[dymk]

Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.

[infamia]

There are lots of strategies how to make money and it will vary based on your specialty. It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising (e.g., many cooking YouTubers sell their own brand of cooking utensils that they have designed themselves). It requires some thought, but the idea is to deepen the authenticity and engagement by building an actual community and your own personal micro-brand. The offering needs to feel organic and huge value to your community in some way. Many many people have done this on YT and now are making way more money than what's possible with the pittance that is YT monetization. YT then becomes just one part of your funnel intake strategy once you get big enough.

Edit: Of course, you do need to have enough demand/scale to make it worth your while, but that will depend on your audience size and how engaged/invested they are in your content AND you personally to an extent. Perhaps be creative and start out with small experiments. Not too hard with LLMs nowadays.

[wisty]

Selling get rich quick schemes, workout plans, etc?

[infamia]

A bit more like Kevin Powell, who publishes lots of free CSS videos [0], has some good basic CSS Training Courses for free, but charges money for the advanced ones [1]. His videos are not only available on his site, but they're also on Front End Masters, which is a well known training site.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@KevinPowell

[1] https://www.kevinpowell.co/courses/

[ElProlactin]

While I can't speak specifically to this person's earnings, I suspect you're overestimating just how much money average YouTubers make from owned platforms when they try to push their audiences to them.

It's very difficult to do this in a way that produces sustainable, durable revenue, and I suspect that people doing technical educational content are finding it increasingly difficult in the age of AI.

Trends for his YouTube channel look pretty much like what I expected given the general trends in the marketplace.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCJZv4d5rbIKd4QHMPkc...

[makeitdouble]

> It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising

To address the elephant in the room, except for "premium content", you're asking to pay for something the users didn't come for and most probably don't want.

So if you're not into mild grifting, the only way your content is directly monetized is paywalls, and that's an utterly complicated business as you need to show enough to entice, but not too much, while dealing with freebooting and custome support. It can be alleviated by joining a paywalled community like Nebula's, but it comes with it's own issues.

As you point out it's not impossible by any mean, it's just a huge PITA that will make no business sense for most creators compared to ad ridden platforms.