In this time, I logged 18 million views, grew my subscriber base to 231,503, and grossed a total of $187,997. Some of those numbers sound big, but the costs—financial, logistical, and personal—didn’t earn out. In this newsletter, I’ll explain the hard and soft costs of doing business on YouTube, why leaving is the right move for me, and what I’m doing (for money) next.
I spent $3500 to produce, shoot, and edit each long form video for YouTube. I regularly shot five recipe videos over two shoot days, and I booked a food stylist to prep with me the day before. All of this happened in my house, so there was no studio expense.
Back to the rough stuff. Until recently, I put out a video every week, costing me $14,000 per month, plus groceries. (My time is not included in that figure.) Average monthly earnings from Google Adsense, the program that matches ads to content on YouTube? Brace yourself.
That means that on my best month, income fell short of expenses by about $6500. My crappiest month put me more than $12,000 in the hole. On average though, I grossed about $4000/month in ad revenue; my sales partner takes 8% of that off the top.
I've never seen their videos, and I'm sure they're great, but I wonder if the production quality is as important as their spending suggests. I used to watch shaytards every day in college and they did it all with a basic vlogging camera back then.
Oh, missed the goodbye section. It seems like they know that's a factor:
I have a lot of respect for creators who self-tape and edit their content, and I envy their lower production costs.
I guess it's a matter of not being able to produce the show they wanted to produce and have it be profitable.