The thing I enjoyed about this particular Applied Science video was his hypothesizing and admission that his hypothesis could be wrong (but then he added why he thought it had merit).
Perhaps it is because this is such a rarified area to be poking around, but in many other videos the content creator seems to often "know it all". It's refreshing when someone says, "I think this is why this behaves like this," and then lays out their claim.
Truly, this guy should leave Google so he has more time to make YouTube videos and tinker/research in his garage/lab. Something tells me he likes his day job too though.
> this guy should leave Google so he has more time to make YouTube videos and tinker/research in his garage/lab.
unless he's so independently rich that he doesn't require the income from google, this is not a good idea for most people (and i'm sure not for him neither).
Google pays a lot, and this high pay would allow him to spend more free time (e.g., it may be possible to work only 4 days on google pay) doing tinkering. It would also allow funds to buy goods _for_ doing the tinkering. Youtube money is unlikely to be enough, and he doesn't put out enough videos for it to be a job. Paradoxically, making youtube your job will likely diminish the tinkering aspect of the video - youtube encourages you to create clickbait and upload often and consistently.
>To be sure though, to be able to comfortably afford up even a used electron microscope for your hobby ... it would be nice to have a decent income.
they're often given out free or sold very cheap during lab auctions.
problem is that setup is a pain, the old ones are very large, and they're usually one of the heaviest pieces of equipment in the lab -- all that stuff adds up to the real cost.
I dunno, some of the YouTubers make bank. I'm thinking specifically of Shahriar on 'The Signal Path', who has parlayed his YouTube income into a laboratory that likely surpasses many universities, but I doubt Ben is hurting either.
If he is still working for Google X, it's because he wants to, not because he has no choice.
Hahahaha, it's hilarious to think that Shahriar could be making that much from YouTube income. His lab with the equipment he has is certainly worth over $1 million.
Much of the high dollar equipment he gets is donated by test equipment companies. I dont think it's reasonable to call niche test equipment donations income.
Rest assured Shahriar is making good money at his day job, considering he has a pretty good title at one of the biggest/best RF research companies.
I think a lot of his income comes from Patreon, admittedly. Not clear how it breaks down between YouTube and Patreon. The same is probably true for Ben.
What is clear is that most of Shahriar's equipment is not donated, by the manufacturers or by anyone else. He will (obviously) say so when it is, and he rarely does. He buys it himself -- primarily on eBay, but still, that doesn't mean it's cheap.
For my channel, Patreon provides about 2-3 times as much financial support as YouTube ads. If I started doing 30-60 second sponsorships in my videos, that would provide about 5-10 times as much as YouTube ads. I really like Patreon because it's just a basic and honest transaction. I only charge money for each video that I create, and people can give me feedback directly, and increase or decrease their pledge accordingly. Everyone gets what they are expecting.
Tom Scott has a video talking about why he doesn't set up a patreon. My takeaway from that video: one sponsored video covers (for him) multiple months of good patreon income. Given that paying / being paid impacts a relationship, he prefers to keep that for companies instead of changing the relationship with a significant portion of his audience.
It's a good point. If YouTube were my day job, I'm not sure that I would turn down the significant money from sponsorships. If I didn't personally dislike ads so much, I'd probably have already done it. Patreon may not require a huge shift in viewer relationship: Only 1-2% of my viewers support me on Patreon, but even this provides more revenue than basic YouTube ads. The vast majority of viewers benefit from the generosity of the 1-2%, and everyone seems OK with this setup.
I absolutely love the, “would you join me in excitedly exploring this problem space?” YouTube channels. I agree about the “I’m an expert who only researched this last week” channels. But I think there’s a big need for the actual expert channels.
I'm not a youtuber, but in similar position – I have a relatively interesting and stable dayjob and a exciting hobby I'd probably earn much more with if I'd really focus on this. It's almost daily routine for me to answer "why don't you turn this hobby into dayjob?" question.
At first I like it this way - it's all my jobs and roles which makes me really me. And focusing in one high income role only would have benefit in short term only. In long term I'd burn myself out and my family will suffer even in short term. This would be even more true if my income would depend on Youtube algorithm etc.
In a video from few years ago he mentioned "electromechanical prototyping" at Verily ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily ) previously called Google Life Sciences which is doing healthcare and biotechnology related research. Not exactly the first thing you might think when hearing Google.
Perhaps it is because this is such a rarified area to be poking around, but in many other videos the content creator seems to often "know it all". It's refreshing when someone says, "I think this is why this behaves like this," and then lays out their claim.
Truly, this guy should leave Google so he has more time to make YouTube videos and tinker/research in his garage/lab. Something tells me he likes his day job too though.