[CM30]

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.

[bleah1000]

While most of this comment is true, there are lots of youtubers that can make it full-time without getting millions of subscribers. The key is that you can't rely on adsense, you need to get as many different ways of getting income as possible (patreon, sponsors, merch, etc).

From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.

The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.

[CM30]

Yeah this is true. Adsense is a very difficult way to make money on YouTube, and it's stuff like sponsorships, selling merch, selling courses, Patreon, etc that usually keep a lot of creators afloat.

If you can get those working for you, you can definitely get by on a few hundred thousand subs, and I know lots of creators in exactly that situation.

But yeah the challenge there is definitely building enough of a community that people are willing to pay you for that stuff, which is more difficult than just posting videos would be. Especially given that your niche has a huge effect on how easily you can make money from those things, and whether your community is going to be 'loyal' enough to support you that way. Creator focused and topic focused channels have very different routes and possibilities for monetisation...

[zamnos]

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]

Black Swan aka long tail.

Most people starve.

It's not a valid career choice, it's a lottery.

[Mawr]

It's not a lottery, there's a direct relationship between the quality of a video and its viewership.

Luck is involved, but to a much lesser degree than in fields like music, acting, or startups.

[oblio]

The point of the entire article is that you can't make a living out of it.

But you do you.

[system2]

I disagree. There is an algorithm and some people analyze the trends to crack it.

[oblio]

And those people are the 0.01% and many admit they got lucky, and at a certain point fame is close to self sustaining.

[oska]

Kurzgesagt has become (or was always?) propagandistic, in my experience, so that may explain where they get some of their funds from.

[oska]

(Can't edit my comment above now so adding on by reply)

My observation above was just from personal experience. But after making it I searched 'Kurzgesagt' on YouTube (just wanted to see what videos they'd recently produced) and, as well as their recent videos, that search also turned up one called Kurzgesagt: billionaire propaganda, trusting science, and effective altruism [1] which I've now watched and found that my observation has been made by others and analysed in quite some detail. That video mentioned some others on the same subject [2-3], which I haven't watched but also look interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGfBV4I8DQI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuy1DaQzWI

[AviationAtom]

The most successful content creators know how to brand themselves and make a significant amount off such. I think MrBeast would be the shining example.

I think MrBeast could be compared to a Jay-Z of this content-creator era. What I think is noble about MrBeast, and a handful of other creators, is their trying to give back.