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Comment by sys42590 | Hacker News Reader

Are these revenue estimations given out by the platform realistic?

If the revenue numbers are right, I'm strongly considering opening my own Youtube channel.

Edit: And if the numbers are right, why are so many mid-sized creators begging people for more money on their Patreon?

Without commenting on the accuracy of the numbers, Youtube is very much a rockstar platform. Similar to the music industry, it's largely a winner-takes-all situation, where a few top players make almost all of the income. The top channels are not single people doing it as a hobby, they're production companies, often with considerable teams working behind the scenes.

Mid-sized creators want to get money from Patreon because YouTube is Google platform which means it's absolutely unreliable source of income with no one to talk to in case you channel get demonetized or banned. Algorythm can change at any moment and make any mid-sized channel 90% less popular.

And Patreon is kind a exactly what every creator want - to just get support from dedicated fans who going to stick to their content no matter what platform they're on.

Thanks for that answer, and I fully agree, it only takes some copyright strikes, algorithm changes, a locked Google account and the money from Google stops.

Maybe what the market needs is a Substack or OnlyFans-style monetization site for video. This would have the effect of smoothing out revenue streams for creators. I am sure it exists a few times over...

There are several attempts at that going on including one from Linus Tech Tips (Floatplane), but they're not really popular.

Nebula is probably the biggest and most mainstream, but like Floatplane it has a certain kind of niche it serves, and typically only existing fans of the channels that are available on it join, it doesn't have the same kind of audience that can sustain new content creators who don't already have an audience elsewhere.

For most creators this is the wrong monetization model, or they do it very poorly (E.g. paywall content no one wants to see). Launching merch/products and/or doing brand deals is much more effective.

"Damn, Jeff Bezos is making billions...let me just start my e-commerce company and get rich!"

If life were that easy, we'd all be at the top making millions. The amount of effort it takes to nurture and maintain a successful YouTube channel is staggering...not to mention a lot of luck involved because you could put in all the energy and make nothing at the end.

> if life were that easy

... or fair. Check some channels you enjoy on the site and mentally rank them by quality. The ones you've unsubscribed from (or are considering) seem to be among the top of the revenue. Quality doesn't pay; superficially that suits a broader audience and jokes do. In other areas, encouraging healthy competition doesn't pay as much as shoring up your duopoly. Etc.

Nobody is so fast that they can outrun what five others can transport. Nobody so strong that they can replace five others can lift. Nobody so smart that they get five times as much office work done as anyone else. Yet many people make five times more money than others. Looking at the channel stats, more like thousands of times more.

Success has very little to do with one's individual performance (although it certainly plays a role) and much more with luck

(I am well off in life, but I don't think that's because I've worked harder than the average person. I just liked learning about computers as a kid and that's what got me where I am.)

> If the revenue numbers are right, I'm strongly considering opening my own Youtube channel.

Starting the channel is the easy bit. Gaining any sort of traction whatsoever is the difficult bit.

Yes, you're correct.

I mean, what do I loose? 2 to 3 hours per week, half of it for editing? Some $$ for equipment? If I get some 1k subscribers, it's already worth the ongoing effort. If not I can still drop it and look out for another hobby.

You're grossly underestimating the effort. There are many ballpark measurements, but a common one is one man-hour of work for one minute of video. It's an open market and you're literally competing with the world's best.

I tend to disagree on this one. It surely helps to enter the market with a top notch production team in the background or investing a lot of time into your videos.

However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.

> However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.

Sure, but for every channel like that with 10k subs there'll be another 100 with no subs. It's a reasonable starting assumption that you'll need to put some effort in to video production if you want to start a yt channel.

This is correct. If you're around the space long enough, you can see the hundreds (thousands) of tiny channels (per big channel that could conceivably grow into anything resembling a business) that are pulling in 50 views per video with 22 subscribers, languishing for 5+ years.

Unless you are extremely lucky or already have things set for you, building an audience is a very long-term grind, and typically a large percentage of those with some potential get burned out after 1, 2, or 5 years.

(None of this to say you shouldn't try, especially if you love the work... I enjoyed editing video since grade school when my Dad first bought an analog video capture card so I could dump a few minutes of VHS footage into a video editor and make dumb family videos.)

Those talking head vlog-style channels are more personality driven whereas big production channels are usually more content-driven. Big grain of salt here obviously, but IME the chips more or less do fall this way when you look at the bigger picture. If you're not going to put effort into standing out on the editing and production style, do you have a good enough on-screen personality to compete with the current top-dogs in whatever niche you'd enter? My guess would be that it would be much easier to stand out based on your knowledge you have to share and the effort you put into the presentation than on personality, because not everyone can be authentic and interesting enough on camera, or be a good enough actor.

Edit: on second read I realized the tone of this comment could be read as dissuasive. I wanna clarify that I mean the opposite, I do support you in trying to launch a YouTube channel, I know far too many people who I think would make for great YouTubers I'd watch! But I do feel like you're underestimating aspects of this just based on a figure estimated by a web-site which probably doesn't have fine-enough grained access to YouTube data anyway and I think it would be better to come into it with realistic expectations.

How much do you expect to make per month from 1k subscribers?

> If I get some 1k subscribers

Bro 0 -> 1 is always the hardest part. How many videos do you think you'd need to make to hit 1k subs? It's probably a lot more than you think.

I'd like to treat is as a hobby in the beginning.

I'm sure success will heavily depend on my personality and the topics I choose. I may not ever reach 10 subscribers. But every shot you don't take is a missed shot.

You should speak to people who tried it for years without any success, or those who stream on Twitch for nobody and never get traction.

Sure if it's a hobby that's fine but you don't have a topic yet and it seems the money is your motivating factor, not a good start IMHO.

What are you considering "mid-sized"? To me that means probably 100k-250k sub and views per video, and most of those people are not making mega-bank.

CPM varies drastically based on your category. Finance-related channels for example are known for having extremely high CPMs.

Ad revenue can also be fairly unreliable. Patreon is recurring income.

Yes, I consider 50k to 250k mid sized channels.

I'm aware that chances of becoming rich as a creator are minimal, but it may develop into a worthwhile hobby with an active community nonetheless. And if I utterly fail, I still have some experiences and a story to tell.

If your target audience is younger people, then why not? The supply of 12-18 year olds entering the internet is only going to increase.

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