
More than a decade later, how original YouTube stars feel about the site - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/06/youtube-changed-my-life-a-pair-of-original-videostars-ponder-a-life-lived-online/
======
jumpcutstudios
Currently have over 4 million subscribers and 600 million views across
multiple channels on YouTube (all organic, no paid traffic).

Usually what you see is about $1 per 1000 views (CPM) for US creators. This
number can be much lower depending on which country you are from - US is the
highest.

Since "adpocalypse" (advertisers pulling out of YT ads) and some other
relevant events, CPM has gone down significantly for everybody. While we were
making about $1 CPM a couple years ago, we are now doing about $0.50 CPM.

With that said, most business-savvy YouTube creators have known from the
beginning that YT ads are a drop in the bucket compared to the potential of
revenue that you can make using other monetization methods. Patreon is one
way, but merch, live shows, and digital products are examples of other ways
that a creator can make way more money from their following.

For example, one of our channels with nearly 1 million subsribers only made
about $4000 per month on YT ads at its peak. During that same time, it made
over $15,000 per month just selling t-shirts (3x+ more than ads).

Another one of our channels that had over 2.5 million subscribers was making
about $10k per month on average at its peak. By selling our own digital
products, we were able to make over $200k per month (20x YT ad revenue).

I know this was kind of a long answer but basically - for the YouTube creators
who saw their channel as a business, not much has changed. YouTube ads
continue to be a very small percentage of their overall revenue.

On the other hand, YouTube creators who were dependent on ad revenue are now
feeling the pain. However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise
because it forces these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to
view their channel/brand as a business rather than just a content creation
machine.

~~~
JohnStrange
> _However, I actually see this as a blessing in disguise because it forces
> these creators to look at other ways of monetization and to view their
> channel /brand as a business rather than just a content creation machine._

Why would that be a blessing?

I'm just being curious. Are you talking from a business perspective or do you
suggest that diverting work force to selling t-shirts instead of mere content
creation is somehow more beneficial to humanity?

~~~
meowface
On some level it's a boon to not tie one's livelihood so closely to a fickle
and shady advertising industry. I agree that t-shirt selling doesn't sound
like an amazing alternative, though.

~~~
andrewksl
Recording artists have had a fairly similar set up for quite some time; the
label takes almost all the money from album sales, so the artists tend to make
their money off live shows and merch.

------
justboxing
I always wondered how much on average a Youtuber makes, per 100K or 1 Million
video views. Any original Youtuber care to throw some light on this?

Articles like this paint a very rosy picture....

> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly
> and set up their own companies just to deal with the income from ad sales,
> marketing tie-ins, and personal appearances at live events.

But I'm having a hard time getting convinced. I launched a tech videos channel
like what TechCrunch is doing now with CrunchReport, back in 2011. For video
views of 10,000 or so, I was barely getting 10 / 15$ in ad revenue. A year
later I shut it down as the cost of production was far outpacing the video ad
revenues. I had a hard time getting sponsors also.

The article mention 1 of the MOST POPULAR Artist - “PewDiePie” -'s earnings of
8 Million, but this NYTimes story [ 2014 ] also features the same Olga Kay
mentioned in OP, and also paints a much sober picture of how much money
"Youtube Stars" really make from it, and all the efforts that go into it.

"Chasing Their Star, on YouTube" =>
[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their-
st...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their-star-on-
youtube.html)

> “We are underpaid,” Ms. Kay says. “We are not only coming up with the
> commercial concept and tapping into a loyal audience, we are also doing
> marketing. We are doing all of these jobs for a relatively small fee.”

~~~
bane
From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those
folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video
production. I think the EEVblog guy posted a video when he went full-time
youtube and he's looking at making somewhere between $30-40k a year and he has
about half a million subscribers with most video getting somewhere between
40k-100k views and he puts out 1-2 videos per week. Considering the intense
time commitment to producing content, this really doesn't seem like much. So
he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or
three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly
pretty terrible.

Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers,
but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000
videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it
doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a
street corner.

On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k
views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class
life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've
had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some
calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of
$100k.

One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often,
google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were
putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are
suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody
will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few
weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people
complaining or shutting down channels.

~~~
kalleboo
> So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or
> three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly
> pretty terrible

One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he
has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded
multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube
channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a
good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of
building a loyal customer base.

A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as
well.

~~~
yellow_postit
Source on the Patreon claim? I watch a lot of frequent YouTube channels and my
anecdote is that < 10% have Patreon.

~~~
kalleboo
I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of
electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo
on Patreon.

~~~
sndean
On the more extreme end of the spectrum, CGPGrey is making ~$20000/video on
Patreon [0]

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey](https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey)

~~~
Applejinx
Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and
I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that
as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up
as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a
year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining
even as the total population grows.

With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor:
the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle
people's credit card interactions.

------
jameskegel
YouTuber here, it feels like the party is over. The viewership is there but it
seems like the list of things we can't do or speak about is getting bigger and
bigger. You literally cannot mention war; your video will be demonetized.

~~~
paulsutter
Are you there to speak freely or are you there for the ad revenue? They
actually disallow very little.

But if ad revenue is what you want, be advertiser friendly. There's nothing
unreasonable about that.

~~~
csallen
Au contraire, I think the effect that advertisers have on what can and can't
be said via popular channels is something we should all care about.

It's easy to say, "Just stop advertising," but producing valuable content is
expensive. Advertiser-funded outlets are at a _tremendous_ financial
advantage, and that translates directly into higher viewership. Consequently,
we get the vast majority of our news, information, and opinions from
advertiser-funded institutions.

Furthermore, the majority of advertising dollars come from clients who share
similar attributes with each other (rich, corporate, favoring the status quo,
etc.), so their perspectives and agendas tend to align.

The result is that contradictory perspectives are pushed to the sidelines, no
matter how correct, logical, popular, or morally superior they may be. The
fact that people aren't allowed to discuss war on YouTube is something we
should all be concerned about. It's de facto propaganda.

This applies to more traditional media, too, not just the internet. There are
all sorts of topics that advertisers won't "allow" even the mainstream media
to dwell on for too long.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
On the other hand, it also does a good job of removing what I might call
accidental propaganda. Most youtube videos are not even skin deep, running off
of one article in the news they read, and some youtube person is going to have
almost no real understanding when making a video about Syria for example. By
removing the people who are only there to drive clicks and revenues, I can
probably get better results when I search for a serious topic. Maybe some
topics should be left to pure enthusiasts.

~~~
sillysaurus3
This is an oversimplification of the issue.

Some videos to illustrate:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn46t8NksX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn46t8NksX0)
\- h3h3 "We're at an Important Crossroad"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw)
\- 2veritasium "Why YouTube Used to Prefer Quality"

In particular, consider the thought experiment presented in the second video:
If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be
all that are uploaded to YouTube. The algorithm _is_ the content.

Even though it happens to align with what you like right now, the bias should
be concerning.

~~~
simias
>If YouTube's algorithm solely promoted car videos, then car videos would be
all that are uploaded to YouTube.

That's assuming that people only upload videos on Youtube to monetize them.
Given that uploading videos is basically free I'm sure there'd be no shortage
of non-car videos. Actually if I recall correctly youtube didn't have any
monetization for many years when it started?

What you'd probably lose is high production value original content, although I
suspect that many of those content producers might still break even if they
have other ways to monetize their content.

------
billdybas
Veritasium recently made a video [1] talking about how the site today seems to
favor quantity over quality. Many of the people in the comments there think
YouTube's recommendations are to blame saying they're often not relevant. What
have been your experiences?

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw)

~~~
droidist2
Yeah, the recommendations on YouTube are horrible. Google is a very hard
company to understand sometimes. They're attempting to make self-driving cars
with AI, yet they can't recommend relevant videos.

~~~
wingerlang
A self driving car seems easier in some ways. Just make it not crash.

Recommendations for millions of people and millions of videos on the other
hand. Liking a video is subjective, for some channels I don't like half their
content yet I am a regular viewer of some of their series.

Personally I am quite happy with their recommendations, even if I don't watch
half of it.

~~~
droidist2
Maybe easier in some senses, but cars are life and death. If 1 out of 10 of
your recommendations are bad, no big deal. If the car misclassifies obstacles
in the road at even 1/100th that rate, not acceptable.

------
FussyZeus
Very little of YouTube feels genuine at all anymore. For as much as I can't
stand the middle schoolers vlogs, at least I know that's an actual person with
something to actually say. If you go to YouTube's home page with no account,
literally all you see is promoted content, usually by a mix of record labels,
TV stations, some "company" that makes comedy sketches or whatever, and one of
those channels that does the "worlds blankiest blank" video lists.

There's very little regular people on there anymore, and IMHO, that is their
biggest problem. It's just become a slightly different version of television,
with all the big money, shallow personalities, derivative content and problems
that comparison implies.

Edit: self correcting, there are plenty of regular people on there, they just
never get seen organically.

~~~
ryandrake
Isn't that pretty much what happened to eBay? Used to be a community of people
selling their old computer parts and Magic The Gathering cards, and now it's
devolved into Yet Another Distribution Channel where faceless companies offer
their lineup of products.

~~~
maxxxxx
Add Etsy to that list.

------
peterburkimsher
"you do the job of at least five people. You have to be creative; you have to
be a writer, be a performer, an editor, a director, a marketer."

This is my problem. I keep building things, both hardware and software, and
post them to Hackaday and Show HN, respectively. Cool things, like a magnetic
audio connector or a big data project of 20,000 restaurant menus translated
from Chinese.

But I can't do the marketing. I have no idea how to make money out of this.
Finishing a project and posting it is exciting, but then I'm always let down
by the fact that nobody cares.

~~~
shostack
I'm a senior marketer. The short answer is yes, you can market without
spending. The slightly longer answer is that time is money and those forms of
marketing often take lots of time, and take time away from building the
product.

There's lots of free info out there, but it can be hard to separate the signal
from the noise. Noise in this case often being gurus and blogs trying to get
you to buy info products or make a purchase via affiliate link.

Start simple by making a site to sell your product and add a way to monetize
it. Get engaged in communities that have problems your product solves. You can
then reach out to people to get product feedback and maybe a sale.

But to be honest, at some point odds are you will need to spend money. If the
issue is you simply cannot afford it, that's fine... bootstrap with non-paid
channels.

If your issue is that you don't want to pay for anything on principle, you're
going to have a rough time. There reality for most businesses is that it takes
money to make money.

If you have any specific questions or want to chat, feel free to contact me
via my profile. While I charge a consulting rate for hands-on work or
analysis, I'm always happy to answer general marketing questions, point people
in the right direction to reputable resources, etc. for free without any
pressure to consult.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! And thanks for not using an affiliate
link, unlike some commenters below.

"add a way to monetise it" \- do you mean Google ads? Affiliate links? The
same thing we just said is "noise"?

"don't want to pay on principle" is part of it. I have a maximum wage - my
visa and work contract do not allow me to do other paid work. I'm not allowed
to have any revenue, so I want to minimise my costs. My "portfolio" feels
useless if I can't find anyone else to use it though, so I know I need to do
marketing, I just don't know how.

~~~
shostack
That's an interesting challenge--I've never encountered it. Monetization can
occur through a variety of ways. Ads and affiliate links tend to be fairly low
margin. Personally, I'd focus on productizing your offering, and trying to
find a way to sell it as a service for recurring revenue.

That said, I don't know how you can actually make a business if you're not
allowed to have any revenue. Can you clarify on what your end goal is? I might
be missing something with that.

~~~
peterburkimsher
My end goal is just to make my work useful to someone else.

I do these projects because I want to. I'm going to keep building stuff,
because that's what I enjoy. I just feel useless when I think how much time I
spend on it, and then nobody cares.

Existing Chinese textbooks don't have colours for tones, pinyin, and literal
translations. So I decided to make my own software to do that. I can sit back
and judge the textbook authors (saying their stuff sucks), but that doesn't
help anyone. So I made my own better one! But the only person who is helped by
my work is me. It's not going to change the world if I'm the only person who
uses it. Do I have to be a business in order to give stuff away for free?

~~~
shostack
That helps me understand a bit better. I'm not clear on the legalities of your
situation, but it seems like you might benefit from looking into educational
institutions and other community resources to see if they could make use of
your work.

If you are giving stuff away for free you don't need to be a business, but if
what you are giving away has costs associated with that, you need some way of
covering those. If not by yourself, then with the help and sponsorship of
another org.

------
xxpor
I've always wondered, who (demographically) actively goes to YouTube and
watches videos/subs to channels?

Among my friend group (mid-20s tech people in Seattle for the most part),
YouTube is a non-entity. It never comes up in conversation. I personally never
go to the front page of youtube to actually look at anything, I'm always
searching for something specific. OTOH, we talk plenty about Netflix and
podcasts.

~~~
mrkrab
I agree with you. I think the site caters mostly to children and young
teenagers. Most popular videos, those shown on the home page, are of guys
talking to a camera loudly and making silly jokes about videogames and current
events, or very bad pop music.

And video thumbnails are the most cringy thing you can see on the Internet.
[http://buyviewsreview.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/custom-...](http://buyviewsreview.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/custom-youtube-thumbnails-good-examples.png)

It's sad to admit it but I avoid youtube whenever I can.

~~~
theonemind
If you log in and watch what you like, what shows up on your page really
adapts. You can think of it sort of like reddit, many siloed communities. I
wouldn't judge what you can get out of it by the default front page.

------
nstart
I really wish they had got a hold of Ray William Johnson to ask him about the
rise and fall off the equals three show. He was YouTube's number 1 for a long
time. His timeline defined the drama around all aspects of YouTube. From being
a trail Blazer to personal tolls on life to partnering with networks to make
things "better" to the complete meltdown of a partnership. Would have made for
an interesting perspective.

------
sotojuan
I don't how how it affects "original" stars but the "adpocalypse"[1] + the
move to "punish" infrequent uploaders[2] are sure to have interesting long-
term effects.

[1] [https://redd.it/6cyuva](https://redd.it/6cyuva)

[2] YouTube algorithms like channels that upload frequently and can generate a
"community" around them

~~~
komali2
Hmm. I want to lash out because I feel like this is a total thread hijacking,
but I am curious how some of these OG youtube stars are reacting to these new
developments.

------
avenoir
I'm not a YouTuber but I do subscribe to a dozen of channels. It seems to me
that the sustainable channels are making their money from donations either via
PayPal or Patreon not so much from ads which was my long-standing belief.

------
technofiend
MKBHD seems to be this generation's Walter Mossberg: he's a trusted reviewer
who goes into the appropriate level of detail, given his audience. I have no
idea what he makes but he drives a Tesla and shoots in 4k and 8k on pretty
high-end cameras. Seems to be doing well enough, anyway.

------
rb666
Read about LBRY here: [https://lbry.io/](https://lbry.io/) They plan to tackle
this problem in an innovative manner, whether it works out, we'll have to
see...

~~~
dredmorbius
LBRY needs a _text-based_ quick intro.

Not a video.

Probably not a FAQ.

"What is this, what problem does it solve."

Or as one of my more populare HN comments put it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/)

------
jarboot
What's next? Vimeo? Vidme?

~~~
CM30
VidMe seems to be the one a lot of YouTubers are using as a backup. So I'm
guessing it's the most likely YouTube replacement as things are now.

~~~
Klathmon
Well I'm mostly a user, and I've got to say that YouTube still wins on the
technical front.

It remembers my position when I watch a video part way through, they have an
app for just about every device you can get, they have a subscription service
that removes all ads, it supports everything from 144p to 4k, it has
livestreaming with multi-camera support, it supports 360 videos, has
annotations, subtitles, speed changing, and more.

Compared to the next best thing, YouTube is still winning by a lot for me as a
user.

