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<p>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.<p>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).<p>Here's my channel if anyone is curious: <a href="https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell">https://youtube.com/MicaelWidell</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out <a href="https://fasterthanli.me/" rel="nofollow">https://fasterthanli.me/</a> 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 <a href="https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-full-time" rel="nofollow">https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-ful...</a><p>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!
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.<p>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.<p>So I can definitely back up this point from the article:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
It is the classic & interesting question, but from watching other creators it seems to miss a key variable: Reliability of monetization.<p>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.<p>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)
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.<p>Just one example of their copyright shenanigans:<p>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.<p>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.<p>So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever.
And 10 times the earnings of the video.
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<p>I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too <i>late</i> 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
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:<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Ch7t9KGcOPk</a>
Actually that holds out for all platforms including Medium, but medium seem to actually pay better based on my exp:<p>1. Monthly hits at 35k
2. Which means that realistically I should be earning $350 to $700. Which in fact happens now!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And, all while getting my ADHD under control using a modified nootropics approach.
This guy only has 4k subscribers and averages only 1.2k views per video... that's not good.<p>I run a channel that produces AI content / tutorials and I do better than this only using 2-6 hours per week.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://sociables.com/creators" rel="nofollow">https://sociables.com/creators</a>
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.<p>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.
Even better question:<p>For people who multiplatform, how does youtube compare to other platforms, and how does monetization differ on those platforms?
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): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYd4aZOhJ0</a><p>His main channel is about wood-working: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel">https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel</a> and he has another one where he tinkers with stuff: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221">https://www.youtube.com/@matthiasrandomstuff2221</a>
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!
I really like your channel, I'm a developer who wants to learn more of the *Ops world in general.<p>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.
Making non-commercial videos about coding some product is the equivalent of majoring in basket-weaving at Youtube University.<p>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.
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 ...
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.<p>Would be neat if someone else enjoyed it.<p>Maybe I’ll try.
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.
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.