5 years and 300+ well researched videos results in $5k/mo revenue, mostly patreon. This shows how brutally unforgiving the youtube economy is, even when your content is excellent. I fully expect this channel to grow to $50k/mo in the next couple of years, but still, the stamina required to get there amazes me.
I don’t think it’s the YouTube economy so much as it is the creative economy. If you produce creative content, you are at the mercy of the whims of your audience. Even in profitable or well-funded businesses, there’s a constant existential threat associated with the whims of the audience changing.
The problem is especially visible on YouTube because so many creators are small, and so have a connection with their audience but don’t have the resources to absorb the costs and risks of trying to keep up with a constantly changing audience, but it’s not a problem specific to or even especially pronounced on YouTube.
I don’t think it’s the YouTube economy so much as it is the creative economy. If you produce creative content, you are at the mercy of the whims of your audience. Even in profitable or well-funded businesses, there’s a constant existential threat associated with the whims of the audience changing.
Yup. Generally speaking, people value content like this as pretty much having, well, no value at all. They don't want to pay for it, and they'll go out of there way to make sure they pay as little as possible for it.
In fact, I would even go further and suggest that many people feel that all jobs, except for whatever job/industry they are in, as having little to no value and should be done for nothing.
> Yup. Generally speaking, people value content like this as pretty much having, well, no value at all. They don't want to pay for it, and they'll go out of there way to make sure they pay as little as possible for it.
A lot of the blame goes to the content creators, though.
They were the ones who set the expectations for "free content" by giving their creation away for "free". And in that context, making $5k a month is pretty good. If I have a garage sale, put $0 price tags on everything, and end up with $5k afterwards, then that's amazing.
> In fact, I would even go further and suggest that many people feel that all jobs, except for whatever job/industry they are in, as having little to no value and should be done for nothing.
I suspect that my (passive) valuation of entertainment, given the culture that I grew up in, partly stems from growing up with ad subsidized radio. It feels like music is almost a public service, but for buying a receiver, not choosing the playlist, and switching stations when the ads come on. I suspect the availability of a public library inclulcated similar expectations in me. Eventually, I paid for movies and songs. But, youtube and other internet content hosts fit most in that mode whereby I can eat from the buffet to my limit, provided I bat away the promotional posters as I sit down.
This rings true even for clearly necessary fields - I've had clients balk at pricing for a complete revamp of their network. Do you think I googled 'How to setup Company Network Safely' and went to work? Years of knowledge etc; that a lot of these guys don't care to understand
Most people chose to be ignorant in this manner. They'd rather spend as little as possible and denounce your skill rather than understand why xyz costs as much as it does.
Right -- YouTube is essentially the only platform that you can get "all three": distribution, discoverability & revenue.
People can make creative content and get the first 2 on TikTok but all things equal the payout would be way, way less. They can make money on Patreon and distribute their content through it but there isn't enough discoverability there for them to grow.
There's a reason why everyone who blows up on any other platform expands to YouTube asap.
> If you produce creative content, you are at the mercy of the whims of your audience.
More like if you produce creative content, you're at the mercy of your distributor. Google is making significantly more money off of the channel than the content producers are, I wouldn't be surprised if the difference were an order of magnitude.
How so? Google gives 55% of the ad revenue to the creator and pays for all the hosting and administrative costs itself. And none of the Patreon revenue goes to Google.
He doesn’t do paid sponsorships. That would probably double the revenue when looking at other creators who published their numbers.
As per article it’s because of the day job who doesn’t leave too much time handling those and that the video making is a hobby to him - I read from it he doesn’t want to make it a job?
It depends on the type of sponsorship. A friend turned [cooking in a niche cuisine tiktoker] does sponsorships where for example if the cooking step is to fry something in a pan, you just include the 1-2 seconds of adding the oil so that viewers see what type of oil (and brand) you're using. They get stuff sent to them like, use our toaster in your video and all you literally have to do is show yourself putting the bread in the toaster if you're making a video about like avocado toast or something. If they scaled it up properly they could easily clear $3k/month before counting the amount of growth that comes from uploading frequently (they've experimented with how much they grow per video but kinda get tired of doing it).
I do see other tiktokers do it poorly, like having a long lingering shot on the label that makes you realized the video is an ad. Somehow they still get views but their videos are really really boring.
It works well for the viewer if the content lends itself to sponsorships - your friend's example is a perfect one, he has a cooking show, needs cooking equipment and the sponsors provide it - win-win!
But this model doesn't apply to every channel. If I'm on a science/physics channel, I'd tolerate scientific/test equipment sponsors but that's rarely what we see (turns out most quality goods sell fine without polluting YouTube videos), so instead you get VPNs, crappy Chinese earbuds, website builders, etc.
Yeah that's fair and to be honest a lot of it is due to greed. Youtube would be better if it returned to people doing it for fun rather than for money. Yes even if it means only being able to put up a video twice a week beacuse they only have time for it on the weekends.
"The FTC has expressed the opinion that under the FTC Act, product placement (that is, merely showing products or brands in third-party entertainment content – as distinguished from sponsored content or disguised commercials) doesn’t require a disclosure that the advertiser paid for the placement."
The thing is, when it comes to content this is basically the whole game. I once, after a disagreement with a friend of mine who is a designer about the difficulty of designing a non-doubly symmetric gear icon, burned around eight hours on designing some icons and put them up on The Noun Project. I'm not a designer, a structural engineer trained software dev with a decent eye, but no real training or work experience in design.
Over years the money kept coming in. I think I calculated it out to about $20 an hour after four or five years. I literally could have looked at this as a sort of bond, did the net present value accounting on it, and realized better gains than with software over the next 70 years of copyright.
This is with no automation or market research or experience or training.
I wonder how much they would have made without Youtube. If they had to host/stream the videos themselves, didn't have magical algorithms to push a % of viewers to them, had to market and discover their own audience completely on their own, had to sort out ads/subscriptions themselves, etc.
> without youtube, users would be seeking out this content, like they did with blogs before facebook.
Would they really though? His top viewed videos are "Why the Soviet Computer Failed" and "What Eating the Rich Did for Japan". If those were headlines for a personally-hosted video blog, the biggest group I can see eating that up is the Twitter mob, which, all things considered, doesn't generate much value and is unlikely to translate into a dedicated follower base.
In addition, those are kind of two different interest groups: I'd imagine less than 50% of people interested in the Soviet Computer topic are interested in viewing/reading a pro-"eat the rich" content piece. With YouTube, their recommendations allow the user to only be fed the content that correlates with what they want to see (and this is more apparent in other parts of YouTube, eg. Channel Awesome[0] where anything that's not in their Nostalgia Critic or Untitled Review Show series tends to get comparatively few views).
Considering merely having an algorithm not recommend your channel is equated with censorship by many producers, I assume it stalls your growth and possibly even drops your views significantly with existing subscribers.
It is but there is a huge upside to it: no bosses breathing down your neck (even if they are nice and hands-off, you still have to do what they tell you), no 9-5, no nauseating business corporate language, no commuting, interacting with coworkers, etc. I am a content creator myself, get paid way less than I could at a 9-5 job, and would never go back simply because there's nothing better than doing exactly what you love without having to waste time doing what other people want you to do.
Assuming your time is worth minimum wage - you haven't even broken even yet.
This is a very, very long term play.
You have to bank on YouTube still being a dominate market, not getting too greedy with it's algorithms or revenue sharing, and your old videos continuing to attract a large number of views.
If any one of those goes wrong - you're basically working for below minimum wage.
I always wonder what his returns would be if he just stopped posting but kept the old videos up.
I realize it probably declines faster than you'd think - but imagine over the course of 5 years he'd prob still hit 100k in residual value. Which must be a nice safety blanket to have.
Exactly. If these videos were "Asian financial advice" - this post would be about how to hire a video production team. The crazy good youtube money is in finance: realestate, 401ks, investing, etc. You want to be in a market with advertisers with deep pockets.
i watch this channel because the videos are not just trash topics solely engineered to gain ad revenue.
A lot of his topics in the video are not related to any advertising, and thus the CPM is low. I'm glad he's stuck through it, because the content is excellent.
i'm glad to hear that majority revenue actually comes from patreon - this means people do realize the value of the video, and there's enough willing to donate.
That's a good way to kill the authenticity of a channel, and race to the bottom creating flashy but shallow content. I don't begrudge a youtuber merely hiring a cameraman, but the more people they hire on a permanent basis, the more pressure there is to optimize for monetary success. This means flashy well produced videos, but very shallow content that is more accessible to a wider audience.
I would assume a meaningful definition of luxury involves at least abundant space, food, energy, and time. For example, working 100 hours per week is not luxurious, nor living in a Hong Kong pod, nor having to eat ramen because you cannot afford fruits and vegetables.
Would you have access to broadband internet to upload HD video? Clean water? Sewage? Healthcare? Education?
Supposedly, median household income in Peru is $17k, and that is skewed higher to urban residents, so let’s say two earners earning $24k total in rural Peru would be 2x median income of the surrounding families. Maybe it can be “luxurious”, but I would want more proof that you can get access to reliably energy, high quality network connectivity, and access to other goods/services one would normally associate with luxury.
Having money in the Peruvian countryside is not going to make up for QoL because the infrastructure just isn't there. 40% of the households in rural areas don't even have electricity. No chance for clean drinkable water or insulated housing.
YouTube allows you access to a the world's largest group of suckers as well as those in poverty who are desperate. If you create content that targets these people, you can make bank… and fast. While someone creating high-end education content might get $1-$2 CPMs, someone creating targeted scam content can make 10x—yes, $10-$20 CPMs are possible.
Content about personal finance, coaching, "selling online", affiliate spam, MLM and pyramid schemes, dropshipping, and meta-content about being a "creator" all makes unbelievable bank.
He seems to release about 2 videos a year and has more than 10k patrons. If he gets 2$ on average from each per month that makes 240k a year or about one million after four years.
I would love to see some of the better educational YouTube channels get picked up by Netflix and the like... And hopefully find a good audience & better compensation too.
I agree, to me, some of these documentaries are better than the ones on Netflix at the moment. The Netflix 'docuseries' Explained is so bad it would not be viable on youtube!
You'll also need to own and pay for marketing and distribution in that case.
I don't know of any indie consumer video-based product that got popular without being on Youtube. Note that I am excluding "video courses".
Most people can't do the marketing, it requires too much time to learn and implement, time that cuts into video production. For a lot of people, it's better to delegate it to the platform itself.
I'm not sure that makes YouTube a monopoly. Just like some games work best on the Nintendo Switch doesn't mean Nintendo has a monopoly on console gaming.
I am a very happy Asianometry subscriber. He has a bit of a monotone delivery but the content consists of fantastic dives into the world of electronics manufacturing, science, and technology in general. He deserves his success.
It's a welcome break from the exaggerated emotions, fast breaks/cuts, and general dopamine triggers that are littered in your average youtube video. It's like watching Bob Ross. I love Asianometery!
He's sometimes a bit too (economically) left-wing for me, but I generally sticks to well-researched facts, so it has never been an issue that would impair my enjoyment.
No problem with his style either, but whatever software he's using to cut the audio together doesnt duck the cuts properly and so they click. Subtle issue, and definitely not a criticism, but it's emphasized because of the recording style.
I don’t know about his service but I run popular apps for asian language learning and have a lot of non-native immigrants / westerners who’ve moved there and are still learning (often life long), so you could still be right
I started a Youtube channel about Dynamic Programming. This was out of frustration of doing nothing during the COVID isolation.
To my surprise, I reached 1,000 subscribers relatively quickly. I posted my first video on Apr 14, 2020. By Jul 13, 2020 the channel had 1k+ subscribers. So, it took 3 months.
The videos have extremely good (IMHO) like/dislike ratio. I somewhat proud of it :)
I've never had monetization enabled, so never made a cent out of this journey. On the other hand, it was crazy fulfilling.
Since I joined AWS, I barely have time to reply to comments, let alone publish new videos. Wish I had more time...
I stopped releasing new videos on Feb 8, 2021. By that time I had 4k subscribers. It's passively grown to 4.5k since then.
Mostly Asian viewers is just not it from an income perspective.
There are other youtube channels who are super successful and do niche Asian History content with mostly western viewers and I assume make a lot more money.
If OP is not aware of them maybe he should check them out and see what they do better. I have a feeling there's a bunch of things you can learn from it.
I enjoy his semi videos but honestly general history should be more popular than semis, I think he just has to get their quality up to snuff. Don't assume your earlier less popular history videos is down to the topic rather than your earlier inexperience. The stuff you said about storytelling that you learned makes a huge difference.
Clicking into the article you see that it was built over the course of five years. And from other comments it seems that ~half of his revenue is from Patreon.
That means that five years of labor has netted a salary of $60K per year (only $30k from YouTube)… Almost certainly that’s top line revenue and not net profit.
That’s… not much for the work involved. The benefit here is with this strong presence and smart thinking he can likely turn this into significantly more income. Perhaps as an affiliate for travel sites or packaging historical vacation packages. But it certainly dissuades me from any business model where showing ads is the primary revenue driver (unless you on a platform, of course, a la Google, Meta, et al.)
But it scales. If he keeps at it (while keeping the quality - I watch most videos), it's likely that each year will bring as much revenue as all previous years combined. It may saturate at few millions subs but at that point it's not a bad profit and revenue from potential partnerships increases.
I'm not saying it's an easy money, but it could be much more rewarding than working for big tech. Of course having a yt cahnnel is still kind of working for big tech, but he seems to be smart about it, heavily promoting newsletter, presumably to be able to switch platform if necessary.
It also could go to nothing any year, as audiences move on or a youtube algorithm change murders his watchtime (Patreon a little less risky here but it could shrink as watchtime/new audience shrinks).
This is an important point… I purchased a website about 3D printing at the beginning of this year and have been steadily improving the content quality and posts… Only for a recent Google update to obliterate 90% of my traffic overnight.
Two months later it’s starting to recover but that’s not the bedrock of a business you’d like to build upon.
The thing to remember is that it's a two-way door: current audiences move on, but we keep making more humans, and they keep "discovering" what youtube recommends to them, so realistically the threat is "leveling out" rather than "losing viewers" if you run a quality channel that isn't built on slagging others off.
Plus, we're already seeing alternatives (or rather, in-parallels) becoming quite established, most notably Floatplane and Nebula as created-by-youtuber(s)-who-wanted-an-off-platform-alternative.
It's a part time hobby about things he has an interest in. There is no employer employee relationship and no alienation of labor. Given all that, 60K is pretty damn great.
Awesome channel, puts out consistently high quality content and I find the narrator to be better than a vast majority of similar channels who seem to all have the same annoying voice quirks which I think they do intentionally.
Wendover and Asianometry I would expect to both be exceptions. Wendover's delivery, especially for informative content, is among the best I've ever heard.
Yes, through personal experience in the field and maintaining communication and friendships with those still in the industry. I realized a long time ago that the Economist's material is entirely based on second-hand information (think tank, government and NGO reports), mixed in with a few sentences about market liberalization.
I work for a company that makes industrial water filtration systems and his video on water filtration systems for the semiconductor industry still taught me things.
An interesting channel is Will Prowse's Off Grid Solar Channel. He was living in his van (in CA, no surprise) until the youtube money allowed him to buy a house (in Vegas), which he recently paid off.
"I paid 34k every month for 10 months to pay off this house. "
Anyway, so it's possible, but you need to have the right topic. I think reviews and how-tos of expensive things you are about to buy is a lucrative place to be.
The best is when they literally ban everything you've ever worked on. Love when 6 bans come in at 12:03 am like last week. I feel like pretty much anything I ever work on now is at risk of google randomly banning it. It sucks that it feels like you can't really escape it because a client always either wants an android app or google maps integration etc.
I can't imagine a youtube creator is at any less risk somehow. Over a lifetime google will certainly find some reason to ban the creator. I understand they want to protect their business but the way they operate is especially harsh and can literally ruin people's lives.
Interesting that he is willing to deal with receiving money from AdSense, but not willing to deal with receiving money from sponsors. Sounds like an opening for an AdSense-like middleman except for sponsorships, so he could just receive money from one place instead of dealing with multiple customers.
Since he mentioned the Discord benefit for Patreon, I'm guessing the ability to chat with him would be the biggest incentive. The audience really likes getting extra access to a creator and have 2-way communication instead of just being passive viewers.
His other Patreon benefit for the highest tier is early access to videos but in observing other Youtube creators' explanations, it's the live chat that attracts Patreon payments.
I do notice that some Youtubers do the reverse of Patreon tiers from Asianometry. E.g. Real Science: least expensive tiers have early access but no livestream chat; the highest tier has the chat
Everybody's trying to figure out the right mix of incentives for Patreon.
I love his channel and his narration style. It's a super informational channel with no clickbait and just tons of quality content about semiconductors and other technology. Would highly recommend.
There are many comments about how little he makes from this channel, but it seems like he’s not really focusing on maximizing his revenue. Specifically:
- he does not do sponsored videos (too much work he doesn’t want to do)
- he has not monetized with his own product(s) (tried merch, but it didn’t work)
- he does not promote the videos
After taking a look at some of his video titles, I’m fairly certain he could make an absolute bucketload of money just by doing lead gen for folks who specialize in Asian trade (either as boots on the ground or as advisors).
As an example, a recent video on Chinese semi-conductors has 161k views — that’s the high side of his normal range. I can imagine finance companies wanting to be connected to the “real” local experts on this topic (not the blowhards who are a dime a dozen, but the real folks who like to get their hands dirty with the details) — that connection could be worth millions. I can imagine chip buyers just wanting to know which consultants will give them a reasonable deal. I can imagine finance/investing newsletters tripping over themselves for access to local experts with specialized knowledge that would provide insights to their readers. The list goes on. Being able to facilitate these connections would be a huge business, imho.
The problem is that this would require some scut work… but I imagine it would be very lucrative scut work, most of which could be wrapped into the research phase of his videos.
tl;dr — I think he could make a lot more loner from his channel, but he doesn’t seem interested in or knowledgeable about the type of work that would generate high levels of revenue.
I'm working on a team to build alternative YouTube recommendations. You can search a channel to get a list of similar channels. Our list for Asianometry includes the Asia Society's official channel which has videos of public talks on Asian geopolitics, TechTechPotato which covers semiconductor chips, and Dongfang Hour covering the Chinese space program, as well as dozens more channels covering hardware and asian geopolitics (sometimes both!):
Great channel, but much less focus on general asian history now that tech history with economic / industrial policy focus is driving the eyeballs. Also sad his brief foray into shitpost style humor got slapped down by viewers.
I really enjoyed his videos on semiconductor developments since it's often hard to parse what's really going on since I'm not an electrical engineer, so none of it really makes sense to me. :)
I wish he would stop pumping the newsletter. I like that he's promoting his own stuff, but he doesn't understand why i watch his channel - it's because they are informative videos, and give me something meaningful to watch when i eat dinner.
I'd love a westernamatry channel, or something similar in being a sister channel. Maybe shorter episodes. maybe just reading news articles and reflecting on them. Lots of formats that could work.
the stories he tells are unique and intriguing - for me that's the value.
Love a behind-the-scenes peak of a creator like this one, it's fascinating to see. But yeah, $5k / month for the amount of work and talent that went into this seems disproportionate, but then I could also see this growing exponentially, where if he keeps at it, it will make ridiculous amounts of money that's just as, if not more disproportionate to effort invested, except this time in his favor. Which is what I wish for him.
I am transitioning to content creation and I already get paid for it. I used to just have an engineering job. Yes, I got paid WAY more in an engineering job but I look at it this way: the much higher salary I got in an engineering job is an exchange for having to do the work other people tell me to do, which I don't really find intrinsically interesting. It also means I have to commute sometimes, interact with others who might be incompetent, etc. Not worth the extra money at all.
Lots of people want to be content creators. Just like lots of people want to be musicians or athletes (or pet vets or work with kids.) Or write novels or create video games.
Many of these people are willing to take somewhat lower pay in return for doing something they love.
Yt just hosts the creators. They get paid whatever the ad market pays for the niche they are in. Plus what they make from Patron or Locals subscriptions.
I believe adsense witholds a sizeable portion of that ad revenue. Plus there is literally no transparency in adsense about which advertiser paid which channel. We are just supposed to take google's word for it
The earnings are strictly dependent on the audience profile(location, age, gender etc.) and the theme of the channel as the earnings are essentially a cut from the ad view and click costs.
I've watched some videos from similarly sized youtubers disclosing their earnings and socialblade seem to be quite off the mark most of the time probably because they don't have a good way to estimate the profile of the audience accurately enough.
Rule of the thumb is, a finance channel with American audience makes 10x-50x more per view than a Bangladeshi channel about gaming.
By being an indispensable, well-researched, source of information! That's how. I catch every bit of content from this person. I can't believe they choose to operate in China, I'd love an entire video just on that. Wish them the best.
