Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Youtube earnings

brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 422 posts

Re: My Youtube earnings

#221

Post by makeitdouble »

_tom_ wrote: post #181
makeitdouble wrote: post #25

The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc. Th…

> still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm. That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel. I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo? How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?

I get the feeling that the day it gets wiped away he'll move to another job (he's been a software engineer for a while apparently) and not look back.

The way it's managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there's so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.

Re: My Youtube earnings

#222

Post by amake »

jesuscript wrote: post #213
nomilk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (this) information is extremely valuable Estimating earnings based on views/subs is helpful to prospective youtubers, letting them make wise decisions about whether they pursue that path or do something else with their time (it will probably dissuade more than it will encourage, but that's a good thing if in aggregate people are making sounder career decisions).

I immediately noticed a dark dynamic based on the analytics. Lucky for OP, they are making Lego videos. However, if you are in the business of selling your opinion or sexuality, and you start to see that people click on certain hot takes or less-clothes on, you will start to morph to cater to that traffic. I wonder how this destroys a person (the greed). Totally taking the convo in the darker direction, but you can s…

> He’s a liberal

Is he?

Re: My Youtube earnings

#223

Post by stephen_g »

bagels wrote: post #189
stephen_g wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think YouTube now puts ads on basically everything though... (I don't know for sure, I have had Premium for a little more than a year now, and before that uBlock Origin took care of things).

If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google. Those channels often have other sponsors.

They do demonetise videos, yes, but I believe they still put ads on them (just they take the money, not the creator).

Re: My Youtube earnings

#224

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

blacksmithgu wrote: post #10

$10000/video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content. It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).

To highlight just how crazy things can get, my highest-earning YouTube video has earned well-over $100,000 in AdSense revenue.

But that’s not the end of the craziness.

About a year ago, that video was suddenly and inexplicably deemed by YouTube as unsuitable for all advertisers. I appealed, but they stuck with their decision.

In the year since, that video has brought in ~$80.

While I have found success on YouTube, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a strong track record of attracting and maintaining a large audience. YouTube is the most saturated market on the planet, and and at the end of the day, you are subject to the whims of a largely-opaque algorithm. It is not possible to succeed on YouTube without significant effort, but significant effort doesn’t guarantee success. Moreover, the connection between effort and reward is unpredictable, and it’s sometimes not there at all. You can be flying high today, only to have it all change tomorrow, without any explanation.

People understand that high-quality content is necessary for success on YouTube, but they often lose sight of the fact that it is not sufficient. Not only do you have to create quality content, but you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them on YouTube - which is obviously very, very hard.

Re: My Youtube earnings

#225

Post by midasuni »

runarberg wrote: post #148
coldtea wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be surprised if any nation classified a person uploading videos on to a platform with the hopes of having a revenue share on ads the 3rd party sells on those videos is in anyway an "employee" of any kind. I would be surprised in some countries dont change their laws at some time to account for this digital sharecropping (from Youtube and iOS App Store to Uber, etc), and set some rules (like with employment)…

> digital sharecropping This has to stop. People are making products which one company uses to profit. This company is buying their labor—albeit in a really roundabout way. We’ve heard this gaslighting from e.g. Uber, where their workers weren’t employees but “gig workers”, or some other thing. The only reason companies do this is to get their labor for cheaper. No, these are YouTube workers, their labor is bought by…

Does YouTube stop people from uploading the videos to other platforms? Do they require a set commitment of work?

There are various tests that apply to contractors in the U.K. to work out if you’re an employee or a Lego mate contracting company, as it makes a difference to how taxes and benefits are calculated. Fro my understanding YouTube nowhere near meets that criteria of employee/employer. Companies like Uber and deliveroo are far closer.

Re: My Youtube earnings

#226

Post by madchinchilla »

sumedh wrote: post #140
alvah wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point, YouTube on my smart TVs is logged into my account, my kids are forever mangling my search history with Roblox, Minecraft, squishies & other random things kids are into. I'm sure Google / YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me!

> I'm sure Google / YT has no idea what type of ads to serve me! I am sure the smart folks in Google will know who is watching based on the videos being watched and show appropriate ads at that time or maybe show generic ads about products which they know parents with young kids want.

That wasn't the case just a few years ago, not sure how it works now since I've shifted my kids to YouTube Kids entirely. Youtube would casually throw in a 3-minute-long beer ad in the middle of a cartoon compilation my 3-year-old watched...

Re: My Youtube earnings

#227

Post by stephen_g »

pojzon wrote: post #193
system2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example is probably the Primitive Technology channel. Last week I was reading his interview and he mentions $1M savings from his channel.

He would make a lot more if not ppl blantly copycat’ing him and his work. Primitive Life, Primitive Tools, Primitive Technology Ideas… Youtube should take those channels down or force them to change name due to how SOE works.

There’s an interesting video digging into the way these copycats are fake too [1] - if you watch them you can often see things like excavator tracks that haven’t been hidden well enough, and they found somebody involved who talked about how the buildings are built by teams of people on leased land and then just abandoned when the video is done…

But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing!

1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc

Re: My Youtube earnings

#228

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

grogenaut wrote: post #31
tra3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$90/hour is real nice money, but for some reason i assumed a channel with that many subs would make more money. For every million plus channel, there’s probably a million+ channels with no subs. Basically have a day job before you go all in as a content creator.

Subs on YT don't mean revenue... they're just people who may watch your videos later. It's more a hueristic than anything.

> Subs on YT don't mean revenue... they're just people who may watch your videos later.

Right on. I always tell people that I can’t pay my employees with subs and likes.

For most videos, an overwhelming majority of views come from traffic suggested by YouTube in some manner (home page, sidebar, after a video). I have millions of subscribers across a few channels. Subscriber notification and feeds invariably account for a very-low-single-digit percent of video views.

Re: My Youtube earnings

#229

Post by adalacelove »

warent wrote: post #5

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…

> I wonder how much other information exists on the web that is extremely valuable yet unnoticed

Basically every scientific progress which gets published on peer reviewed journals (a lot of them open). Some books also are online.

Re: My Youtube earnings

#230

Post by Aaronmacaron »

Decabytes wrote: post #17
warent wrote: post #5

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…

I don't think YouTube allows you to make videos showing your revenue, but I could be wrong

This is not true. There are quite a few large (and also some smaller ones) youtubers who shared their ad-sense revenue.
Post reply on HN