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Comment by elsonrodriguez | Hacker News Reader

The flipside to this is that there are people who will never ever pay money for your content, and ad revenue is the only way to directly capitalize on your popularity among those people.

This also means that when your ad revenue disappears, you will NEVER get that revenue back. Your only recourse is to get more popular, as your supporters are already buying your merchandise and donating.

It's going to become much more difficult to support yourself via creating content if step 1 becomes "be famous".

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"It's going to become much more difficult to support yourself via creating content if step 1 becomes "be famous"."

You don't have to become famous. One of the things I love about Patreon are how some of my obscure things nobody has ever heard of are now providing a low-to-mid-grade middle class lifestyle for people you've probably never heard of.

Wander around a bit on https://graphtreon.com/ , and bear in mind a lot of what you see is hobby work, not attempts to make a living.

And also bear in mind there is no option where anybody ever just wakes up one day, decides "I'm going to make a living as an Internet content provider!" and a thousand people pour out of the woodwork to give them $3 a month right away. The question is not whether Patreon successfully thrusts success on people... the question is whether it enables it.

i.e., if I love Patreon so much why haven't I switched to make a living on it? Well, I have a realistic view of my own "content creation" skills and realize that it's not really an option for me. Patreon isn't going to magically fix that for me.

I'm speaking from experience here, I have ad revenue and Patreon.

If my ad revenue tanks, Patreon does not automatically go up, I'm just out my ad revenue for the month. For some artists this is the difference between being able to pay rent or not.

It's going to become much more difficult to support yourself via creating content if step 1 becomes "be famous".

It's already becoming like this for certain forms of media. Videogames, in particular. It's amazing how many things become easier, once you've already gotten notable. Come to think of it, it's been true to some degree, even in the days when media only existed in the form of spoken word and songs.

>ad revenue is the only way to directly capitalize on your popularity among those people.

Are these people clicking ads, though? I doubt it. And if not, you aren't monetizing them directly via that method, either.

They don't have to click to monetize, but yes, some click.

Enough so that you can offset the cost of the hobby in many cases, and make a living in that rarest, most desirable of cases.

Most advertising is cost per impression, not click. Search is pretty much the only major cost per click type of advertising.

Putting adds on your content if you have viable patreon fan base just means you value your fans time at ~30 cents per hour, its a slap in the face with rotten fish.

But to get money from ads you have to be famous too.

10,000 views means "famous?"

10,000 ad views means supporting yourself from ad revenue? I mean if one person buys a t-shirt you've probably made more money, so I don't really see the advantage to ad revenue over merchandising, Patreon etc.

No. YouTube announced recently that they aren't paying out on videos with less than 10K views.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/6/15209220/youtube-partner-pr...

By "make money", they meant "make more than peanuts", not "make their first $0.01".

Just to clarify this it's 10K views for the channel overall, not individual videos.

If your channel has 10k views total across all videos, you can monetise the next video from viewer 1.

Thanks, that was unclear from YT messaging.

Maybe just don't even try to capitalize on those. If you cannot sustain your work via better means then maybe it is just not worth it.

That's like telling Google to turn off all ads on Youtube tomorrow, and only rely on people who use Youtube Red to make a profit.

Or maybe Youtube is just not worth it?

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