance in view count per episode more than outweighs any “trans conversation premium” if that even exists. At acquisition Spotify mentioned Joe was the most searched query in their search bar they don’t have.
The value of his podcast is the massive audience of humans who watch his 2 to 3 hour multiple times a week diatribes, it’s probably not the little clips that anger people. If you’re clicking at a trans clip and foaming of the mouth, you’re probably going to be super disappointed to listen to 10 hours of rogan and find no salacious topic included.
Plus I’m biased once but he swung by my ju jitsu gym once and he seemed like one of the most normal humans every and super humble.
It’s probably either: how he speaks, his takes in general, how others view him, how others reamplify him, or something else, but I really doubt he’s beating the drum on transgender rights since he’s he seems to in favor of all socially liberal topics in general.
I went to one of his stand-up shows last year. Both him and the guys he had opening all had maybe 30% trans jokes. He's definetely catering to an antitrans crowd these days
I wonder how many in the crowd are reacting to being labelled antitrans and transphobic unfairly. It's definitely what I see the comedians reacting to.
Definitely some of that. I think a person should have the right to do whatever they want with themselves, and it's not mine or the states business. I'm sure others in the crowd felt the same way. I can see why people would have issues with the routine he put on though, it was certainly not a kind one, and saying he just has a few instances of bringing up trans issues seems like a outright lie.
I don't watch Rogan a whole lot nowadays (used to regularly before the Spotify purchase), but back when I did he spoke about Trans people (especially atheletes) way more than 5 times. It wasn't constantly, though, although it did seem like he wormed it in a few times where it wasn't really called for (to be fair he does that for several of his interests, hence the "Have you ever tried DMT?" meme[1]). And that was before he started bringing more alt-right guests on the show.
To me it was clear he had an axe to grind in regards to the subject, though, and took out that axe out semi-regularly.
His trans critiques are very reasonable though, particularly when he talks about males in women's sports, males in women's prisons, and the social contagion aspect of this type of identity.
These are the questions that cut across the entire political spectrum, as there are plenty on the left questioning the excesses of this activist movement too.
I agree they are reasonable, but it’s kind of like a cock tease dog whistle (maybe a less crude way to put it is a feint dog whistle).
If you take a Kanye, and he says ‘I love Hitler’, that’s a blow horn. But if you say, ‘There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, and look at all that stuff that’s going on in Palestine’, now we’re angling. Everything you are saying is reasonable, but you are reconnoitering around the rim of a specific demographic.
I guess the question is, is this subtle play going past you, or are you letting it get a pass?
He’s keeping one foot in the ring because it’s a pragmatic way of acknowledging the existence of those viewpoints.
I’m not saying black people commit a lot of crime, but look at this shoplifting video. Proceeds to show black people looting. We need to do something about crime.
There are ways to hold that audience without being an outright demagogue.
I like Rogan, but this manipulation in the interest of holding that broader audience smells a little. Integrity is the word I guess.
> What does one become when you effectively sell out to the analytics?
We know what happens... you get Mr. Beast. He's known for hyper optimizing the metrics. Watch one of his interviews. His Joe Rogan interview was an eye opener.
They only get noticed by the general public once some media person sees it, misunderstands the point, gives it a clickbaity title and sells it for clicks.
I‘d wager that the general public can’t name three scientific journals on average. In Germany COV19 sure helped to get some insights from public persons regarding pre print and review processes. However, even friends that have done their Bachelors don’t know too much about publishing. It basically begins with your own career in academia that you know how journals and academic publishing „works“ but outside of that no one really cares.
The vast majority of published scientific progress is completely devoid of value outside their specific field of study, and those in their specific field of study know where to look for it and are(?) giving its due value.
If anything I'd prefer less interest of the general public on specific papers because the way it ends up is with people misunderstanding it to fit whatever the journalist/redditor that peddled it wanted it to mean, maliciously or not.
This issue, in this case, is information dispersal. This sort of information is highly analyzed, almost certainly, by google/youtube. They have all the data, so there's a lot more you can get out of analyzing it.
If ever channel's youtube data was released to the public like this, there would be a lot more notice.
Transparency doesn't just need to overcome secrecy, they need to overcome obscurity.
One data point from a successful YouTuber is interesting but I'm not sure about the extremely valuable part. If anything, it probably leads to a lot of people thinking they can make >$100K/year making YouTube videos and they almost certainly won't.
I'd say its the opposite, you're talking about a channel that gets 10M views average per video while being kid friendly and targeting probably the audience with the most spending power(middle aged males in the US), you'd think they'd make far more than 100k/year.
Fair enough. Although I think a lot of people outside much of the HN demographic would consider making $100K/year from YouTube videos a pretty good deal. That's probably more than a lot of documentary film makers bring in. So I'm not sure how many would takeaway "Crap. This guy's pretty darned successful by YouTube standards and he's still just bringing in a fairly modest income--with no benefits etc."
I think most people, ignoring the specifics, would consider making 100k/y from youtube a pretty good deal, but well there's the specifics. Let's not kid ourselves 100k/y is not a modest income, but surely he should be the example of the guy that would get rich off of it, lego's mr.beast or whatever.
At the end of the day there's already huge amounts of youtubers showing their mansions or whatever to influence the gullible viewers, the ones who would miss the nuance of his situation would most likely fall for them anyway. There's already an abundance of blatant "false hope" being peddled far harder and wider, the chance of his objective analysis being misinterpreted by people is as far as i'm concerned insignificant.
The data makes sense to me but not the interpretation. My 2.5yo son loves watching Lego assembly videos on Youtube during his TV time, which is of course tied to my account, which therefore means I contribute to his middle aged male statistic. Perhaps I am having a tough time empathizing but I find it hard to believe droves of men my age are watching Lego assembly videos in the background.
I was thinking exactly this. How many of that demographic are actually playing it for kids using their account? But I also know it is a very popular hobby for some people. My brother started a lego city group on Facebook and it exploded totally organically to tens of thousands of members. He was shocked!
You'd be surprised, I myself know several and I have no interest in the hobby to be adjacent to their circles. Anecdotally it seems like MLP all over again, but even more skewed to the adult demographic, which does make a lot more sense to me than MLP at least.
It's valuable in the sense of giving some sort of feedback. The way many streaming services compensate people lacks any transparency and is basically making them compete to generate product blindly.
I like to think that most of the valuable information is generally unnoticed. Most of the things I make are very valuable to the people who want it, but any one of those things are pretty useless to the majority of people who would find it.
A huge part of the phenomenon comes through how fashions form. Hype collects around emotionally-charged things. By their very nature, their spectacle is compromising some of the sincerity and value to maximize reach. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts.
HN is a perfect example of this: looks like a chat forum from 1998, but is very much current and edgy with the cool kids.
> 65 is only middle-aged if you plan to live to 130...
60 is a more usual endpoint, but...
It's a range. The middle of that range is 55, so following that math it would be 110, not 130.
But as the other reply points out, it's the middle section of being an adult. So if you take that 45-65 range, and treat it as the exact middle of your adult life, then you get 92, which is a bit high but not crazy. If you take that 45-65 range and assume old age will be the same length, you get 85, which is pretty close for wealthy non-US countries.
The real error is probably that some fraction of this is children of those men, as in many family homes men are the ones who login to YouTube on the TV or other devices. That may or may not be beneficial depending upon whom the advertisers think they're bidding on.
This is fantastic information and very sobering for those of us with smaller channels. I had 10-50 views per month until two weeks ago and I got 200k views suddenly thanks to the algorithm, but it's already peaked so I expect I can't make more than a few dollars per month. See what happens though!
I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it reached "the front page of YouTube" like the sibling post suggested or it would have millions.
Somehow it must've got suggested to a few people and maybe it had a high engagement rate (likes and comments?) which was somehow taken positively. I'm purely guessing though.
It really isn't an impressive video though it does have a 99% like ratio. I'm a bit embarrassed to self promote here so I'll email you based on your HN profile site contact page.
$10000/video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content.
It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).
To highlight just how crazy things can get, my highest-earning YouTube video has earned well-over $100,000 in AdSense revenue.
But that’s not the end of the craziness.
About a year ago, that video was suddenly and inexplicably deemed by YouTube as unsuitable for all advertisers. I appealed, but they stuck with their decision.
In the year since, that video has brought in ~$80.
While I have found success on YouTube, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience. YouTube is the most saturated market on the planet, and and at the end of the day, you are subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm. It is not possible to succeed on YouTube without significant effort, but significant effort doesn’t guarantee success. Moreover, the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable, and it’s sometimes not there at all. You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
People understand that high-quality content is necessary for success on YouTube, but they often lose sight of the fact that it is not sufficient. Not only do you have to create quality content, but you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them on YouTube - which is obviously very, very hard.
Considering HN biased towards startups, I wonder can the same reasoning be applied to starting a company. Starting a SAAS company sounds the same:
- the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable
- subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm (product-market fit)
- strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience
> You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
Probably this one is not that harsh as it seems, Ludwig made an experiment "I made a secret YouTube channel to prove it's not luck". Many creators are using multiple platforms and income sources, so it's not all YT in the end.
$90/hour is real nice money, but for some reason i assumed a channel with that many subs would make more money. For every million plus channel, there’s probably a million+ channels with no subs.
Basically have a day job before you go all in as a content creator.
And then even if they do watch your video, your topic of choice will strongly affect your revenue per view. For example, a personal finance channel makes a lot more per view that say, a channel about thrift store finds.
> Subs on YT don't mean revenue... they're just people who may watch your videos later.
Right on. I always tell people that I can’t pay my employees with subs and likes.
For most videos, an overwhelming majority of views come from traffic suggested by YouTube in some manner (home page, sidebar, after a video). I have millions of subscribers across a few channels. Subscriber notification and feeds invariably account for a very-low-single-digit percent of video views.
It's $90/hour, which is great, but it is also 100 hours per video, and depending on what your release schedule is that could be an insane amount of work. They list 65 uploads, which is a little more than once a month for 5 years.
I think that might be the average hourly rate since they started the channel. I think it would make more sense to calculate it on a monthly basis. It was probably close to $0/hour for the first few years, and it must be much higher now.
I could be wrong but I don't think YouTube TOS allows publicizing this kind of information. I would be afraid of my channel being de-monetized. I believe they have a similar policy for AdSense.
I think such policy is illegal in many countries. An employer cannot prohibit workers from discussing salaries. This is often a measure to combat against gender discrimination at a workplace. I’m not sure how this affects contractors, but I would be surprised if these laws wouldn’t cover contractors as well.
This is my biggest pet peeve with YouTubers. THEY ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF YOUTUBE.
employment laws do not apply to a youtuber, unless they are employed by some other company, but they do NOT have an employment relationship with YouTube, they are not "employees" of YouTube, and Susan Wojcicki is not "their boss"
That's an odd pet peeve, and while you're probably right in most places, I wouldn't be surprised if some countries define employee differently. Atleast in regards to wether or not certain practices or fine print is legal.
Everytime there is a YT Change (like happen recently) there is all these videos where YT often try to compare their experience with employment, how their "boss" Susan did something, or how they are being "Fired" if they get banned, or other such non-sense. That is my peeve.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if some countries define employee differently.
I would be surprised if any nation classified a person uploading videos on to a platform with the hopes of having a revenue share on ads the 3rd party sells on those videos is in anyway an "employee" of any kind.
I would also be surprised if any country has laws where 2 parties could not agree to non-disclosure of the terms of their business contract (which is the basis for this comment thread). that is pretty standard really
I would also be surprised since most of the time when you upload a video you have to agree you will be governed under the Laws of the US, and even more specific the laws of California
>I would be surprised if any nation classified a person uploading videos on to a platform with the hopes of having a revenue share on ads the 3rd party sells on those videos is in anyway an "employee" of any kind.
I would be surprised in some countries dont change their laws at some time to account for this digital sharecropping (from Youtube and iOS App Store to Uber, etc), and set some rules (like with employment) to this wild west of making a living that affects millions...
The digital sharecropper analogy is less about the monopoly position of platforms but about the content creator and platform relationship. More platforms wouldn’t change that relationship.
For an individual, yes. For a country? It is just a matter of the country not wanting to spend the money to buy servers, bandwidth, and labor to moderate.
Why are countries coming up now? I thought you were arguing against the sharecropping analogy, and the people that do sharecropping are all low-power individuals.
"Someone rich could make a new ecosystem" is unrelated to whether the current ecosystem resembles sharecropping.
So, is your arguent that instead of inconveniencing those businesses, countries should just create competiting public services?
They can always do that too, but I'm also full for them inconveniencing those businesses.
Businesses should be whiped and forced to play responsibly in society. They can innovate on tech and features, they don't have to innovate on milking people and erroding working rights.
And any sharecropper was welcome to buy their own land, spin up their own castle, fund their own mercenary army, and make their own feudal kingdom! Sharecroppers weren't slaves either. But that's a pretty low bar (and "build your own YouTube" a pretty high bar).
>I disagree that build your own YouTube is a “high” bar, outside of money. (...) It is just ridiculously expensive.
I'm not sure what you mean. That it's not rocket science? Well, yes, it isn't. It's not the technology: money (and to a second extend, entrenchment and network effects, and ties with Android, and many other non-tech things) IS of course the huge, sky-high, bar, to building an alternative YouTube.
>Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.*
Well, it was quite a lot of mobility in the feudal ranks. Any competent mercenary could rise to be a higher ranking soldier, and any compenent and cunning higher ranking soldier could, and often did, take on some existing feudal lords, and get their own smaller or bigger fiefdom. After some point, even succesful merchants could get their own armies and castles and be feudal "nobility". Tons of stories from the feudal times (that was what all of cross-feudal fighting was about), and thousands of castles and fiefdoms - and that's just in Europe.
Whereas Youtube? That's one service of its size/scale in the world, covering multiple billions of people.
That would be more like trying to get something competitive not to a feudal lord (which were a dime a dozen), but to the whole of an empire.
This has to stop. People are making products which one company uses to profit. This company is buying their labor—albeit in a really roundabout way. We’ve heard this gaslighting from e.g. Uber, where their workers weren’t employees but “gig workers”, or some other thing.
The only reason companies do this is to get their labor for cheaper. No, these are YouTube workers, their labor is bought by YouTube, and YouTube should obey all labor laws when they buy their labor and profit from their work.
the analogy doesn't work here, the videos are owned by their creators so they can monetise that content in other available ways, once an Uber driver has given someone a ride they can't find new ways to profit off of that (at least legally, or unless the passenger was a celebrity)
The farm products were owned by the sharecroppers too, to eat or sell as they see fit. They just had to pay their tax to the landowner and be at their mercy regarding the property and changes in demands.
the farm products when used once are used up, videos, texts, "content" can be reused theoretically infinitely.
furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
I understand it is a rhetorically powerful phrase, digital sharecropper, but unfortunately as often happens with analogies it falls apart with all the ways it does not fit.
>the farm products when used once are used up, videos, texts, "content" can be reused theoretically infinitely.
How is this a useful distinction? It's about how you can sell the product, but doesn't change the fact that you don't own your lot, that you pay a percentage share to the owner of the place, that they can change the terms or even crush you anytime they like, and so on.
>furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
What you paid to the landowner was a percentage of your lot's production, same as with YouTube.
So if people insist YouTube does not employ the creators of the products that make them money, then at best YouTube is their land lords. I don’t know if that is any better, particularly if this land lord is not asking for rent, but rather, is asking their creators to work for them.
Does YouTube stop people from uploading the videos to other platforms? Do they require a set commitment of work?
There are various tests that apply to contractors in the U.K. to work out if you’re an employee or a Lego mate contracting company, as it makes a difference to how taxes and benefits are calculated. Fro my understanding YouTube nowhere near meets that criteria of employee/employer. Companies like Uber and deliveroo are far closer.
>There are various tests that apply to contractors in the U.K.
As there are in most of the world. Most of them were made for the factory and office era, and despite "updates" still within the old spirit, are antiquated in 2023 when it comes to addressing many new work scenarios...
I actually wonder if they are really that antiquated, but rather that these schemes to bypass labor laws used to be called out and stopped, either by the unions in the 1890s or 1920s, or by the government in the 1950s.
That is, I wonder if the the deregulation era of the 1980s also deregulated labor practices to the extent that companies can now jump through these hoops in order to avoid labor laws.
Where do people get the idea that they are either employees of or contractors to YouTube? Do Amazon affiliates and bloggers monetizing with AdSense have the same, false idea?
I don't think that's right. A lot of YouTubers make videos detailing their YouTube earnings and post them to YouTube (for example [1]). If it were against the ToS, you'd think YouTube would at least remove those videos.
It is against ToS I'm pretty sure, I don't remember YouTube ever doing anything about it ever though since a lot of people really do share this information publicly.
The terms for the partner program aren't the same as for the YouTube website and are not available publicly (at least from my short search). I did read it a few years ago when I was considering monetizing a small channel I had and remember very vividly something along those lines in the terms.
I came across a YouTube creator who shared their revenue with their audience. They mentioned that the idea that sharing revenue is not allowed has been a myth for many years. However, I believe that some channel networks may prohibit creators from disclosing their revenue. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the name of the creator.
> I don't think that's right. A lot of YouTubers make videos detailing their YouTube earnings and post them to YouTube (for example [1]). If it were against the ToS, you'd think YouTube would at least remove those videos.
From memory, the issue is publicly disclosing CPM among some other things (at least it was 4+ years ago).
I actually wonder if posting it off-platform is even allowed, I've seen Twitch enforce their platform exclusivity for 24 hours for Partners.
Yeah, I’ve seen lots of these videos. I’d expect YouTube would want creators to do this since viewers see it and get inspired to become YouTube creators.
The same logic applies to most tech jobs. I would expect more big tech companies would want to broadcast their comp numbers to encourage more people to pursue those careers and apply to those companies. The average joe probably assumes SWEs at Google make $100-150K MAX. If more people knew they could make doctor-like numbers without going to grad school (or even going to college at all in some cases), more people would go into tech. But I guess companies have done the math and determined its better to conceal that information best they can to keep their advantage during negotiations.
Dunno about YouTube, but Adsense used to prohibit that but then reversed that policy.
I remember emailing someone that said they “didn’t share how much they made because it’s against TOS” after the policy changed and they still declined.
I think it might have been the “I made my Christmas lights controlled by anyone on the internet” guy.
That used to be the case but it changed at some point I think about 2 years ago - couldn't find a quick reference to exactly when it changed but I remember seeing quite a few channels start publishing their earnings once it changed.
Linus Media Group has at least ten full time employees and rents a fairly large office/warehouse/studio space in the Vancouver suburb area of Surrey/Langley BC.
Their payroll and overhead costs probably eat up a significant part of that 4.6m.
They have other revenue streams. Sponsorships, YouTube Premium, Floatplane, their online store, affiliate links on YouTube and their forums to name some.
They have around 100 employees and rent, I think, (at least) two warehouse spaces. They also seem to do work-for-hire production work, merch, and Floatplane on top of their YouTube content. I'm sure there are other revenue streams that aren't obvious besides those listed in addition to their YouTube AdSense only being a slice of their advertising revenue since they do in-video sponsored spots.
They own three or four different warehouse spaces in the same complex. 4 units comprise the main studio + shop area, LTT Store has its own unit, Labs has a massive warehouse they're working on setting up, and I believe they still have the original Labs space they decided to not go with (or this is what became the LTT Store space). According to what Linus has said in the past, they own (not lease) all of these units.
Yes its a small part of the pie. In their 2020 review it was about 20% of their revenue. Their lttstore.com creator warehouse stuff has gone crazy since then - they were talking about having 5-10m tied up just in inventory waiting to sell. So, yes.
Is this really so hush-hush, secret or amazing? It seems pretty run of the mill... there must be millions of people with access to these reports for various channels.
The first video I watched on this channel was the Lego submarine. Quite a cool channel. The format of minimal talking and to-the-point and normal thumbnails is refreshing. Cool that one can make this much on their hobbies.
The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.
I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc.
The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest.
IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of.
There’s an interesting video digging into the way these copycats are fake too [1] - if you watch them you can often see things like excavator tracks that haven’t been hidden well enough, and they found somebody involved who talked about how the buildings are built by teams of people on leased land and then just abandoned when the video is done…
But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing!
You seem to be against this idea of 'copycating' but our society has put a lot of thought into what's Trademark-able and what's not.
In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away.
Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this.
> It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles
I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.
Yes, many prominent youtubers are pretty explicit about how they’re not happy with it, but tweaking thumbnails and titles gives an actual boost to their videos that doesn’t just translate to people clicking, but actual views and “engagement” throughout their content.
For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.
I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves that problem of content discovery.
Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok.
Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero.
Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on.
Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs.
Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me.
Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me.
Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s
I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution.
You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone.
Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued.
Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM.
The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors.
It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now?
Your prediction seems depressing but I can't think of a solid argument against it. Already there are sites that pay people to copy content from other sites or scrape & paste it. They rank higher than the original site by combining relevant data from multiple sites. AI that can copy-paste articles will make that business infinitely scalable and harder to detect.
What you describe could also be considered copyright laundering, but critically it is understood to be such—it is frowned upon and is penalized by the likes of Google. If we apply the same understanding to LLM design it might actually be half the battle.
You have a point, and of course not everything should live and die by its channel. In particular the incentives to have regular uploads and consistent videos should be fought back, it's crushing so much creativity, brings burnout and I'm sure we're missing on otherwise good videos that are nver made because to long to take, or shelved because it doesn't match the channel.
Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view.
It’s probably because advertisers demand that their ads are not placed on “bad” content. By limiting ads to 1000+ subscriber channels, it’s much more likely the content isn’t in violation of the YouTube rules.
I think YouTube now puts ads on basically everything though... (I don't know for sure, I have had Premium for a little more than a year now, and before that uBlock Origin took care of things).
> If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google.
That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on.
Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
I believe they don't put ads on most demonetised videos, since they are typically demonetised because (YT's algorithms think that) advertisers don't want their ads associated with the content.
Exactly. My bet is it's simple greed, and that it shuts enough people (and revenue) out to make Google a pretty penny.
Likely it was a decision based on analytics that Google, and no one else, has.
Imagine we are talking a cable TV platform instead, and your analytics show that most people flip through channels most of the time, as opposed to actually watching something specific. You make a rule to only share revenue with channels if the viewer is engaged longer than 120 seconds. People are still watching TV, you are still monetizing, but the channels aren't getting fully paid and only you know the money involved.
Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
> Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
That's not even the half of it. Unless your channel is big enough to be considered a "partner", you are basically fucked when it comes to content strikes, DMCA, AI/contractor driven "community standards" issues, random demonetization, etc. There's no real "support".
The demonetizing thing is particularly funny, I know of channels where their videos get demonetized for content guidelines violations, but viewers still see advertisements. Happens a lot with firearms related content.
I imagine it's more to do with reducing the administrative burden of processing payments for $3 to thousands of people who have one vaguely useful video.
Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.
Nope, mine was persistently saying it’s stuck. The brush was jammed. Turned out you can pull off the non-drive side of the brush, dis-assemble with a pick and clean out the disk of internalized gunk that has starting to roll over itself.
> Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on...But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had?
What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort.
I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.
To some extent, it may be the messaging, not the amount. The limit being in place is labeling those creators as "value-less" (vs others, who do have value).
In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
Lots of open source is either people doing it as part of their job, or people doing it as part of building up a portfolio to get a certain job.
But of course there are more intrinsic motivations like wanting to give back to the community, practising their hobby, etc. Those would be equally valid reasons to make youtube videos.
Depending on how philosophical you want to get, there'll be people who derive pleasure and purpose from sharing what they know or building something that is enjoyed by others. There'll be people who gain pleasure from being known for being helpful/useful/knowledgeable or even being recognized at all. Even if we can't call it altruism that's not necessarily a bad thing. I guess I just feel that there are, and likely will always be, plenty of incentives for people to create and share online besides financial ones.
$2 isn't really the incentive to have a youtube channel though. People enjoy making something and sharing it with the world. Most people who do X as a hobby don't make even $2 for almost all X: art, music, fishing, whatever, and yet they still do it.
You usually have to go up to "serious amateur" level before you make even token amounts of money (which still doesn't cover your tools much less your time), and 1k subscribers for a video hobbiest is a low bar for that.
> Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.
We're just going back in time. Back in the days when I was making YT content, you wouldn't make any money until you reached certain views / subs thresholds. You could then apply for partner, setup an AdSense account, and monetize videos. Before I had the numbers, I became a partner with Maker Studios and monetized videos through them. They ended up getting bought by Disney for $500M.
The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
Hearing that an off the cuff idea has been proven out before is such a pleasant feeling, thank you!
I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"
That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel.
I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo?
How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?
Patreon works, but only as a monetization platform; while it's a channel that can offer early access to e.g. new videos, in practice the vast majority of views will still be on youtube and unless it's something critical, patrons will wait until it's on youtube anyway (citation needed).
Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar.
Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches.
I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.
I’m following a few creators on patreon who have a two/three steps approach.
The video will be on youtube from the start, but as a private video. From there a part of their patreons might get very early access (e.g. CGP Grey has a tier for spell checking and gross errors spotting), and then all patreons get access to the final video. But still private (and/or exposed to channel paying members)
After a short time (a day at most) the video gets public and is fully dispatched to everyone on Youtube.
I get the feeling that the day it gets wiped away he'll move to another job (he's been a software engineer for a while apparently) and not look back.
The way it's managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there's so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.
> The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.
That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse.
Then you can presumably go to another company. There isn't another YouTube.
More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
None of those are really substitutes for YouTube. But I agree that if someone has stumbled into a somewhat sustainable business that they decide they want to do full-time as long as they can, they should diversify both their content and their channels.
Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production.
The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying?
I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious.
I've taken a look at the videos. The editing, angles and camera quality tell me that this guy has done quite a bit of research on making good videos and fully intended to make money from them. If you were on YouTube pre-monetization, that's what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation
> kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most
I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.
Oh yeah. I have been producing content full-time on YouTube for nearly 7 years. I have two NASes, each with ten 18TB HDDs and an SSD cache, plus a separate all-SSD DAS that has ten 4TB TLC NVMe SSDs. Video storage is a significant cost that people frequently overlook.
And we edit on two M1 Ultra Mac Studios, as well as M1 Max MacBook Pros, all fully-optioned.
People vastly underestimate the time and expense involved with “just posting videos to YouTube.”
(If it’s such easy money, why aren’t they doing it…)
I'll post this as a reply to your comment because I think other people will have this concern when it comes to content creation.
You do not need a really beefy computer to edit videos especially when you're starting out. A Canva Pro subscription is a couple of hundred dollars and will let you upload all your footage and then edit it within the browser meaning you don't need to have a powerful computer. If you grow your channel and your needs change then just cancel Canva and buy that bigger machine you need. Use your phone or something on the cheaper end (of cameras) like a GoPro to record.
i had no idea that canva did video as well as images. would you call it having all the basics or are there noticeable features missing compared to say Screenflow?
I’ve never used screenflow so I can’t talk about that but in terms of features Canva has everything I want as a very amateur creator. The elements, animations and transitions are all easy to use and work really well out of the box. The preset elements and designs can help speed up videos too since you don’t need to find stock footage or gifs elsewhere, just search in Canva.
"pro grade" cameras are at least ~$2,500 (say, a BMPCC) plus a another thousand or so for each professional lens. Storage media, monitors, lighting, stands, audio, and more and it eventually adds up.
Perhaps the $20,000 he spent on film equipment helped propel him to 2.9 million subscribers, 705 million video views, and $664,000 total earnings by allowing him to produce a grade of video that is better than other lego videos on YouTube.
You can spend US$5 pretty easily on one very good tripod (but something enough for this kind of production $2K would be fine). For a decent mirrorless camera you're looking at $3K body only, so then you have to think about lenses, B cameras, rigging, lighting, etc. which all adds up. Good audio equipment is expensive too, so I think for the size of the channel here, $20K is a pretty moderate spend.
> Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.
>Now also talk about production costs, staff salaries, and taxes.
Per the article...
"Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN."
Taxes would be pretty simple to approximate given he lives in Finland and gives a rough average of his monthly revenue.
I wonder how often “middle-aged males” means an adult LEGO fan, of whom there certainly are many, versus a parent letting their kid watch YouTube. My son has notably shifted my recommendations towards LEGO and/or trains.
This is a good point, YouTube on my smart TVs is logged into my account, my kids are forever mangling my search history with Roblox, Minecraft, squishies & other random things kids are into. I'm sure Google / YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me!
> I'm sure Google / YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me!
I am sure the smart folks in Google will know who is watching based on the videos being watched and show appropriate ads at that time or maybe show generic ads about products which they know parents with young kids want.
That wasn't the case just a few years ago, not sure how it works now since I've shifted my kids to YouTube Kids entirely. Youtube would casually throw in a 3-minute-long beer ad in the middle of a cartoon compilation my 3-year-old watched...
This channel in particular is less about Lego than mechanics and experiments, so adults have plenty to enjoy from the videos.
There’s a video about building a quadcopter for instance, and bricks are used for the frame but he’s also be soldering to have what he needs on the chip. Same for the submarine ones, where the radio control will have nothing to do with Lego.
And you’ll see magnets, metal axles, non Lego controllers, survolting etc. Highly recommend for anyone curious about funny practical experiments.
"successful" Lego channels are an avg of 9 years old is interesting. It shows difficult it is for new creators to break in. This is why social networks seem to have a natural lifecycle - new platforms offer an opportunity for a network reset. This was one of the keys to tiktoks rise (also their distribution is much more engagement based).
I find it depressing because I’m in such a niche that I’ll never be able to monetize my channel. I think the path for me is to sell a course online or do a patreon.
I came here to say that, based on my experience, his RPM is really low, but then he points out that he gets lots of views from India. We get around $4, for a niche, but primarily English speaking niche.
It makes me see now more why Mr. Beast is getting his content translated....
I'm not a youtuber, but I'm trying to understand the RPM.
Based on my understanding, RPM is directly proportional to the amount of money you make.
So, how does a lot of views from India cause a lower RPM?
In the post the author even says this:
> When I see my RPM drop suddenly, it is usually because my videos are being watched a lot in India
Like, say you have a billion views, and 200 million of those views were from India. Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?
Why does Indian viewers cause this? I mean, they too see ads, right? Or is it because in India it costs less (??) to put up an ad?
Not a lot of Indians are going to buy your product even if they the cost of the product will probably be lower for Indians so the advertiser makes less money
> Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?
No, that would mathematically make no sense.
His average RPM drops because of views from India but he still makes some money from the extra 200 million views.
I'm Indian. The reason Indian views make less money is simply that the advertisers who advertise to Indian audiences have lower budgets due to PPP. So the amount they pay to YouTube is less than what a US advertiser would pay. In turn, the channel's share of the revenue (supposedly 55% of it) is also less.
Advertisers bid on ad spots, based on the viewer. It's all algorithmic and real-time.
Advertisers can target ads based on various demographic info, e.g. age, gender, location. Cookies etc allow for even more targetting.
So you can imagine an advertising bidding high for ad spots shown to 20-30 males in London (i.e. relatively rich westerners who can afford your product), and bidding low for poorer nations where people do not have as much money to spend (so are not your target customer - e.g. imagine you are trying to sell iPhones etc)
421 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadA quick google shows a range of $0.03/cpm to $13.00/cpm depending on category.
https://stashvine.com/most-profitable-youtube-niches/
Meanwhile in Canada, our wireless telecoms have convinced the government that this level of bandwidth consumption should cost hundreds a month otherwise the cellular network would crash.
India got a massive bandwidth bump precisely because a new player (Jio) came and gave unprecedented bandwidth at literal pennies per GB and changed india forever. Not saying this company or it’s runners are nice people or aren’t corrupt but it helps even if corruption has a level of monopoly protection I suppose!
What's the government got to do with mobile data prices?
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1316055
- USA: $6.98
- India: $0.62
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.
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
https://youtu.be/-zt57TWkTF4 https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us
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
- 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
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...
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
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
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
It makes sense that the tax code hasn’t yet caught up with “YouTube personality” as a career.
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.
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.
I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticed
https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
Of course he has other income streams - sponsorships, lttstore.com, commissioned videos etc.
This is pretty common knowledge for monetized or high viewership (sponsored/paid for outside of Google) channels.
They both have private communities where people freely share a lot of good info (especially Project24).
There are many others that I have heard good things about but have not checked out myself.
Estimating earnings based on views/subs is helpful to prospective youtubers, letting them make wise decisions about whether they pursue that path or do something else with their time (it will probably dissuade more than it will encourage, but that's a good thing if in aggregate people are making sounder career decisions).
Totally taking the convo in the darker direction, but you can see this dynamic in play with Rogan‘s podcast. He’s a liberal, but those hot button right wing takes are probably what brings in the clicks. Every trans critique he makes caters to that traffic, so he milks that audience often.
What does one become when you effectively sell out to the analytics?
Your thoughts and perspective are no longer driven by your convictions or experience, but by this shit.
Is he?
"USA: the primary use of the term liberal is at some variance with European and worldwide usage. In the United States today, it is most associated with the definition of modern liberalism, which is a combination of social liberalism, public welfare and a mixed economy,[12] which is in contrast to classical liberalism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_parties_by_country#The...
This assumed cultural hegemony by some US citizens is frustrating as hell; they are incredibly quick to assume (or demand even) the rest of the world knows their cultural references/idioms/etc., yet make zero effort to discover what the rest of the world is doing. Unfortunately they are also loud and so it's easy to come to the false conclusion all US citizens are like that.
I used to believe this as well. I was thaught a lesson... In fact, now I understand that liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
> liberals, when given the power, will corrupt into totalitarism in a few months.
Is your complaint an actual example of that? I've never actually heard the argument - I've heard "billionaires should not exist", but never "we should have a 100% tax on those making more than $100m", so I don't know if the claim you're making is as popular as you're making it out to be, nor do I believe is it an example of totalitarianism.
I also don't see actual examples of liberal governments doing that. People say lots of crazy stuff online, but "liberals say the darndest thing" is not the claim here.
These conversations never go anywhere. The battlelines are already drawn. It just becomes a semantic debate around loosely defined terms like totalitarianism.
Republican = social restrictions + economic freedoms
"Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.[10] Until the Great Depression and the rise of social liberalism, it was used under the name of economic liberalism. As a term, classical liberalism was applied in retronym to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism.[11] By modern standards, in the United States, simple liberalism often means social liberalism, but in Europe and Australia, simple liberalism often means classical liberalism.[12][13]
...
In the United States, classical liberalism may be described as "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal". Despite this context, classical liberalism rejects conservatism's higher tolerance for protectionism and social liberalism's inclination for collective group rights, due to classical liberalism's central principle of individualism.[14] Classical liberalism is also considered closely tied with right-libertarianism in the United States.[15] In Europe, liberalism, whether social (especially radical) or conservative, is classical liberalism in itself, so the term classical liberalism mainly refers to centre-right economic liberalism.[16]
"
"Liberal" in the US -> some social freedoms, but restricted in certain ways + economic restrictions.
"Liberal" outside the US -> social freedoms + economic freedoms.
I learned this as an American abroad when someone called me, who would generally be seen as conservative / libertarian in the US, "very liberal" when discussing gay rights (pro), gun rights / armed self-defense (pro), and abortion rights (pro-choice).
Again, it's just a fine point when discussing in an international context (like on HN). When speaking only with Americans, you'll never need this distinction, it's just good to be aware of it when discussing with non-Americans or when reading about foreign politics (e.g. FDP in Germany is a "liberal party" in the European sense of the word, but their policies are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If an American reads "liberal party", they would be surprised to learn that they campaign on cutting taxes, pro free market, privatization, etc., yet are also pro gay marriage and are for legalizing marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Democratic_Party_(Germany...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
Supporting gay rights and being pro-choice is seen as conservative??
These are many large quantitative changes, that are going to have qualitative implications.
For instance, given the small scale of each offering, post, etc., most creators won’t have developed deeply held individual visions to be compromised with a focus on adapting
I’m guessing (but not willing to check although it’s easily empirically proveavle) that the variance in view count per episode more than outweighs any “trans conversation premium” if that even exists. At acquisition Spotify mentioned Joe was the most searched query in their search bar they don’t have.
The value of his podcast is the massive audience of humans who watch his 2 to 3 hour multiple times a week diatribes, it’s probably not the little clips that anger people. If you’re clicking at a trans clip and foaming of the mouth, you’re probably going to be super disappointed to listen to 10 hours of rogan and find no salacious topic included.
Plus I’m biased once but he swung by my ju jitsu gym once and he seemed like one of the most normal humans every and super humble.
It’s probably either: how he speaks, his takes in general, how others view him, how others reamplify him, or something else, but I really doubt he’s beating the drum on transgender rights since he’s he seems to in favor of all socially liberal topics in general.
To me it was clear he had an axe to grind in regards to the subject, though, and took out that axe out semi-regularly.
[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-crazy-man-have-you-ever...
These are the questions that cut across the entire political spectrum, as there are plenty on the left questioning the excesses of this activist movement too.
I agree they are reasonable, but it’s kind of like a cock tease dog whistle (maybe a less crude way to put it is a feint dog whistle).
If you take a Kanye, and he says ‘I love Hitler’, that’s a blow horn. But if you say, ‘There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, and look at all that stuff that’s going on in Palestine’, now we’re angling. Everything you are saying is reasonable, but you are reconnoitering around the rim of a specific demographic.
I guess the question is, is this subtle play going past you, or are you letting it get a pass?
He’s keeping one foot in the ring because it’s a pragmatic way of acknowledging the existence of those viewpoints.
I’m not saying black people commit a lot of crime, but look at this shoplifting video. Proceeds to show black people looting. We need to do something about crime.
There are ways to hold that audience without being an outright demagogue.
I like Rogan, but this manipulation in the interest of holding that broader audience smells a little. Integrity is the word I guess.
We know what happens... you get Mr. Beast. He's known for hyper optimizing the metrics. Watch one of his interviews. His Joe Rogan interview was an eye opener.
Basically every scientific progress which gets published on peer reviewed journals (a lot of them open). Some books also are online.
If anything I'd prefer less interest of the general public on specific papers because the way it ends up is with people misunderstanding it to fit whatever the journalist/redditor that peddled it wanted it to mean, maliciously or not.
This issue, in this case, is information dispersal. This sort of information is highly analyzed, almost certainly, by google/youtube. They have all the data, so there's a lot more you can get out of analyzing it.
If ever channel's youtube data was released to the public like this, there would be a lot more notice.
Transparency doesn't just need to overcome secrecy, they need to overcome obscurity.
At the end of the day there's already huge amounts of youtubers showing their mansions or whatever to influence the gullible viewers, the ones who would miss the nuance of his situation would most likely fall for them anyway. There's already an abundance of blatant "false hope" being peddled far harder and wider, the chance of his objective analysis being misinterpreted by people is as far as i'm concerned insignificant.
A huge part of the phenomenon comes through how fashions form. Hype collects around emotionally-charged things. By their very nature, their spectacle is compromising some of the sincerity and value to maximize reach. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts.
HN is a perfect example of this: looks like a chat forum from 1998, but is very much current and edgy with the cool kids.
No, most viewers were 18-44.
"Middle-aged" is 45-65.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_age
60 is a more usual endpoint, but...
It's a range. The middle of that range is 55, so following that math it would be 110, not 130.
But as the other reply points out, it's the middle section of being an adult. So if you take that 45-65 range, and treat it as the exact middle of your adult life, then you get 92, which is a bit high but not crazy. If you take that 45-65 range and assume old age will be the same length, you get 85, which is pretty close for wealthy non-US countries.
But you are right that his peak earning range was 25-34 (so less than middle age) and his second highest range was 18-24.
So yes I'd agree this isn't middle-age.
my best video has 8k views, coming in at between 100-1000 per month depending how many impressions the algorithm decides to allot to me.
It happens when your video reaches the frontpage of Youtube.
I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it reached "the front page of YouTube" like the sibling post suggested or it would have millions.
Somehow it must've got suggested to a few people and maybe it had a high engagement rate (likes and comments?) which was somehow taken positively. I'm purely guessing though.
It really isn't an impressive video though it does have a 99% like ratio. I'm a bit embarrassed to self promote here so I'll email you based on your HN profile site contact page.
It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).
But that’s not the end of the craziness.
About a year ago, that video was suddenly and inexplicably deemed by YouTube as unsuitable for all advertisers. I appealed, but they stuck with their decision.
In the year since, that video has brought in ~$80.
While I have found success on YouTube, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience. YouTube is the most saturated market on the planet, and and at the end of the day, you are subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm. It is not possible to succeed on YouTube without significant effort, but significant effort doesn’t guarantee success. Moreover, the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable, and it’s sometimes not there at all. You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
People understand that high-quality content is necessary for success on YouTube, but they often lose sight of the fact that it is not sufficient. Not only do you have to create quality content, but you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them on YouTube - which is obviously very, very hard.
You can do everything right and still lose, if you're not lucky.
Considering HN biased towards startups, I wonder can the same reasoning be applied to starting a company. Starting a SAAS company sounds the same:
- the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable
- subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm (product-market fit)
- strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience
> You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.
Probably this one is not that harsh as it seems, Ludwig made an experiment "I made a secret YouTube channel to prove it's not luck". Many creators are using multiple platforms and income sources, so it's not all YT in the end.
But I guess it's hard hard work to grow a channel to this size and also not a guaranteed success.
Basically have a day job before you go all in as a content creator.
Right on. I always tell people that I can’t pay my employees with subs and likes.
For most videos, an overwhelming majority of views come from traffic suggested by YouTube in some manner (home page, sidebar, after a video). I have millions of subscribers across a few channels. Subscriber notification and feeds invariably account for a very-low-single-digit percent of video views.
Usually a wage or salary is a payment in exchange for doing something. Which this isn’t.
I would imagine most places treat this similarly to the way something like a book publishing agreement works.
This is my biggest pet peeve with YouTubers. THEY ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF YOUTUBE.
employment laws do not apply to a youtuber, unless they are employed by some other company, but they do NOT have an employment relationship with YouTube, they are not "employees" of YouTube, and Susan Wojcicki is not "their boss"
Everytime there is a YT Change (like happen recently) there is all these videos where YT often try to compare their experience with employment, how their "boss" Susan did something, or how they are being "Fired" if they get banned, or other such non-sense. That is my peeve.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if some countries define employee differently.
I would be surprised if any nation classified a person uploading videos on to a platform with the hopes of having a revenue share on ads the 3rd party sells on those videos is in anyway an "employee" of any kind.
I would also be surprised if any country has laws where 2 parties could not agree to non-disclosure of the terms of their business contract (which is the basis for this comment thread). that is pretty standard really
I would also be surprised since most of the time when you upload a video you have to agree you will be governed under the Laws of the US, and even more specific the laws of California
I would be surprised in some countries dont change their laws at some time to account for this digital sharecropping (from Youtube and iOS App Store to Uber, etc), and set some rules (like with employment) to this wild west of making a living that affects millions...
Any country or group of people is welcome to spin up their own data centers and content moderations teams to make their own YouTube.
The point is is no one else in the world wants to make the enormous investment required to create a YouTube, so why should they get to make the rules?
It is not technically hard to make a YouTube alternative, just expensive.
"Someone rich could make a new ecosystem" is unrelated to whether the current ecosystem resembles sharecropping.
They can always do that too, but I'm also full for them inconveniencing those businesses.
Businesses should be whiped and forced to play responsibly in society. They can innovate on tech and features, they don't have to innovate on milking people and erroding working rights.
There are and were multitudes of video hosting and serving websites. It is just ridiculously expensive.
Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure what you mean. That it's not rocket science? Well, yes, it isn't. It's not the technology: money (and to a second extend, entrenchment and network effects, and ties with Android, and many other non-tech things) IS of course the huge, sky-high, bar, to building an alternative YouTube.
>Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.*
Well, it was quite a lot of mobility in the feudal ranks. Any competent mercenary could rise to be a higher ranking soldier, and any compenent and cunning higher ranking soldier could, and often did, take on some existing feudal lords, and get their own smaller or bigger fiefdom. After some point, even succesful merchants could get their own armies and castles and be feudal "nobility". Tons of stories from the feudal times (that was what all of cross-feudal fighting was about), and thousands of castles and fiefdoms - and that's just in Europe.
Whereas Youtube? That's one service of its size/scale in the world, covering multiple billions of people.
That would be more like trying to get something competitive not to a feudal lord (which were a dime a dozen), but to the whole of an empire.
This has to stop. People are making products which one company uses to profit. This company is buying their labor—albeit in a really roundabout way. We’ve heard this gaslighting from e.g. Uber, where their workers weren’t employees but “gig workers”, or some other thing.
The only reason companies do this is to get their labor for cheaper. No, these are YouTube workers, their labor is bought by YouTube, and YouTube should obey all labor laws when they buy their labor and profit from their work.
furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
I understand it is a rhetorically powerful phrase, digital sharecropper, but unfortunately as often happens with analogies it falls apart with all the ways it does not fit.
How is this a useful distinction? It's about how you can sell the product, but doesn't change the fact that you don't own your lot, that you pay a percentage share to the owner of the place, that they can change the terms or even crush you anytime they like, and so on.
>furthermore you paid for the right to work the land what the landowner asked, nobody pays a minimum rate to have a YouTube channel that I am aware of.
What you paid to the landowner was a percentage of your lot's production, same as with YouTube.
No, this is an even further stretch.
There are various tests that apply to contractors in the U.K. to work out if you’re an employee or a Lego mate contracting company, as it makes a difference to how taxes and benefits are calculated. Fro my understanding YouTube nowhere near meets that criteria of employee/employer. Companies like Uber and deliveroo are far closer.
As there are in most of the world. Most of them were made for the factory and office era, and despite "updates" still within the old spirit, are antiquated in 2023 when it comes to addressing many new work scenarios...
That is, I wonder if the the deregulation era of the 1980s also deregulated labor practices to the extent that companies can now jump through these hoops in order to avoid labor laws.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rm-ElJPDJk
From memory, the issue is publicly disclosing CPM among some other things (at least it was 4+ years ago).
I actually wonder if posting it off-platform is even allowed, I've seen Twitch enforce their platform exclusivity for 24 hours for Partners.
The same logic applies to most tech jobs. I would expect more big tech companies would want to broadcast their comp numbers to encourage more people to pursue those careers and apply to those companies. The average joe probably assumes SWEs at Google make $100-150K MAX. If more people knew they could make doctor-like numbers without going to grad school (or even going to college at all in some cases), more people would go into tech. But I guess companies have done the math and determined its better to conceal that information best they can to keep their advantage during negotiations.
I remember emailing someone that said they “didn’t share how much they made because it’s against TOS” after the policy changed and they still declined.
I think it might have been the “I made my Christmas lights controlled by anyone on the internet” guy.
It was a long time ago.
This quora post quotes the terms: https://www.quora.com/Am-I-allowed-to-show-my-earnings-to-my...
"HOWEVER, YOU MAY ACCURATELY DISCLOSE THE AMOUNT OF GOOGLE’S GROSS PAYMENTS TO YOU PURSUANT TO THE PROGRAM"
Linus Tech Tips has published their earnings for the past couple of years. One detailed video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4
Linus also posted his adsense of ~$4.6million for the last 9 months a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094682622194032...
Their payroll and overhead costs probably eat up a significant part of that 4.6m.
https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
Source on employee count: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094698614949519...
I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc.
The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest.
IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/BrickExperimentChannel
I'm pretty sure those videos take a LONG time to make.
Primitive Life, Primitive Tools, Primitive Technology Ideas…
Youtube should take those channels down or force them to change name due to how SOE works.
But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing!
1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away.
Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this.
> SOE
Do you mean "seo"?
I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.
For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.
Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok.
Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero.
Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on.
Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs.
Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.
What methods did you use to monetize your blog?
Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s
I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution.
You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone.
Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued.
Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM.
The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors.
It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now?
/thread hijack
Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view.
I kinda want it both ways to be honest.
That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on.
Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
Likely it was a decision based on analytics that Google, and no one else, has.
Imagine we are talking a cable TV platform instead, and your analytics show that most people flip through channels most of the time, as opposed to actually watching something specific. You make a rule to only share revenue with channels if the viewer is engaged longer than 120 seconds. People are still watching TV, you are still monetizing, but the channels aren't getting fully paid and only you know the money involved.
Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
That's not even the half of it. Unless your channel is big enough to be considered a "partner", you are basically fucked when it comes to content strikes, DMCA, AI/contractor driven "community standards" issues, random demonetization, etc. There's no real "support".
The demonetizing thing is particularly funny, I know of channels where their videos get demonetized for content guidelines violations, but viewers still see advertisements. Happens a lot with firearms related content.
If they can keep spam out of my inbox, I’m sure they can figure out what’s objectionable to advertisers beyond “unpopularity”.
Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.
Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had?
What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort.
I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.
In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
Why does anyone do anything? There needs to be an incentive.
But of course there are more intrinsic motivations like wanting to give back to the community, practising their hobby, etc. Those would be equally valid reasons to make youtube videos.
You usually have to go up to "serious amateur" level before you make even token amounts of money (which still doesn't cover your tools much less your time), and 1k subscribers for a video hobbiest is a low bar for that.
Gopher was channelized. IRC was channelized. Usenet was channelized. Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls.
The entire "search" thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.
The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"
It’s always disappointing when a channel I enjoy goes into the “reaction video”, YouTube drama, clickbait type spiral :(
That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel.
I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo?
How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?
- branded merchandise
- endorse or develop your own products - write a book
- other platforms(TikTok, Instagram etc.)
Or use your experience and brand value to do things your YouTube fans might not even notice:
- public speaking
- consulting/video production for brands
- presenting work for commercial YouTube channels
Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar.
Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches.
I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.
Don't leave out cryptocurrency scams.
The video will be on youtube from the start, but as a private video. From there a part of their patreons might get very early access (e.g. CGP Grey has a tier for spell checking and gross errors spotting), and then all patreons get access to the final video. But still private (and/or exposed to channel paying members)
After a short time (a day at most) the video gets public and is fully dispatched to everyone on Youtube.
The way it's managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there's so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.
That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse.
It's an insane imbalance of power.
More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production.
The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying?
I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious.
The algo just didn't experiment with it.
I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.
And we edit on two M1 Ultra Mac Studios, as well as M1 Max MacBook Pros, all fully-optioned.
People vastly underestimate the time and expense involved with “just posting videos to YouTube.”
(If it’s such easy money, why aren’t they doing it…)
You do not need a really beefy computer to edit videos especially when you're starting out. A Canva Pro subscription is a couple of hundred dollars and will let you upload all your footage and then edit it within the browser meaning you don't need to have a powerful computer. If you grow your channel and your needs change then just cancel Canva and buy that bigger machine you need. Use your phone or something on the cheaper end (of cameras) like a GoPro to record.
https://brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com/2022/09/12/my-c...
He's also in Finland, so the cost of gear might not be as cheap as in the US.
> Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.
Per the article...
"Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN."
Taxes would be pretty simple to approximate given he lives in Finland and gives a rough average of his monthly revenue.
I recommend reading the article before commenting.
I am sure the smart folks in Google will know who is watching based on the videos being watched and show appropriate ads at that time or maybe show generic ads about products which they know parents with young kids want.
There’s a video about building a quadcopter for instance, and bricks are used for the frame but he’s also be soldering to have what he needs on the chip. Same for the submarine ones, where the radio control will have nothing to do with Lego.
And you’ll see magnets, metal axles, non Lego controllers, survolting etc. Highly recommend for anyone curious about funny practical experiments.
https://youtu.be/QfkUM4hBge8
It makes me see now more why Mr. Beast is getting his content translated....
Based on my understanding, RPM is directly proportional to the amount of money you make.
So, how does a lot of views from India cause a lower RPM?
In the post the author even says this:
> When I see my RPM drop suddenly, it is usually because my videos are being watched a lot in India
Like, say you have a billion views, and 200 million of those views were from India. Would your revenue be higher if those 200 Indian views never happened and your total views was only 800 million instead?
Why does Indian viewers cause this? I mean, they too see ads, right? Or is it because in India it costs less (??) to put up an ad?
Not a lot of Indians are going to buy your product even if they the cost of the product will probably be lower for Indians so the advertiser makes less money
No, that would mathematically make no sense.
His average RPM drops because of views from India but he still makes some money from the extra 200 million views.
I'm Indian. The reason Indian views make less money is simply that the advertisers who advertise to Indian audiences have lower budgets due to PPP. So the amount they pay to YouTube is less than what a US advertiser would pay. In turn, the channel's share of the revenue (supposedly 55% of it) is also less.
Advertisers can target ads based on various demographic info, e.g. age, gender, location. Cookies etc allow for even more targetting.
So you can imagine an advertising bidding high for ad spots shown to 20-30 males in London (i.e. relatively rich westerners who can afford your product), and bidding low for poorer nations where people do not have as much money to spend (so are not your target customer - e.g. imagine you are trying to sell iPhones etc)