51–60 of 422 posts
How did he spend $20K on film equipment? A few pro-grade tripods and a solid camera shouldn't be more than a quarter of that.
Some of the cost might come from buying a computer suitable for video editing, which I can imagine could be a couple of thousand dollars.
How did he spend $20K on film equipment? A few pro-grade tripods and a solid camera shouldn't be more than a quarter of that.
I could be wrong but I don't think YouTube TOS allows publicizing this kind of information. I would be afraid of my channel being de-monetized. I believe they have a similar policy for AdSense.
I think such policy is illegal in many countries. An employer cannot prohibit workers from discussing salaries. This is often a measure to combat against gender discrimination at a workplace. I’m not sure how this affects contractors, but I would be surprised if these laws wouldn’t cover contractors as well.
This is my biggest pet peeve with YouTubers. THEY ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF YOUTUBE.
employment laws do not apply to a youtuber, unless they are employed by some other company, but they do NOT have an employment relationship with YouTube, they are not "employees" of YouTube, and Susan Wojcicki is not "their boss"
Now also talk about production costs, staff salaries, and taxes.
> Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN.
So they make around $150K/year but likely pay more tax, higher overheads, and have to fund their own benefits out of that. Depending on where they live this could either be a very good income or only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk/stress. That's on 2M-6M viewers too. Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff? I have…
For the larger channels such as LTT, the YouTube ad revenue is likely approaching rounding error compared to their sponsorship/merch/platform revenue.
So they make around $150K/year but likely pay more tax, higher overheads, and have to fund their own benefits out of that. Depending on where they live this could either be a very good income or only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk/stress. That's on 2M-6M viewers too. Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff? I have…
I am pretty sure their YT Ad Revenue is a small fraction of their over all revenue. That is what the successful channels do, Merch and Internal Ads (not YT Ads) are WAY more profitable than YT Ads
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's right. A lot of YouTubers make videos detailing their YouTube earnings and post them to YouTube (for example [1]). If it were against the ToS, you'd think YouTube would at least remove those videos. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rm-ElJPDJk
It is against ToS I'm pretty sure, I don't remember YouTube ever doing anything about it ever though since a lot of people really do share this information publicly.
The transparency of this is really amazing; big respect. It's interesting to think that this information was quietly posted to their low-traffic blog with little notice, meanwhile the information contained is actually extremely valuable (and itself would have probably made a highly valuable youtube video itself with 10s of millions of views). I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely val…
This is pretty common knowledge for monetized or high viewership (sponsored/paid for outside of Google) channels.
Now also talk about production costs, staff salaries, and taxes.
Per the article...
"Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don’t belong to an MCN."
Taxes would be pretty simple to approximate given he lives in Finland and gives a rough average of his monthly revenue.