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The True Costs of Being on YouTube

carlalallimusic.substack.com

61–70 of 73 posts

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My longer-term goal was to sell a cooking show, or get cast on an existing production. To me, that explains the psychology.

Yeah. I don't think she understands how it works at all. People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)

You don't understand what "sell a cooking show" means. She was hoping to have a show, featuring her and based on her YouTube videos, bought by a major tv company. They would pay her to produce and star in a show for their platform.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#62

This is a very instructive story of how much the media landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 15 years due to the explosion in content, the lower costs of production, and the change in audience tastes. It used to be that people made homemade videos with the hope of graduating to 'Real' TV'—think Andy Samberg & friends getting picked up by SNL or the guys from Big Brother magazine filming themselves on VHS an…

This is a great explanation. Thank you.

Another aspect which the author touched on but which you didn't mention is that YouTube is optimized for people who watch a lot of YouTube. Both technically and culturally it's set up to work well if you fit in with that world, rather than if you just see it as a platform to plug something else on. One example is the fact that her subscriber count grew so slowly. If course: people who are just on YouTube to watch a particular video linked from somewhere else do not like, comment or subscribe, without which building virality is incredibly hard. And people who are on YouTube all the time will not like the aesthetic, will not care about the book, substack, or Instagram content, will not include you in YouTube discourse which makes celebrities.

Similarly, other social media will penalise stuff that links outside their network to YouTube video content, as mentioned by the author. Your followership there will be effectively neutralised if you try to use it to build success on another platform.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#63

The creators I see on YouTube are EXTREMELY lean. Typically it's them and an editor. Some video game creators stream on twitch and record the YouTube videos live on stream. Pass the content to your editor and do light editing work and you have a video. You also collected ad revenue from the stream. Also shorts are pretty important promotional tools and if you're making the videos anyway cutting out a good 15 second c…

This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of YouTube creators who spend a LOT on videos.

Mr Beast, the most successful YouTuber of all time, is famous for it. When he was barely known, he still did stunts which were staggering costly, given his then level of success.

A different example is storytime animation. People telling cute, short stories about their lives used self produced animations to do so. This is literally hundreds of times more labor-intensive than vlogging to camera. They weren't paying money to others but they were using weeks instead of minutes of their own time to produce somewhat similar content. Several of these animators became huge on YouTube, to the point where they now hire artists and engineers.

Lots of other creators have got success by doing things much more ambitious than the norm. The slo-mo guys did something like lots of others but much much more professionally. Jazza tested more art products than anyone else, for example one of every alcohol marker set in the world, and the scope made his content stand out.

Of course if you aren't successful with an expensive project you will lose a lot of money but that's just a tautology. YouTube has literally millions of low-budget channels who also didn't come near to recouping their costs.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#64
post #17

> To advertise on my channel, that number [CPM] is about $29 per thousand views. > My RPM is around $10 > Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? You can't combine those two stats like this. CPM is the cost to the advertiser per ad view . RPM is the payout to the creator per video view . But it's not the case that every video will result in…

It's a perfectly reasonable rule of thumb though.

Ad blockers typically leave the YouTube service thinking that an ad has been watched, otherwise they wouldn't get far. These bogus views are counted in the thousands of views, and the proportion that aren't watched is baked into the price.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#65
post #3

> It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength. I thought the split was something like 55-45 for Youtube vs the creator. This sounds more like 66-33, is this typical for other creators / influencers as well?

It is 55-45. I suspect the author read some data incorrectly (the YouTube analytics page can be a bit confusing). The RPM she achieved is excellent (average in many niches is $1-$2), she could have been incredibly successful if she trimmed down her production cost.

She could never have been incredibly successful by cutting costs. She posted a video a week which cost $3,500 to make and brought in $1,000.

If production had cost her nothing she would only have made $1k a week, for something that would have taken up half of her time.

There are very successful people making high budget video and very successful people making shoestring video on YT. She didn't really have the following to do either. The success that she had on YouTube was driven by her following elsewhere, and she only continued losing money for so long because she was motivated by non-YouTube goals.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)" Those are contradictory.

Not at all. If you are going to sell your channel then typically you won't be on it anymore, so the people who were watching to see you specifically won't be there anymore.

The phrase "sell your channel" in this context can be (and was, in my and the other commenter's case) taken to mean "sell yourself, promote your channel, or sell your product." Not to actually turn your channel over to someone else.

In that interpretation, the two statements are contradictory and puzzling.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I don't think she understands how it works at all. People watch YouTube for the people generally. You can't just sell your channel if you are well liked (generally)

You don't understand what "sell a cooking show" means. She was hoping to have a show, featuring her and based on her YouTube videos, bought by a major tv company. They would pay her to produce and star in a show for their platform.

How many people have made this transition? From youtube influencer to tv personality. I don't follow that stuff so would like idea how realistic it was in first place.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. If you are going to sell your channel then typically you won't be on it anymore, so the people who were watching to see you specifically won't be there anymore.

The phrase "sell your channel" in this context can be (and was, in my and the other commenter's case) taken to mean "sell yourself, promote your channel, or sell your product." Not to actually turn your channel over to someone else. In that interpretation, the two statements are contradictory and puzzling.

HN guidelines suggest writing comments based on the most charitable interpretation. But yes, honest mistakes can happen.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#69
post #67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand what "sell a cooking show" means. She was hoping to have a show, featuring her and based on her YouTube videos, bought by a major tv company. They would pay her to produce and star in a show for their platform.

How many people have made this transition? From youtube influencer to tv personality. I don't follow that stuff so would like idea how realistic it was in first place.

Becoming a TV personality is not a statistically realistic plan. Going from Youtube to a TV personality is lower probability because there are other ways to become a TV personality...only a subset of people become TV personalities will be Youtubers.

Re: The True Costs of Being on YouTube

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "sell your channel" in this context can be (and was, in my and the other commenter's case) taken to mean "sell yourself, promote your channel, or sell your product." Not to actually turn your channel over to someone else. In that interpretation, the two statements are contradictory and puzzling.

HN guidelines suggest writing comments based on the most charitable interpretation. But yes, honest mistakes can happen.

I would never have thought he meant "actually place a YouTube channel up for sale." This wasn't a choice of being "charitable" or not; it was reading the comment and being perplexed by its contradictions.
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