There are more kids who want to be YouTubers when they grow up than Astronauts


anatess2
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I had this discussion with @JohnsonJones today that made me think to create this post to give you guys an insight into the not-so-new world of Independent Creators.

The title is the launching pad - there are more kids today that want to be YouTubers when they grow up than Astronauts.  My early childhood was the 70's and in those days, becoming an Astronaut was the rage among children.  80's kids want to be programmers... or hackers.  The past decade... "YouTubers".

When I was 12, I got into the world of computer programming with a Radioshack Tandy TRS-80.  I came home that day and told my Father... I want to be a programmer.  My dad thought that meant I want to play video games for the rest of my life and tried his best to discourage me.... 4 years later I was in college taking Computer Engineering and my dad remained skeptical until he read the "Y2K Problem" on an American newspaper and that's when he realized computer programming is actually a "REAL" career path.

About 10 or so years ago, my then 8-year old told me at dinner... "I'm going to make money making YouTube videos!".  I laughed... but having the experience I had as a kid, I didn't automatically dismiss the idea.  But that's also because I have been watching Happy Slip on YouTube - a Filipino living in California who is a "Career YouTuber" back when YouTube was still known as a place for old single ladies to watch cat videos.  Happy Slip became a Filipino celebrity as her YouTube Channel became popular in the Philippines where the smartphone just became "a thing".  So yes, I knew it wasn't just a joke to be a YouTuber as a career, cat videos notwithstanding. 

Of course, these days, YouTube is not the only game in town so the official term is - Independent Creators.  

A lot of people don't believe Independent Creators can be financially independent.  A lot of people just think - those who make money off of their creations are like lottery winners... it only happens by luck.  And then there's the flip side - the people who think Independent Creativity is so easy anybody can do it... just take a video of yourself eating a Tide Pod and kaching!

Being an Independent Creator is just like any other career choice.  It requires skill, work ethic, and business sense to succeed at it.  But, this career path is inline with independent contractors or small business owners rather than the company job.  Of course, you can make money on YouTube, et. al., without being an Independent Creator - YouTube is simply an avenue to get worldwide exposure, so you can make money on YouTube using it as an Ad outlet for your brick and mortar business or product (kinda like As Seen on YouTube), or using it to promote your online market (like Amazon FBAs, etc.) or an entryway to gathering mailing lists, or even publishing somebody else's videos, etc.  I won't discuss those types of businesses which can also be lucrative... I'll only touch specifically on Independent Creators.

So, how much money do Independent Creators make?  Well, it's like asking how much money does a Restaurant Owner make?  It depends on what you have in your menu.  And, that includes $0 or worse.  The easy way to measure it in YouTube is through CPM rate.  YouTube profitability is determined the same way as TV... through Cost Per Mille of Advertisers.  That is - how much an Advertiser is willing to pay for 1 thousand views.  This varies depending on the Advertiser.  Ferrari would pay a lot more per cpm than say, John Doe's Hair Gel.  So, as an example, there's this popular YouTuber named David Dobrik who gives away cars in his YouTube videos as a thank you gift to random subscribers.  He used to buy the cars with his own income from his YouTube Channel but then car manufacturers started giving him the car to give away just to get David to run through the features of the car for 20 seconds.  David gets 10 Million views on just one video.  So, let's say it costs the car manufacturing company $20K to give away a car.  That means, they spent $20K to get 10 Million people to look at their car for 20 seconds.  To put this into context... NBC's America Got Talent averages 10 Million views per episode.  It costs approximately $50K to get a 30-second ad placed on AGT.  So the car manufacturer got a sweet deal with David Dobrik.  But $20K for David Dobrik to give away is worth getting the viewership he gets that allows him to place 5-second-skip ads in his videos that earns him $100K per month.  But that's David Dobrik - a channel with 13 Million Subscribers.  Cpm for a much smaller channel is also, of course, much smaller. 

Smaller channels with non-targeted audience in the USA get only $2-$4 cpm after YouTube gets its 45% cut.  Foreign markets could go as low as $0.03 cpm. You'll also need to account for people who view your video but exits out before the ad or use an ad blocker - they don't count.  So to make the equivalent of an 8-hour day on minimum wage, you're going to need on the most optimistic outcome, about 20K US views a day.  To put this into context... I made a video of how I feed my dogs.  I only have 40 subscribers to my Channel as I'm not placed for searches.  My videos are on YouTube only because it is too big to attach to an email to my family.  I got 25K views on that video.  If I monetized that video with one ad, I'd have a potential to make $60 on that one video as dog videos gets a targeted US audience (I don't have 25K family members) for dog product manufacturers that shell out good cpm. 

There are other ways to monetize a video like getting Sponsorship, product placements (like David's cars), etc. and they have the benefit of not needing to share the ad revenue with YouTube.

So, if I know all this stuff, why am I not an Independent Creator?  The easy answer is... I don't have the chops for it.  The number 1 barrier is... I'm not comfortable with being public.  The number 2 barrier is... I don't have a niche that I can talk about day after day, week after week.  Yes, I spend a lot of time digging up politics which I can try to monetize through political analysis.  Remember Trump's Social Media Summit?  Every single one of those people that were invited to the Summit were career Independent Creators specializing in political commentary.  Each of them get more views than CNN on primetime.  I can't do that.  I can write well, but I can't speak well.  I can, of course, use graphics with voice-overs - like several PragerU videos.  But that requires a different kind of skill that I don't have - graphical production.  Anyway, what I'm trying to say is... not everybody can succeed in this career path... just like not everybody can be Restaurant Owners.

Can you be an Independent Creator?  If you have the skills, work ethic, and business sense then YES!  What skill?  Here's the advice my father gave me when I was a kid - when you're in a career for the money, you're going to be working most your life.  When you're in a career for the passion, you're going to be enjoying most of your life.  Independent Creativity is no different - first you have to have a passion for the creativity so find something you really love to create.  Then build up the skillset to create it in a manner that serves people - you can be passionate about something but if people don't find any use for it, it's not going to work out.  Work hard at improving your craft - learn from successes and failures, spend the time to get good at what you do.  Then find a way to make money out of it - learn how to get monetized (it's not as easy as creating a channel and posting a video - there's minimum requirements for everything), learn methods to gain subscribers and views, learn to get good ratios (views vis-a-vis likes vis-a-vis dislikes, etc.) learn how search engine works, learn copyright rules, learn community guidelines to avoid censorship, learn how to ride Trending topics without becoming Clickbait, learn how to market your channel, etc. etc.

Yes yes... you can also be an Independent Creator solely for the opportunity to share yourself without the need for monetization.  This is one way you can share knowledge - like sharing your faith, your testimony, becoming an influencer, social activism, etc. etc.

So, if your kid tells you... I want to be a YouTuber when I grow up.  Don't be the Filipino Mother who is the Crusher of Dreams... 
Jokoy:  Ma, I want to be a comedian when I grow up.
Mom:  Who told you you are funny?

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9 minutes ago, Backroads said:

It's true, all the kids in elementary want to be YouTubers. 

Yeah, well, my brother was able to pay off some medical debt through his hobby of YouTube/helping Liberian scammers, so... I believe it. 

A Korean-American guy in our ward paid his way through college by running ads on his website of K-pop videos.  No Liberian scammers, though... :)

 

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9 hours ago, anatess2 said:

when you're in a career for the money, you're going to be working most your life.  When you're in a career for the passion, you're going to be enjoying most of your life. 

I actually follow a few mid tier YouTubers (from 10,000-100,000 daily/weekly views). All of them are on that cusp of the immense amount of effort put into their content ALMOST meeting their financial needs. One in particular is just right there where it seems to be the hardest. He is often talking about how he is battling the joy that is suppose to be in it with the pressure to provide regular quality content for their subscribers, which ultimately has lead him to needing medical treatment because the stress and hours he works is just too high, found out yesterday that the doctor gave him the all clear to return to full time content creation as long as he gives himself limits. Steven Crowder is another who ran into this too and had to take a brief hiatus.

Edited by Fether
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25 minutes ago, Fether said:

I actually follow a few mid tier YouTubers (from 10,000-100,000 daily/weekly views). All of them are on that cuff of the immense amount of effort put into their content ALMOST meeting their financial needs. One in particular is just right there where it seems to be the hardest. He is often talking about how he is battling the joy that is suppose to be in it with the pressure to provide regular quality content for their subscribers, which ultimately has lead him to needing medical treatment because the stress and hours he works is just too high, found out yesterday that the doctor gave him the all clear to return to full time content creation as long as he gives himself limits. Steven Crowder is another who ran into this too and had to take a brief hiatus.

Even Pewdepie went through this.  That's actually part of the reason he went from Let's Play to social commentary a few years back then went back to Let's Play after some moron dragged his name to a mass shooting.

Like every other career/job out there - you gotta learn how to achieve efficiency, striking a balance between effort and reward.  Money is not the only measuring stick.  Like Pewdepie's experience, you can burn out while raking a million dollars a month.  And then there's Elliot Choy who keeps creating videos with good ratios he can't monetize because he'd rather create videos using copyrighted music than not use copyrighted music.  He doesn't get as much fun out of it.  So he only monetizes videos enough to subsidize the cost of making videos.

This is the same for any other career choice... there are people who get college degrees and end up flipping burgers on minimum wage because they don't know how they can monetize their passions or skillsets and there are those who land $50K jobs managing retail right out of high school through a keen sense of knowing how to monetize their overload of charisma on demand.  You gotta know what you're capable of and how you can market it and know to balance effort and reward to avoid burn out.

P.S. Steven Crowder's Louder with Crowder is technically not an Independent Creation.  It's with Blaze Media.  He went on hiatus to be independent but I don't know if that happened.

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Speaking as someone who *is* on YouTube?

Every time there's a whiff of controversy or scandal, the powers that be freak out and make devastatingly bad choices. Couple this with the sheer number of people who false-flag other peoples' videos (including over-zealous music companies and people who just want to silence opposing viewpoints) and individual content moderators who have been caught abusing their positions, and you've got a situation where "becoming an astronaut" is actually more plausible in many ways than making it big on YouTube. 

Simply put, even *if* your first few videos end up being smash hits, you're still looking at having to produce 3 - 5 videos every day, with those videos being about 10 minutes in length or more, in order to produce enough content to potentially qualify for revenue-sharing from the advertisements on your content... assuming, of course, someone doesn't arbitrarily decide that your content is "sensitive" in nature and so doesn't qualify to have ads in the first place. 

And once you get this rhythm of content going, you have to start advertising yourself because YouTube won't; if you aren't already getting massive viewer counts or you don't know someone, you won't get pushed by YouTube. You need a minimum number of people watching a combined minimum hours of content over a given period, and if you can't make that you won't get paid. And even if you do qualify for pay, you only get disbursements in $100 increments... if you remember to sign yourself up for revenue-sharing in the first place. 

It would actually be more plausible for someone to become a successful pilot than to become a successful YouTube channel host at this point because of this.  

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11 hours ago, Ironhold said:

Speaking as someone who *is* on YouTube?

Every time there's a whiff of controversy or scandal, the powers that be freak out and make devastatingly bad choices. Couple this with the sheer number of people who false-flag other peoples' videos (including over-zealous music companies and people who just want to silence opposing viewpoints) and individual content moderators who have been caught abusing their positions, and you've got a situation where "becoming an astronaut" is actually more plausible in many ways than making it big on YouTube. 

Simply put, even *if* your first few videos end up being smash hits, you're still looking at having to produce 3 - 5 videos every day, with those videos being about 10 minutes in length or more, in order to produce enough content to potentially qualify for revenue-sharing from the advertisements on your content... assuming, of course, someone doesn't arbitrarily decide that your content is "sensitive" in nature and so doesn't qualify to have ads in the first place. 

And once you get this rhythm of content going, you have to start advertising yourself because YouTube won't; if you aren't already getting massive viewer counts or you don't know someone, you won't get pushed by YouTube. You need a minimum number of people watching a combined minimum hours of content over a given period, and if you can't make that you won't get paid. And even if you do qualify for pay, you only get disbursements in $100 increments... if you remember to sign yourself up for revenue-sharing in the first place. 

It would actually be more plausible for someone to become a successful pilot than to become a successful YouTube channel host at this point because of this.  

This is also an overhyped outlook.

If you want to monetize your creations, you need to learn the rules just like in any other career choice.  Yes, socio-political climate today is very reactive.  But it's fairly easy to predict if you're going to skirt the edges of that reaction.  Social and political commentary, of course, is vulnerable.  Cat videos, not so much.

And yes, you need to learn search engines... and the "algorithms".

To become an astronaut, you need at least 10 years to learn how to become one.  To learn how to carve a niche in Independent Creations won't take 10 years.  To become a successful programmer, it will take a lot less time to learn the craft - one year or less even.  But, if you don't keep learning every single year, you're going to get left behind by the technology.  Independent Creation is not a "get rich quick scheme".  It's a craft.  And just like programming, you gottta keep up with the times.

P.S.  You know which niche is one of the easiest to succeed at today?  Make-up.  This requires a specific skill set - make-up is the marriage of skin care and visual arts.  Interestingly, a lot of American teen-age girls just learn these things just by going to an American high school such that all they have to work on is the skillset needed for Independent Creation.  And the way it is today, there is no saturation ceiling as to the number of make-up tutorials and make-up reviews on the planet.  It's just like cat videos - you just can't get enough of them.

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On 9/7/2019 at 11:08 AM, anatess2 said:

This is also an overhyped outlook.

If you want to monetize your creations, you need to learn the rules just like in any other career choice.  Yes, socio-political climate today is very reactive.  But it's fairly easy to predict if you're going to skirt the edges of that reaction.  Social and political commentary, of course, is vulnerable.  Cat videos, not so much.

And yes, you need to learn search engines... and the "algorithms".

To become an astronaut, you need at least 10 years to learn how to become one.  To learn how to carve a niche in Independent Creations won't take 10 years.  To become a successful programmer, it will take a lot less time to learn the craft - one year or less even.  But, if you don't keep learning every single year, you're going to get left behind by the technology.  Independent Creation is not a "get rich quick scheme".  It's a craft.  And just like programming, you gottta keep up with the times.

P.S.  You know which niche is one of the easiest to succeed at today?  Make-up.  This requires a specific skill set - make-up is the marriage of skin care and visual arts.  Interestingly, a lot of American teen-age girls just learn these things just by going to an American high school such that all they have to work on is the skillset needed for Independent Creation.  And the way it is today, there is no saturation ceiling as to the number of make-up tutorials and make-up reviews on the planet.  It's just like cat videos - you just can't get enough of them.

Some skills are not lasting skills - and are only popular for a finite time.  There is a lod saying that the first lesson of learning is learning to learn.  I think you covered that.  But there is another skill that you may have missed and that is learning to learn the core isotropic principles that are consistent across all platforms of our changing world.  We call such things - core values.

 

The Traveler

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On 9/9/2019 at 10:53 AM, Traveler said:

Some skills are not lasting skills - and are only popular for a finite time.  There is a lod saying that the first lesson of learning is learning to learn.  I think you covered that.  But there is another skill that you may have missed and that is learning to learn the core isotropic principles that are consistent across all platforms of our changing world.  We call such things - core values.

 

The Traveler

Yes.  Thank you, Traveler.

One of these Core Values is work ethic.  It's not taught in school but if you worked hard and honestly to study a class, you've applied the principles of work ethic.

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