How much money does an article or a youtube video generate? It seems that this one article alone must have cost thousands of dollars in equipment alone.
And while the iphone 6 bend video on youtube has almost 40 million hits now, the unbox therapy user who uploaded it hits less than 500.000 views on average for their other videos. I'm willing to believe that 40 million views on youtube can be monitized to pay for more than an iphone 6, but I'm not so sure about the 2-300k, so it seems like quite the investment to go around breaking phones.
I have seen youtubers who live off youtube with average video views of 20-30k per upload.
If an ad plays on 1/10 videos, and each ad makes the person 0.1 cent its still (30 million * 0.1 * 0.1) / 100 = 3 thousand dollars. Now take into account the added subscribers this adds which will make all future videos more profitable, and that I'm probably underestimating ad revenue, it is worth it.
Video cpms can be well over $10, a 40M-view video could easily make a few $100k (though, of course, only a % of that ends up in the creator's pocket). 500k views could be a few thousand. Spread your equipment costs out over a bunch of videos and you're making some nice money.
And while the iphone 6 bend video on youtube has almost 40 million hits now, the unbox therapy user who uploaded it hits less than 500.000 views on average for their other videos. I'm willing to believe that 40 million views on youtube can be monitized to pay for more than an iphone 6, but I'm not so sure about the 2-300k, so it seems like quite the investment to go around breaking phones.