David Dobrik was one of the biggest and most influential vloggers from 2017 until the COVID pandemic forced him to take a hiatus from weekly vlogging. That, and several controversies, have seen his income become diminished markedly; Youtube demonitized his channel (which at its peak had 19 million subscribers) However, he’s gotten into some business ventures (including a pizza restaurant called, of course, Doughbrik’s) so now he just relies on those and getting paid by Snapchat.
I am a teacher, in a STEM magnet–so YouTube and video games are like 90% of what these kids do for fun–and I haven’t found that to be the case. Some do, but usually in a vague way.
And even if people do dream of being a rock star content creator, is that so bad? I mean, yes, there are people who claim that’s their big dream and use that to deflect questions about why they are doing nothing and mooching off a family member or a spouse, but those people have always existed and will always claim they have some grand destiny and that their ship will come in any day now.
But there’s the other type of hopeful content creator (or rock star, or entrepreneur), who comes home from work (or school) and works really really hard at it as a side gig. After some time–could be months or years—they either see enough success to go full time, or they move on to something else. For some reason, society craps on these people or wants to “put them in their place” or sees it as hopeless or destined to fail, and rejoice when they give up. But as far as I can see, trying to build something because you love it and it satisfies you is way more healthy than coming home from work and watching TV or playing golf or even, I hate to say, arguing with people on the internet. The person that pours their leisure time into an ambitious goal for a few years is going to come out of it more skilled, even if that venture doesn’t work out. It’s not a waste–especially in pursuits where the cost of entry is relatively low.
And there’s a big range between rock star and failure. Again, think about musicians: I know lots of people who never “made it big” but who make enough money playing locally to cover the cost of their hobby, and it gives them a lot of satisfaction. How is that being a “failure” but spending thousands a year on golf or whatever is admirable? It’s the same with content creators: if you make enough to cover your expenses and you enjoy it, that’s really cool. Way better than spending the same amount of time becoming a super-fan of someone else’s content.
What they said, and they are not contradictory. Content is content, the concept of content creator is value neutral as to the form or the merit of the content itself. Success or failure there is a matter of who pays or not. And as in many cases of “following your dream” the common phrase “don’t quit your day job” is critically good advice until/unless you get your really big break.
And yes, the real matter here are those who just say “I’m gonna be an influencer” right off the bat, as opposed to having some notion of why am I going to be influential.
Which is a notable bit – there are different tiers and forms of “influencer” and different paths to get there. There are those who are legit celebrities by prior achievement or who gained online visibility first by being actual popular content creators; there are those who are just what we used to call a professional celebrity, “famous for being famous” and of course they get offers to do product placement; there are those who are just out to do the influencer thing from the start, sort of skipping over the “do something legit to become influential” part, this latter being the one IMO less likely to get anywhere.
I follow some “content creators” and even subscribe to one’s patreon. Back of the envelope my guess is that they’re a little better than breakeven right now, but as they pile up content (for example “how to play” on boardgames), they’re building up a backlog of re-viewable content that will provide a helpful long-term income stream, as long as YT doesn’t change its payment rules.
For one of the channels we follow, one of the two folks quit her day job to ramp up the channel output, so I assume it is indeed paying off, at least somewhat.
My ‘day job’ is YouTube now. I quit my IT management job in 2020 when my channel grew to a point where it became sustainable (I had set myself some criteria regarding savings and income level from the YT stuff and promised I wouldn’t make the jump until then - in reality, I went 18 months past those triggers just out of caution, and because I had some stuff I wanted to see done before quitting the regular job)
It took me more than 10 years (more like 15) to get to the point where the channel had grown to this size - but that’s somewhat abnormal; channels that attain ‘success’ on YT usually do so within a year or two, or never. I never really did all the tryhard stuff like begging for subs or chasing trending topics - I just made content on topics I enjoy and let things happen as they may. In fact, I have been incredibly lucky because success doesn’t typically happen to channels with a variety of content like mine.
I love what I do now, but I’m not sure I would recommend this to anyone else starting out, because as I say, it usually takes more than just ‘loving what you do’ to get to a point where it is sustainable. In order to do that, it’s usually necessary to court the algorithm, seek sponsorships, and sort of sacrifice your individuality and personality in order to fit into the mould of ‘successful influencer’ - it changes people, and that’s a little bit horrible.
Worst of all, ‘success’ is often defined in a really narrow niche - and YouTube (probably the other platforms too) want you to be narrow and focused, because that makes it very simple for them to match ads to your content - except that such a narrow focus of content brings with it two major risks:
- Creator Burnout - can you really make content on the same narrow topic forever, AND keep it fresh and interesting? Some can, many cannot.
- Audience Burnout - your chosen topic slips out of popularity and the audience divert their attention to the new thing; sometimes a pivot can be achieved to get back into the spotlight, mostly, not.
YouTube (or whatever platform) doesn’t care if either of these things happen - because there is always a ready supply of fresh up and coming hopefuls to fill the gap.
Wow. Cool to hear from someone who’s done/doing it.
This is a really cool story. Thank you. If it had gone differently–if after 5 or 6 or 8 years it had sorta petered out and you never reached the “quit your day job” point, would you have regretted ever starting/see it as a failure? I think we too often act like if something wasn’t successful long term, it means that it was a mistake to try.
I think another reason why it’s hard to evaluate profitability is that you don’t always know how many people have to be paid. The really big channels are teams–Movie/Game Theory, Kurzgesagt, Mark Rober, all those–they have whole teams. So while I am sure they are making a lot of revenue, it’s quite possible that the individuals are making less than many sole proprietors on smaller channels. It seems to often be an optimization problem: early on, the only possible way to do anything is to do it all yourself, but as you become more successful, people like editors and researchers and moderators can allow you to make more content more quickly–or maintain the same rate while also doing things like stream.
I think I had already passed the point where it seemed like it wouldn’t take off and so I didn’t care if it ever became a significant income stream - I was just doing it because it’s what I like to do (my content was mostly the sorts of things I would be doing in my free time anyway, just documented in video form) - some content is now more deliberate and planned, but still only on topics that happen to fall within my interests.
So when it did take off, it was a massive and mostly unexpected bonus. I have resolved to try to keep it the way it always was - I do the things I want to do; some videos are still massive flops by the metrics - I don’t really care - I still get personal enjoyment out of the process anyway.
No, no there’s not.
Nebula was created by youtubers to be able to do long form and get around some of YT’s restrictions. Almost all of them have YT and Nebula/Curiosity Stream outlets.
Skillshare is… I wouldn’t say scam, but there really is no reason to subscribe. Everything you can learn on Skillshare is available from someone else for free on YT. Internet Archive:
As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts
YouTube:
As of 2022 data, YouTube hosts over 800 million videos among 37 million channels on the platform. 1 billion videos are watched per day on YouTube by its over 2 billion users.
No personal experience but I’ve been a fairly big YouTube watcher for a while so I’ve seen quite a few content creators talking about their job, in the occasional video.
In general, I’d say that it’s like moving to Hollywood to get into acting. If you make it then you’ll really be raking it in but, outside of that small, precious few almost everyone is either going to become nothing or work in porn until they get tired of it/get married.
The big differences are 1) if you’re working in Hollywood, there are some secondary occupations that you can move into like art design, camera work, editing, etc. So, if you fail to make it work with acting, you can still move into a related field that’s better suited to you. And 2) film and TV is a group profession so if you do, for example, make it as an actor then all you have to do is chill, wait for parts to come along, and try to not waste your money too fast. There are groups of people working to manage stuff, separate people working to come up with ideas, other people working to edit, and do on. As a content creator, it’s all you and only you. If you get big enough and you’re organized - like Rhett & Link - then you’ll hire producers, writers, and editors so that things become more like a Hollywood production. But if you never get that big then, as @Mangetout says, you’re looking at a road that inevitably leads off a cliff. There’s only so long you can keep coming up with new ideas, keeping viewers interested, and organize a complex business without external help.
There’s a tightrope to walk of creating clickbait, creating authentic content, having high production values, and maintaining a sufficiently frequent posting schedule to attract and keep viewers. If you’re a person who’s okay with going back to the beginning and making a new “How to boil water” video for newby cooks - because that’s your target audience - after you’ve gone through everything that there is to know about cooking, and you’re all okay with doing practically the same body series all over again, year on year, maybe you’ll be able to survive through burnout. But a lot of people who get into content creation are the sort who don’t like monotony. So once they hit the end of their content path, that’s the end of their content career.
If you want to create content, you had better have something special to offer. Either you have unique knowledge to share, or you are funny or engaging or have some other talent, or you have access to interesting things you can create content around. It’s like people who want to be writers, but have no unique experiences or insights to write about. Best advice for them: Go out and experience things that give you something to wriite about.
I think people look at some of the rich early creators like PewdiePie, and think they might have the same result. But the competition is fierce, and the money has slowed down for all but the biggest channels. And Youtube’s algorithms force you to create content constantly if you don’t want to drop in the rankings. Burnout is common. Finally, if you can’t hit the subscriber threshold, you can’t monetize. Some people expend huge effort to build subscribers, and never get there.
‘Influencers’ are a strange category. I don’t really get it. I don’t need some rando with no special skills or experience giving me life advice or telling me what to buy. But then, I’m not an 18 year old.
From my recent experience trying out some new content providers, I have some advice: Get to the damned point! I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on a video claiming to be about a subject I’m interested in, only to have some talking head with poor speaking skills ramble on slowly for minutes about other stuff before ever getting to the topic. Your job is to grab the viewer immediately and hook them in. So many channels I browse seem to not know this.
Yes, yes yes. This drives me NUTS! We all know about the subscribe button and the notification bell. 
Unrelated to your post, I want to point out that you can make a lot of money on TikTok even though they don’t do “traditional” ad revenue sharing like YT. Those content creators just get a lot of subs and then leverage their own popularity to get product placement deals. This is actually true of YT now as well, plus Twitch, Instagram, and others (Twitter not so much, it’s hard to work product placements into 280 characters). A lot of times the product placement has to be more subtle, certainly more subtle than an ad break, which can be more valuable than traditional advertising. Although AIUI the EU has really changed the game here.
Related to your post, specifically the part I quoted, in many ways this feels like a common refrain among “disruptive” businesses. Uber makes it easier to become a taxi driver, airbnb makes it easier to become a hotelier, soundcloud makes it easier to become a rapper. But you also lose the comfort of just having a job, where your employer has some basic responsibilities.
This may seem obvious, but sixty thousand a year really isn’t all that much. For one thing, for anyone in America, you’ve still got to get health insurance somehow, or go uninsured at the risk of having a catastrophic illness. And no money is going to Social Security, disability or any sort of retirement account. Plus of course there’s whatever costs are associated with producing that content.
You’re right about the expenses that add up for cost of living in the US, but saying that it “really isn’t all that much” misses the fact that it’s much higher than the median income in the US, and only a hair below median household income.
I’m surprised this isn’t being discussed more in this thread. People seem to be assuming this girl is making videos about interior decorating or cooking or something. If I heard an under-30 female describe herself as a “content creator,” I’d assume, barring any hard evidence to the contrary, that she’s talking about doing OnlyFans.
[very OT]
Cool, Mangetout, this inspired me to go hunt up your channel again and I am blown away by the toasting-fork video!
Basically because it dawned on me that I as an American with a predilection for 19th- to mid-20th-century British fiction have read probably thousands of references to toasting forks, without ever really noticing that I had no actual knowledge of what one looks like. My unexamined vague mental image of the implement was more along the lines of a carving fork, which I now know to be very inaccurate! 
[/vOT]
(bonus: and now I know what an actual crumpet looks like as well! spoiler: it’s an “English muffin”, basically)
…there is absolutely nothing wrong with OnlyFans, or any other kind of work in that regard.
But your leap here is based on nothing at all really. A great deal of content creation involves video editing. The last video I edited was only about three minutes long: it took me over a day to edit. And if you are a gaming twitch streamer then yeah, you are going to be spending a lot of time just in front of the camera.
So, barring any hard evidence, I wouldn’t be making these assumptions.
Actually, “content creator/influencer” from a 20’s woman to me would suggest fashion and/or makeup. It certainly could be OnlyFans or being a cam girl but there’s also a bajillion women out there waiting to get noticed for their clothing haul videos, purse reviews, how to get smoky eyes and general young-adult nattering on about life.
(I’ll point out that there’s also, of course, a bunch of women playing video games or repairing engines or building things, etc. But I think the “Want to get noticed and get stuff from companies” angle is usually fashion related especially when you get to TikTok and Instagram and those social media sites)
I want to add: the “influencer” part comes from her believing that what she wears on camera actually influences her viewers. I don’t know, maybe she influences brands of sex toys, too. I am NOT going to watch her channel to find out!