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How much can you earn creating content on Youtube?

185 points by Link- 3y ago

ImKevinArcher 3y ago
Thanks for sharing, I think affiliate links to specific apps or products is the right way to go, as YouTube is paying a very low amount for ads.
paulette449 3y ago
“I have made a total of … ~148 EUR from Youtube ad revenue” From 173,000 views
- amelius 3y ago
  How much did Google make from those views?
  - jsnell 3y ago
    The ad revenue split is reported to be 55% for the creator, 45% for YouTube. (Except for Shorts, where the split is the other way around.)
- gennarro 3y ago
  Yea I was interested in the article until seeing this. And then: > and my content went viral several times Clearly there is misunderstanding of the platform, its scale, and how to use it if you are seeing this as viral. That said he seems to be off to a good start. It’s just a slog to get going unless you are going to go truly viral with shorts but that won’t happen with topics like software, etc
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Yeah it seems odd. 1.73 million views is probably 'viral' for a super niche topic, 17.3 million views for less niche topics, 173 million views for music videos. 173k views though... wouldn't have been viral since at least 2008.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  Yeah approx 1EUR/1000 views which I think is kinda "typical" from what I have heard - the ranges I've heard are approx 1USD to 5USD per 1000 views.
  - amelius 3y ago
    What's idiotic about this market is that you can't set your own price.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      How would you set your own price? Just not showing content when there isn't enough adds available surely would drive away watchers. And the advertisers are already bidding. Certain types of content get higher pay.
      - amelius 3y ago
        Imagine you are inside a store that has magazines. The magazines are all free, because they are filled with lots of advertisements. Then someone says "It's crazy that these magazines can't set their own prices". And someone else says "How would you do that, nobody would pick up the magazines".
        Ekaros 3y ago
        The magazine might be free. But it might set the prices for adds so high that it don't get filled. Or actually make money. And some VC keeps throwing money at it as surely at some point they will corner the market and make money. And the video makers and article writers can already contact advertisers and ask for whatever price they want.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        Not show ads unless price is met
        Ekaros 3y ago
Havoc 3y ago
It is the classic & interesting question, but from watching other creators it seems to miss a key variable: Reliability of monetization. Someone may love making videos, has a reliable core audience and good views from western audience (and thus high pay rate). However if it costs them 1k to make a vid and the algo is hit/miss as to whether it gets demonetized or not then that becomes a show stopper issue. If you make 3 vids a month and are unlucky then you've got a -3k cashflow...so you're not eating that month. I've seen some move to Twitch as a result since core audience will follow and subs are a bit more predictable (or rather not as all or nothing)
- tester457 3y ago
  I've seen twitch let's players say they wish they prioritized youtube first because they claimed youtube revenue is larger and more reliable than twitch subs. But gamers are able to publish a video nearly, a contrast from the kind of youtuber that spends 1k on a video like you mentioned.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    I guess youtube has the advantage of potential recurring revenue from back catalog so I can see that creating a reliable stream effect. Depends on type of content I think - some types have very spiky first 48 hours. So either you're monetized there or it's a dud video.
ryanthedev 3y ago
“And just to be clear...I know exactly what I’m doing”
andai 3y ago
How does half of $2K (over 2 years!) go to taxes? Doesn't that put you in the bracket where the government gives you money?
- veidr 3y ago
  not unless you don't get any other money
- jklein11 3y ago
  If you are doing content creation part time you are going to have more income than the 2k. the 50% is likely the marginal rate though and not the effective rate.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    You should be able to offset a fair few costs against that income.
- gennarro 3y ago
  Presumably he has a high paying engineering role as well
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  if you're in Denmark it would be easy to get to the point where half would go to taxes, also some countries can have different rates on what is your primary income and what is income earned from secondary sources that are taxed higher. However in the case of having a business that is generating taxable revenue you are probably also buying things at times you can deduct, so it's probably not as dire as all that - although depending on how things are you might not want to deduct more than you actually earn from your secondary source of income.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  Many Americans are surprised to learn how much higher taxes often are outside of America
  - 3y ago
fredgrott 3y ago
Actually that holds out for all platforms including Medium, but medium seem to actually pay better based on my exp: 1. Monthly hits at 35k 2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now! The key seems to be advertising in sm in the right numbers. When I increase my sm posting to fully daily and multiples using video slide strategy I tend to get the right number of impressions to drive traffic to my medium articles. In my case I need to post 500-1000 postings a month and then I will see my earn per month multiply by 10 to 100. Impressions will always be the highest but with ads you have it reversed in that you get paid for a distraction which is a different set of metrics. This is good yt creators follow that up with some market product to sell that the yt acts as ad for. In my case my books act as the market piece that my medium articles and yt reels advertise for. I fully expect to be at 500k in the next 6 months using a modification of GaryVee's content strategy and that is concurrently with my current code and book writing schedule. So yes it is possible even if you have a day job. And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.
- nibbleshifter 3y ago
  > getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach. I'm interested in reading about this
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
  GaryVee's content strategy is to create pillar content then repurpose it. How do you find the time to post on social media 15-30 times a day and create the extrapolated content? How do you create quality social media content from based on your main content? I am working FT on a startup and social media has been a stumbling block for me because it takes a lot of time and I am having trouble balancing building the product and marketing/advertising it.
hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
I started a YouTube channel at the end of 2017 and published on YouTube on a regular basis for a bit over a year. My best year was about $1,500. I've made $4,600 since I started the channel. At the channel's peak, I was trying to publish a DIY video where I would build something two or three times a month. I started the channel because I enjoy making stuff and thought I would be able to do more of it and maybe get paid to do it. As I continued, I worked hard to polish my production style and I realized I was prioritizing the video production over doing what I loved. Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped. I still post videos from time to time, but I try to do everything in a single take and not spent more than an hour editing it. Last year I finished a project I was pretty proud of and spent about 20 hours working on a video and it only got 100 views after the initial posting. For me, it takes a lot of self promotion to get the algorithm to recognize the video as a good video and have it be shown to more people. The self promotion part is something I really dislike doing. YouTube is great for people that love the process of making videos because it's a win whether someone watches your video or not. Editing can be fun, but for me it gets tedious and I prefer doing a lot of other things.
- okr 3y ago
  I wonder, what would come out, if all these editing things can also be automated and optimized by an AI. Leaving the video intact, but doing the cuts, translation, timestamps, colorizing, densing, audio gaining, lighting, so it all looks compared to things out there.
- sebazzz 3y ago
  > Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped. Isn't that why a lot of YouTubers (or content creators, whatever the name is), hire a videographer to do that work for them?
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    So a lot of YouTubers start primarily self editing up until they have enough of a following to hire someone’s services. It can be painful!
lakomen 3y ago
Dealing with Youtube's "copyright" department isn't worth the trouble. Also the same content on a Adsense monezited site yields factor 10 earnings vs Youtube. Just one example of their copyright shenanigans: A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music". Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload. Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public? The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with. So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever. And 10 times the earnings of the video.
- saaaaaam 3y ago
  Hold the line music is absolutely copyrighted in a way that you can’t post a conversation containing that music to a channel that you are monetising, without compensating the creators of the music.
  - realusername 3y ago
    That sounds absolutely insane, you don't even request that music to be played. It's time for copyright to adapt to the 21st century.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      It doesn't sound like they were blocked from ever sharing the video, just that they can't make as much money off of it.
    - noAnswer 3y ago
      The cleaning office didn't requested to prank called either!
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      The music is likely fair use since limited time period and not main use. But fair use is complicated and there is no way it could be determined by algorithm. YouTube can’t trust the uploader. It doesn’t scale to decide by person. Fallback to DMCA process would be too expensive. Plus, fair use is only US. Easier to just deny copyright material.
evrimoztamur 3y ago
I checked his YouTube account to see the kind of content he was producing and honestly, not really impressed. None of these have educational value per se and look (at a thumbnail glance) like opinion vlogs. For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-full-time https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful... I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!
- vasco 3y ago
  I don't think getting into producing educational content is a viable strategy if someone is starting now and their goal is to have a good living. Specially on youtube where you also have to give away some of your privacy to the internet.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    For recorded media (ie not streaming on Twitch) you control what you upload, so there's very little exposure you don't want, other than giving your details to YouTube so they can pay you. If that's too much exposure for you then becoming a YouTube star may not be for you. Eg What do the people that run Kurzgesagt look like? I have no idea, because almost all their content is animated. Other YouTube stars choose to share some things, like what they look like, but most don't give away enough serial to be stalked, and with good reason! If you get to Mr. Beast level of recognizability, then you have a whole slew of other problems, but you're not gonna get there, so I wouldn't worry about those problems just yet.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  I never heard of that content creator before and I wanted to see by myself as well. I picked a video on the utility and challenge of test engineers because of all the thumbnails that the subject I had more familiarity with. The content is good IMO. I can’t tell if great but it’s not garbage. But you are right that it’s not educational per se. It seems akin to a podcast of Software lifecycle.
IshKebab 3y ago
I think it's really difficult to answer that because revenue per watch varies depending on the content, because different industries are willing to pay different amounts for advertising. I imagine if you have a popular channel to with anything around money (banking, gambling, investing etc) or high value/margin goods like makeup, cars, etc. then you make significantly more than niche interest channels.
- Link- 3y ago
  CPM (clicks per mille) varies greatly per geography and niche indeed.
amelius 3y ago
Interesting. We could do the same thread for apps on the App Store. I have the feeling that platform owners are painting a picture that is far too rosy ...
- Link- 3y ago
  Yep. That's exactly why I published this, I see a lot of how "creator X made Y in Z time" and usually it's insane figures. I never saw any realistic figures to gauge what the median might actually look like. This post is it. This is what an average channel performance looks like.
flandish 3y ago
I think I could enjoy uploading videos of me doing things I enjoy. I noodle around with things from oil painting to writing emulators. However, both are mostly me tinkering, researching, “hello world” ing and then maybe producing. Would be neat if someone else enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll try.
- Link- 3y ago
  It's always worth a try! You never know what people will find enjoyable to watch :)
CM30 3y ago
As someone who's posted videos for about 10 years, and posted them seriously since 2017, the best period I ever had gave me about £1,500 for a couple of months worth of videos. Usually it's closer to £250 a month or something. This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers. So I can definitely back up this point from the article: > Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge. Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then. Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills. But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.
- zamnos 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but there are some that have managed to crack the code, or maybe just right place, right time, but eg kurzgesagt has a team of 60 to run their channel, and also they get a lot of outside funding for their channel. (they have 20M subscribers, but my question is how they got there, not why are they successful now that they are there)
  - oblio 3y ago
    Black Swan aka long tail. Most people starve. It's not a valid career choice, it's a lottery.
    - 3y ago
mwidell 3y ago
I run a channel with 85k subscribers and around 10k views per day. My monthly income breakdown is roughly this: - Youtube ads $900 - Affiliate links $2500 - Brand deals $3000 (equates to one sponsored video per month) - Patreon $350 Took me around 5 years of posting a video a week to get here. Now I finally make a living. Started working full time about a year ago. Before that 15-20h per week for years. I talked to some other youtubers, and I think my "path" to making a living from youtube, and my income breakdown, is pretty standard. Key takeaway here is that youtube is a looong game. You will be unlikely to succeed unless you love making the videos so much, that you are happy to do it almost for free, consistently, for years. And the money is not in adsense, but in brand deals and affiliate links (which are often part of brand deals). Here's my channel if anyone is curious: https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell
- oblio 3y ago
  How worried are you about copy cats ruining your business?
  - mwidell 3y ago
    Not at all. That's the beauty of being an influencer - it is really hard to copy what you do, including personality and all. Also, it takes years to build a following and a personal brand. Sometimes people upload copies of my videos, but youtube has a good system to notify me and take them down.
- jeffwass 3y ago
  Thanks for this Micael, very helpful info and your channel is pretty cool too! Regarding the weekly video, are you saying you’d spend about 15-20 hours per week on that one video to get to the status you were at last year? I’ve heard that regular releases are important for a channel to be picked up properly by “the algorithm”. Is this your experience, and is that a critical to keep up the cadence of one video per week? I make music videos (basically myself playing keyboards) and have never really gotten a good long-term traction with “the algorithm” yet. Sometimes I get a burst of impressions for a few days with corresponding views and subscribes, but these come and go. I release ever few weeks, though some of my videos are shorts, or just a few mins long for a single song. I think a weekly release would be a real challenge, but maybe that’s what is needed to get to the next step? For me the real time sink is all the time arranging and practicing to get to a point I’m confident to even film myself playing.
nicksiscoe 3y ago
This is entirely anecdotal, but reading the comments here it feels like compensation for the bottom 50% of creators has gone down in the last 5-ish years I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped
- mwidell 3y ago
  Yes, the event where everything went to shit is called the Adpocalypse: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_Adpocalypse https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_Adpocalypse
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  How often did you post a video, and how long were they, roughly? I'm asking because my YouTube channel has about 2,500 subscribers but I've yet to see a penny.
kachurovskiy 3y ago
YouTube channel is a must if you run a business. Ran $100 of ads and got zero orders. Spent a couple hours on a video and got 10.
rchaud 3y ago
Making non-commercial videos about coding some product is the equivalent of majoring in basket-weaving at Youtube University. How much you make via advertising is directly proportional to audience size and geographic distribution. Niches with large audiences include video games, superhero movies/IP, makeup, gadget review videos. And even then, ad revenue usually needs to be supplemented by adding affilliate links and in-video sponsorship messages.
IdontKnowRust 3y ago
I really like your channel, I'm a developer who wants to learn more of the *Ops world in general. But for me these platforms like YouTube have a big problem, they force content creators to accept that everything in life have a trade off, which in this case is quality x quantity. YouTube values quantity in the end, while it's users values quality in a strange way. Because of this, niche channels like yours, gets less attention than it should be.
- Link- 3y ago
  I appreciate your support I'm in it for the long game. In this world the fastest way for growth is riding the waves. An alternative is grinding to build an audience that appreciate the value you offer. The latter takes years of consistent work.
- bemmu 3y ago
  Suppose today you go on YouTube and see 10 recommended videos. There are thousands of videos it could put in these slots, so they'll be ranked and only the very best (based on metrics and your interests) will make the cut. Video #11 might have been great, but wouldn't get suggested to you merely because it had a few seconds lower average watch time. Because of this I'd expect a 10% better video (like %, watch time) would improve its views by some huge nonlinear factor (maybe double?).
tzs 3y ago
There's a section about YouTube in this video [1] by Samuri Guitarist called "How Much Money Guitarists Actually Make Might Surprise You". The YouTube money is covered in the "The Content Creator" section. Overall the video lives up to its title. I was in fact surprised by how much guitarists actually make. The surprise worked both ways--some of the ways guitarists might make money paid much worse than I expected, and some paid much more. [1] https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk
- AviationAtom 3y ago
  I think this data is subject to change quickly. I think content creation has enjoyed it's "Dot-com Bubble" era. I think it's already starting to change, but will likely very rapidly change if a recession sets in soon, as many prominent economists are expecting. Content creation payments are fueled by advertising dollars and it's easy to see that the advertising market has started to contract, as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding, driven in much part by loss of advertising revenues.
  - red_trumpet 3y ago
    > as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding Which time frame are you talking about here? I had the impression news outlets folded during the last 20 years because ads went online?
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Easy 10k per month in the finance niche with 4k video quality and descent lighting.
tpoacher 3y ago
Even better question: For people who multiplatform, how does youtube compare to other platforms, and how does monetization differ on those platforms?
ZachSaucier 3y ago
Ironic that the author has a principle of "no clickbait bullshit" but the article uses a clickbait title since it only talks about his personal experience.
- TheLML 3y ago
  Also you're shooting yourself in the foot by not doing any clickbait, considering that clicks = money. So if you want to make more money on YT, you need more clicks.
kamel3d 3y ago
His content is not good and thats why he not earning that much
dsir 3y ago
In terms of monetization I think content creators are better served focusing on leveraging their reach to build up a community to support them instead of optimizing primarily for ad revenue. Platforms like YouTube have continuously shown that relying on automated ad systems is unreliable and puts your ability to monetize subject to the whims of the advertisers. Many established creators have wrongfully received demonetization strikes against their channels threatening their livelihood. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour. I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche. https://sociables.com/creators https://sociables.com/creators
elintknower 3y ago
This guy only has 4k subscribers and averages only 1.2k views per video... that's not good. I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week. The devrel / dev content niche is hardly a niche anymore - thinking about a market is everything and as others have said building an audience you can market to with brand partners is where most of the $$ comes from these days.
jamalone 3y ago
Is there a specific reason why you have your link structured that way? I'm surprised to see that many tags as subfolders to the content, not sure I've come across that structure before. Just curious!
moremetadata 3y ago
[dead]
lucas_membrane 3y ago
Here I see 116 writers complaining about the near-impossibility of making a living via youtube, a property of one of the biggest big dogs in the technological world. Consider the following: 1. Youtube is a monopoly. 2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation. 3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions. 4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S. 5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work. If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
  What’s the alternative that you’re proposing? From what Google has published, YT barely makes money even at the current 55/45 cut. Consider what they’re doing —- hosting billions of hours of video, at global scale, 365 days a year, for free. Nobody wants this business because it’s a terrible business. Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example. Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns. All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).
  - lucas_membrane 3y ago
    > YT barely makes money Sure. And the same has been about Amazon in retail. But the scoreboard for the tech companies is not earnings; it is return to shareholders, mostly share price appreciation. If the stock prices are high in relation to income, that suggests that the monopoly power is somehow valuable, probably in expectation that the monopoly can be significantly monetized in the future or used to help other parts of the business. Monopolies may have multiple downsides even when they do not extract extortionate profits. Google must obtain plenty of positive feelings from the public for providing so much amusement via youtube, maybe so much good feeling that no one even tries to assess the consequences of their other monopoly (search). Somehow, when I see a huge company like Alphabet (Google) based on a niche like search, which has a single winner, and they offer a service like youtube that looks so grass-roots inclusive inviting everyone to join in and get happy, rich and famous, but only a very small fraction do, where success is based so much on what youtube itself recommends, I suspect that there may be some implicit bias working in favor of unequal results that maybe google has something to do with. We should be looking for alternative models and finding ways to reverse the trend to single-winner markets. I grew up when all the significant cities in the USA had multiple local newspapers, all of which hired writers, and when very many more musicians made a living than do so now. I cannot think of a good reason why anyone should have expected that vast improvements in communications technology would destroy that or why we should just let that go. Monocultures do not find global optimums.
netsharc 3y ago
Matthias Wandel posted this a while ago, he didn't censor the number of views or earnings (apparently YouTube doesn't like people doing that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0 His main channel is about wood-working: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel and he has another one where he tinkers with stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221 https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221
AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago
It all depends how many phones you have running in your farm
weregiraffe 3y ago
Have some self respect and don't produce "content".
stcroixx 3y ago
That’s mostly up to YouTube who is opaque and arbitrary about what they will allow you to post and make money from. They’ll drop the hammer when it suits them.

185 points by Link- 3y ago

Thanks for sharing, I think affiliate links to specific apps or products is the right way to go, as YouTube is paying a very low amount for ads.

paulette449 3y ago

“I have made a total of … ~148 EUR from Youtube ad revenue” From 173,000 views

amelius 3y ago
How much did Google make from those views?
- jsnell 3y ago
  The ad revenue split is reported to be 55% for the creator, 45% for YouTube. (Except for Shorts, where the split is the other way around.)
gennarro 3y ago
Yea I was interested in the article until seeing this. And then: > and my content went viral several times Clearly there is misunderstanding of the platform, its scale, and how to use it if you are seeing this as viral. That said he seems to be off to a good start. It’s just a slog to get going unless you are going to go truly viral with shorts but that won’t happen with topics like software, etc
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Yeah it seems odd. 1.73 million views is probably 'viral' for a super niche topic, 17.3 million views for less niche topics, 173 million views for music videos. 173k views though... wouldn't have been viral since at least 2008.
mattlondon 3y ago
Yeah approx 1EUR/1000 views which I think is kinda "typical" from what I have heard - the ranges I've heard are approx 1USD to 5USD per 1000 views.
- amelius 3y ago
  What's idiotic about this market is that you can't set your own price.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    How would you set your own price? Just not showing content when there isn't enough adds available surely would drive away watchers. And the advertisers are already bidding. Certain types of content get higher pay.
    - amelius 3y ago
      Imagine you are inside a store that has magazines. The magazines are all free, because they are filled with lots of advertisements. Then someone says "It's crazy that these magazines can't set their own prices". And someone else says "How would you do that, nobody would pick up the magazines".
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        The magazine might be free. But it might set the prices for adds so high that it don't get filled. Or actually make money. And some VC keeps throwing money at it as surely at some point they will corner the market and make money. And the video makers and article writers can already contact advertisers and ask for whatever price they want.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Not show ads unless price is met
      - Ekaros 3y ago

Havoc 3y ago

It is the classic & interesting question, but from watching other creators it seems to miss a key variable: Reliability of monetization. Someone may love making videos, has a reliable core audience and good views from western audience (and thus high pay rate). However if it costs them 1k to make a vid and the algo is hit/miss as to whether it gets demonetized or not then that becomes a show stopper issue. If you make 3 vids a month and are unlucky then you've got a -3k cashflow...so you're not eating that month. I've seen some move to Twitch as a result since core audience will follow and subs are a bit more predictable (or rather not as all or nothing)

tester457 3y ago
I've seen twitch let's players say they wish they prioritized youtube first because they claimed youtube revenue is larger and more reliable than twitch subs. But gamers are able to publish a video nearly, a contrast from the kind of youtuber that spends 1k on a video like you mentioned.
- Havoc 3y ago
  I guess youtube has the advantage of potential recurring revenue from back catalog so I can see that creating a reliable stream effect. Depends on type of content I think - some types have very spiky first 48 hours. So either you're monetized there or it's a dud video.

ryanthedev 3y ago

“And just to be clear...I know exactly what I’m doing”

andai 3y ago

How does half of $2K (over 2 years!) go to taxes? Doesn't that put you in the bracket where the government gives you money?

veidr 3y ago
not unless you don't get any other money
jklein11 3y ago
If you are doing content creation part time you are going to have more income than the 2k. the 50% is likely the marginal rate though and not the effective rate.
- ta1243 3y ago
  You should be able to offset a fair few costs against that income.
gennarro 3y ago
Presumably he has a high paying engineering role as well
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
if you're in Denmark it would be easy to get to the point where half would go to taxes, also some countries can have different rates on what is your primary income and what is income earned from secondary sources that are taxed higher. However in the case of having a business that is generating taxable revenue you are probably also buying things at times you can deduct, so it's probably not as dire as all that - although depending on how things are you might not want to deduct more than you actually earn from your secondary source of income.
paulpauper 3y ago
Many Americans are surprised to learn how much higher taxes often are outside of America
- 3y ago

fredgrott 3y ago

Actually that holds out for all platforms including Medium, but medium seem to actually pay better based on my exp: 1. Monthly hits at 35k 2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now! The key seems to be advertising in sm in the right numbers. When I increase my sm posting to fully daily and multiples using video slide strategy I tend to get the right number of impressions to drive traffic to my medium articles. In my case I need to post 500-1000 postings a month and then I will see my earn per month multiply by 10 to 100. Impressions will always be the highest but with ads you have it reversed in that you get paid for a distraction which is a different set of metrics. This is good yt creators follow that up with some market product to sell that the yt acts as ad for. In my case my books act as the market piece that my medium articles and yt reels advertise for. I fully expect to be at 500k in the next 6 months using a modification of GaryVee's content strategy and that is concurrently with my current code and book writing schedule. So yes it is possible even if you have a day job. And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.

nibbleshifter 3y ago
> getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach. I'm interested in reading about this
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
GaryVee's content strategy is to create pillar content then repurpose it. How do you find the time to post on social media 15-30 times a day and create the extrapolated content? How do you create quality social media content from based on your main content? I am working FT on a startup and social media has been a stumbling block for me because it takes a lot of time and I am having trouble balancing building the product and marketing/advertising it.

hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago

I started a YouTube channel at the end of 2017 and published on YouTube on a regular basis for a bit over a year. My best year was about $1,500. I've made $4,600 since I started the channel. At the channel's peak, I was trying to publish a DIY video where I would build something two or three times a month. I started the channel because I enjoy making stuff and thought I would be able to do more of it and maybe get paid to do it. As I continued, I worked hard to polish my production style and I realized I was prioritizing the video production over doing what I loved. Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped. I still post videos from time to time, but I try to do everything in a single take and not spent more than an hour editing it. Last year I finished a project I was pretty proud of and spent about 20 hours working on a video and it only got 100 views after the initial posting. For me, it takes a lot of self promotion to get the algorithm to recognize the video as a good video and have it be shown to more people. The self promotion part is something I really dislike doing. YouTube is great for people that love the process of making videos because it's a win whether someone watches your video or not. Editing can be fun, but for me it gets tedious and I prefer doing a lot of other things.

okr 3y ago
I wonder, what would come out, if all these editing things can also be automated and optimized by an AI. Leaving the video intact, but doing the cuts, translation, timestamps, colorizing, densing, audio gaining, lighting, so it all looks compared to things out there.
sebazzz 3y ago
> Making videos taking time away from actually making stuff and making the projects take 10X longer. So I stopped. Isn't that why a lot of YouTubers (or content creators, whatever the name is), hire a videographer to do that work for them?
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  So a lot of YouTubers start primarily self editing up until they have enough of a following to hire someone’s services. It can be painful!

lakomen 3y ago

Dealing with Youtube's "copyright" department isn't worth the trouble. Also the same content on a Adsense monezited site yields factor 10 earnings vs Youtube. Just one example of their copyright shenanigans: A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music". Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload. Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public? The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with. So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever. And 10 times the earnings of the video.

saaaaaam 3y ago
Hold the line music is absolutely copyrighted in a way that you can’t post a conversation containing that music to a channel that you are monetising, without compensating the creators of the music.
- realusername 3y ago
  That sounds absolutely insane, you don't even request that music to be played. It's time for copyright to adapt to the 21st century.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    It doesn't sound like they were blocked from ever sharing the video, just that they can't make as much money off of it.
  - noAnswer 3y ago
    The cleaning office didn't requested to prank called either!
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    The music is likely fair use since limited time period and not main use. But fair use is complicated and there is no way it could be determined by algorithm. YouTube can’t trust the uploader. It doesn’t scale to decide by person. Fallback to DMCA process would be too expensive. Plus, fair use is only US. Easier to just deny copyright material.

evrimoztamur 3y ago

I checked his YouTube account to see the kind of content he was producing and honestly, not really impressed. None of these have educational value per se and look (at a thumbnail glance) like opinion vlogs. For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-full-time https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful... I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!

vasco 3y ago
I don't think getting into producing educational content is a viable strategy if someone is starting now and their goal is to have a good living. Specially on youtube where you also have to give away some of your privacy to the internet.
- zamnos 3y ago
  For recorded media (ie not streaming on Twitch) you control what you upload, so there's very little exposure you don't want, other than giving your details to YouTube so they can pay you. If that's too much exposure for you then becoming a YouTube star may not be for you. Eg What do the people that run Kurzgesagt look like? I have no idea, because almost all their content is animated. Other YouTube stars choose to share some things, like what they look like, but most don't give away enough serial to be stalked, and with good reason! If you get to Mr. Beast level of recognizability, then you have a whole slew of other problems, but you're not gonna get there, so I wouldn't worry about those problems just yet.
dopidopHN 3y ago
I never heard of that content creator before and I wanted to see by myself as well. I picked a video on the utility and challenge of test engineers because of all the thumbnails that the subject I had more familiarity with. The content is good IMO. I can’t tell if great but it’s not garbage. But you are right that it’s not educational per se. It seems akin to a podcast of Software lifecycle.

IshKebab 3y ago

I think it's really difficult to answer that because revenue per watch varies depending on the content, because different industries are willing to pay different amounts for advertising. I imagine if you have a popular channel to with anything around money (banking, gambling, investing etc) or high value/margin goods like makeup, cars, etc. then you make significantly more than niche interest channels.

Link- 3y ago
CPM (clicks per mille) varies greatly per geography and niche indeed.

amelius 3y ago

Interesting. We could do the same thread for apps on the App Store. I have the feeling that platform owners are painting a picture that is far too rosy ...

Link- 3y ago
Yep. That's exactly why I published this, I see a lot of how "creator X made Y in Z time" and usually it's insane figures. I never saw any realistic figures to gauge what the median might actually look like. This post is it. This is what an average channel performance looks like.

flandish 3y ago

I think I could enjoy uploading videos of me doing things I enjoy. I noodle around with things from oil painting to writing emulators. However, both are mostly me tinkering, researching, “hello world” ing and then maybe producing. Would be neat if someone else enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll try.

Link- 3y ago
It's always worth a try! You never know what people will find enjoyable to watch :)

CM30 3y ago

As someone who's posted videos for about 10 years, and posted them seriously since 2017, the best period I ever had gave me about £1,500 for a couple of months worth of videos. Usually it's closer to £250 a month or something. This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers. So I can definitely back up this point from the article: > Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge. Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then. Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills. But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.

zamnos 3y ago
I don't disagree, but there are some that have managed to crack the code, or maybe just right place, right time, but eg kurzgesagt has a team of 60 to run their channel, and also they get a lot of outside funding for their channel. (they have 20M subscribers, but my question is how they got there, not why are they successful now that they are there)
- oblio 3y ago
  Black Swan aka long tail. Most people starve. It's not a valid career choice, it's a lottery.
  - 3y ago

mwidell 3y ago

I run a channel with 85k subscribers and around 10k views per day. My monthly income breakdown is roughly this: - Youtube ads $900 - Affiliate links $2500 - Brand deals $3000 (equates to one sponsored video per month) - Patreon $350 Took me around 5 years of posting a video a week to get here. Now I finally make a living. Started working full time about a year ago. Before that 15-20h per week for years. I talked to some other youtubers, and I think my "path" to making a living from youtube, and my income breakdown, is pretty standard. Key takeaway here is that youtube is a looong game. You will be unlikely to succeed unless you love making the videos so much, that you are happy to do it almost for free, consistently, for years. And the money is not in adsense, but in brand deals and affiliate links (which are often part of brand deals). Here's my channel if anyone is curious: https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell

oblio 3y ago
How worried are you about copy cats ruining your business?
- mwidell 3y ago
  Not at all. That's the beauty of being an influencer - it is really hard to copy what you do, including personality and all. Also, it takes years to build a following and a personal brand. Sometimes people upload copies of my videos, but youtube has a good system to notify me and take them down.
jeffwass 3y ago
Thanks for this Micael, very helpful info and your channel is pretty cool too! Regarding the weekly video, are you saying you’d spend about 15-20 hours per week on that one video to get to the status you were at last year? I’ve heard that regular releases are important for a channel to be picked up properly by “the algorithm”. Is this your experience, and is that a critical to keep up the cadence of one video per week? I make music videos (basically myself playing keyboards) and have never really gotten a good long-term traction with “the algorithm” yet. Sometimes I get a burst of impressions for a few days with corresponding views and subscribes, but these come and go. I release ever few weeks, though some of my videos are shorts, or just a few mins long for a single song. I think a weekly release would be a real challenge, but maybe that’s what is needed to get to the next step? For me the real time sink is all the time arranging and practicing to get to a point I’m confident to even film myself playing.

nicksiscoe 3y ago

This is entirely anecdotal, but reading the comments here it feels like compensation for the bottom 50% of creators has gone down in the last 5-ish years I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped

mwidell 3y ago
Yes, the event where everything went to shit is called the Adpocalypse: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_Adpocalypse https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_Adpocalypse
bookofjoe 3y ago
How often did you post a video, and how long were they, roughly? I'm asking because my YouTube channel has about 2,500 subscribers but I've yet to see a penny.

kachurovskiy 3y ago

YouTube channel is a must if you run a business. Ran $100 of ads and got zero orders. Spent a couple hours on a video and got 10.

rchaud 3y ago

Making non-commercial videos about coding some product is the equivalent of majoring in basket-weaving at Youtube University. How much you make via advertising is directly proportional to audience size and geographic distribution. Niches with large audiences include video games, superhero movies/IP, makeup, gadget review videos. And even then, ad revenue usually needs to be supplemented by adding affilliate links and in-video sponsorship messages.

IdontKnowRust 3y ago

I really like your channel, I'm a developer who wants to learn more of the *Ops world in general. But for me these platforms like YouTube have a big problem, they force content creators to accept that everything in life have a trade off, which in this case is quality x quantity. YouTube values quantity in the end, while it's users values quality in a strange way. Because of this, niche channels like yours, gets less attention than it should be.

Link- 3y ago
I appreciate your support I'm in it for the long game. In this world the fastest way for growth is riding the waves. An alternative is grinding to build an audience that appreciate the value you offer. The latter takes years of consistent work.
bemmu 3y ago
Suppose today you go on YouTube and see 10 recommended videos. There are thousands of videos it could put in these slots, so they'll be ranked and only the very best (based on metrics and your interests) will make the cut. Video #11 might have been great, but wouldn't get suggested to you merely because it had a few seconds lower average watch time. Because of this I'd expect a 10% better video (like %, watch time) would improve its views by some huge nonlinear factor (maybe double?).

tzs 3y ago

There's a section about YouTube in this video [1] by Samuri Guitarist called "How Much Money Guitarists Actually Make Might Surprise You". The YouTube money is covered in the "The Content Creator" section. Overall the video lives up to its title. I was in fact surprised by how much guitarists actually make. The surprise worked both ways--some of the ways guitarists might make money paid much worse than I expected, and some paid much more. [1] https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk

AviationAtom 3y ago
I think this data is subject to change quickly. I think content creation has enjoyed it's "Dot-com Bubble" era. I think it's already starting to change, but will likely very rapidly change if a recession sets in soon, as many prominent economists are expecting. Content creation payments are fueled by advertising dollars and it's easy to see that the advertising market has started to contract, as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding, driven in much part by loss of advertising revenues.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  > as evidenced by many of the modern news outlets folding Which time frame are you talking about here? I had the impression news outlets folded during the last 20 years because ads went online?

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Easy 10k per month in the finance niche with 4k video quality and descent lighting.

tpoacher 3y ago

Even better question: For people who multiplatform, how does youtube compare to other platforms, and how does monetization differ on those platforms?

ZachSaucier 3y ago

Ironic that the author has a principle of "no clickbait bullshit" but the article uses a clickbait title since it only talks about his personal experience.

TheLML 3y ago
Also you're shooting yourself in the foot by not doing any clickbait, considering that clicks = money. So if you want to make more money on YT, you need more clicks.

kamel3d 3y ago

His content is not good and thats why he not earning that much

dsir 3y ago

In terms of monetization I think content creators are better served focusing on leveraging their reach to build up a community to support them instead of optimizing primarily for ad revenue. Platforms like YouTube have continuously shown that relying on automated ad systems is unreliable and puts your ability to monetize subject to the whims of the advertisers. Many established creators have wrongfully received demonetization strikes against their channels threatening their livelihood. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour. I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche. https://sociables.com/creators https://sociables.com/creators

elintknower 3y ago

This guy only has 4k subscribers and averages only 1.2k views per video... that's not good. I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week. The devrel / dev content niche is hardly a niche anymore - thinking about a market is everything and as others have said building an audience you can market to with brand partners is where most of the $$ comes from these days.

jamalone 3y ago

Is there a specific reason why you have your link structured that way? I'm surprised to see that many tags as subfolders to the content, not sure I've come across that structure before. Just curious!

moremetadata 3y ago

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lucas_membrane 3y ago

Here I see 116 writers complaining about the near-impossibility of making a living via youtube, a property of one of the biggest big dogs in the technological world. Consider the following: 1. Youtube is a monopoly. 2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation. 3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions. 4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S. 5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work. If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
What’s the alternative that you’re proposing? From what Google has published, YT barely makes money even at the current 55/45 cut. Consider what they’re doing —- hosting billions of hours of video, at global scale, 365 days a year, for free. Nobody wants this business because it’s a terrible business. Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example. Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns. All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).
- lucas_membrane 3y ago
  > YT barely makes money Sure. And the same has been about Amazon in retail. But the scoreboard for the tech companies is not earnings; it is return to shareholders, mostly share price appreciation. If the stock prices are high in relation to income, that suggests that the monopoly power is somehow valuable, probably in expectation that the monopoly can be significantly monetized in the future or used to help other parts of the business. Monopolies may have multiple downsides even when they do not extract extortionate profits. Google must obtain plenty of positive feelings from the public for providing so much amusement via youtube, maybe so much good feeling that no one even tries to assess the consequences of their other monopoly (search). Somehow, when I see a huge company like Alphabet (Google) based on a niche like search, which has a single winner, and they offer a service like youtube that looks so grass-roots inclusive inviting everyone to join in and get happy, rich and famous, but only a very small fraction do, where success is based so much on what youtube itself recommends, I suspect that there may be some implicit bias working in favor of unequal results that maybe google has something to do with. We should be looking for alternative models and finding ways to reverse the trend to single-winner markets. I grew up when all the significant cities in the USA had multiple local newspapers, all of which hired writers, and when very many more musicians made a living than do so now. I cannot think of a good reason why anyone should have expected that vast improvements in communications technology would destroy that or why we should just let that go. Monocultures do not find global optimums.

netsharc 3y ago

Matthias Wandel posted this a while ago, he didn't censor the number of views or earnings (apparently YouTube doesn't like people doing that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0 His main channel is about wood-working: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel and he has another one where he tinkers with stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221 https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221

AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago

It all depends how many phones you have running in your farm

weregiraffe 3y ago

Have some self respect and don't produce "content".

stcroixx 3y ago

That’s mostly up to YouTube who is opaque and arbitrary about what they will allow you to post and make money from. They’ll drop the hammer when it suits them.