Good Morning John
At the very first VidCon, I was being interviewed by a television reporter who, at one point,
was surprised by something I said, and she said to me
"You can make money on YouTube? How does that work? And I was a little tired. And I was also, like, super high on VidCon. Like I was so excited about online video and
all the stuff that had come together and so like I did—I did not censor myself
well. I said something to the effect of
“Um, advertising. My show has more viewers than yours does.” Which I did not intend to be a sick
burn! It just came out! Like that was the thing that was true. But the answer to that question is complicated,
and since I think about YouTube a lot, and I think that we should all be more open about
how all of these things work, let’s do it, let’s talk about how YouTubers make their
money.
Different kinds of content have to have different
kinds of support. Like this right here, very low budget. This is just two guys. We could probably subsist on what we call
“adsense and merch.” Adsense works for every YouTuber, as long
as you’re not like philosophically opposed to advertising. You click a little box when you upload your
video, YouTube will sell an ad against it, and then it will split the revenue with you,
you get 55%. This is kind of wonderful. It is not a common thing among social media
sites, though they have started to share some revenue YouTube started doing it way back in like
2007 and 2008. It’s also part of why it’s such an appealing
place to make stuff, and also part of why it’s become harder to break in. Because if there’s a way to make money,
then people will spend money to make their content look better so that they can compete
on the platform.
Anyway, YouTube AdSense pretty much stays
on the same level, and everybody has access to that, which is really amazing. But at higher levels, you start talking about
brand deals, maybe endorsement deals, maybe really good merch stuff. And even eventually getting support from someone
else to help realize your vision. Crash Course and SciShow were both funded
by grants from YouTube because they wanted more high quality stuff on the site so advertisers
would be more likely to advertise. Those systems are really hard to democratize
and make available to everybody. Now brand deals are a little bit different. They have started to be available to creators
sort of in the middle class. Brand deals, basically, anytime somebody pays
you to talk about something in a video, whether that’s like an audible.com callout at the
end, or it can be a big elaborate production and your entire video is about the topic that
the brand wants you to talk about.
YouTube advertising is available to everybody,
and it comes in and you don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s gonna come in,
but it’s a really low rate. In order to supplement income, a lot of YouTubers,
in addition to having, you know regular jobs, also live in Los Angeles, where it’s easier
to get gigs acting or hosting and TV commercials or shows. And if you have more social media followers
these days, it can be easier to get that kind of work, which is interesting. Some YouTubers also make money by touring,
whether they’re comedians or musicians. Sometimes creators will license their content
to other platforms. Sometimes videos go on TV and you make some
money that way. And then you have some creators like Rooster
Teeth, building their own subscription platforms. And then if you don’t want to make people
subscribe, you can also ask them to subscribe through services like Patreon, which is extremely
important for shows like Sexplanations, for example, that gets really bad YouTube ad rates because advertisers don't want to be next to the word "sex." Without the support of Patreon patrons, that show couldn’t happen at all.
The thing to remember is that different kinds
of content work better with different kinds of monetization. Unlike what I said to that lady at VidCon
2010, it’s not simple. It’s gotten a lot more difficult to make
your way on this platform, and it has become more complicated. Which is one of the reasons why I recently
started a thing called the Internet Creators Guild with the goal of being a resource to
connect creators together, to give them information, and to let them have a unified voice when
talking about when things go wrong, and what they would like to make them happier. To be clear, I started this thing, but I really
don’t want to run it. I don’t think that I should run it, and
I definitely can’t. Honestly, I think that I’m too biased to
be in charge, so I’m looking forward to eventually stepping back after helping Laura
Chernikoff, who is one of the most effective people I’ve ever met, get established as
the executive director of the organization.
There is a lot of value that’s created by
online video, and as different systems evolve for capturing at least some of that value,
it just gets more complicated. And as those barriers rise, we need to create
systems that keep the benefits of this revolution accessible to the most people possible, and
I hope that the Internet Creators Guild can play a part in that. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this. Hopefully it wasn’t too inside baseball. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday..
