In reply to OHSCrifle :
Everyone I know who is a social media pro is hustling constantly.
In reply to OHSCrifle :
Everyone I know who is a social media pro is hustling constantly.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
That seems to be the common denominator for anybody who is successful in almost anything. There really isn't an "easy button", contrary to what some on said social media would have you believe.
I've thought about making content myself. But I'm much happier just...making stuff. Not having an internet presence is almost a blessing in disguise. As I don't enjoy that aspect of stuff. Rather just quietly build cool stuff.
GaryC83 said:I'm much happier just...making stuff. Not having an internet presence is almost a blessing in disguise. As I don't enjoy that aspect of stuff. Rather just quietly build cool stuff.
i'm thankful for the stuff you share here, that's for sure.
I've making content on YouTube for nearly 10 years now (only with "success" for 5). I treat it kind of like a part time job and hobby at the same time. Channel is the same as my name (56,000 subscribers, not massive by any means).
Best advice I can give is make videos you would actually watch. If you can't watch your own videos nobody else will. Also it's important to understand that there are two types of videos, long term and short term.
Things like tutorials are long term videos, people will search for them for as long as whatever it is you are teaching is relevant. Short term videos grow at the beginning but usually level out as time goes on and don't grow as much. Ideally your channel will be a mix of both, long term is where the "passive" income comes from, short term is for new growth.
GRM forum member Doc Brown has a reasonably successful channel: Robot Cantina.
Amusingly, the Spitfire on his channel home page is the one he sold to me almost ten years ago.
I like the shirt but be prepared to get double sued. About 10 years ago I was working on a Warhammer cartoon called Dorm of War, a real-world parody where an Ultra-marine, a Noise-Marine, an Ork, A Guardsman, and an Eldar were housemates. I was doing all the writing and voicing the Noise marine. We were done with storyboards on the first few episodes and had even started the animation when GW went after Pedersen.
We scrapped the whole project that day. There's a reason this meme works.
Mary Spender published a very interesting deep dive into her metrics for her original music (66 videos!) compared to a single gear review video:
In reply to Javelin :
I watched that and it jives with what a number of creators have mentioned in similar videos.
I have heard YouTube pays more ad-sense revenue during December - likely due to advertisers wanting to get holiday sale ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so some creators will go to town making extra videos for that month. I don't know if YouTube still does this.
Video length is important. It needs to be long enough to allow YouTube to get a few ad breaks in, but not so long that viewers debate if they have time to watch... Personally, I like them in 15-30 minute range. If it seems like a video will run long - you now have material for next week's video! Score!
Thumbnails and titles are practically an art unto themselves... and it'll take practice to see what works for you and get right.
Some viewers like raw, "vlog" style videos... some like more produced videos... neither are right or wrong, but being consistent is arguably more important. Develope a style and stick to it.
It's the 1st which means I have data on last month. I will post the raw data and the difference compared to October in (parenthesis).
Additionally, I made 2 videos on my car channel, added 44 subscribers, and made $47.78 in AdSense (+$10.03).
So October net was $205.39 and November net was $204.39, literally a dollar less.
Some more fun facts. Payments are *slow*. AdSense requires you to earn at least $100 before sending a payout, and they do it on the 21st of the month following you ending with enough. So on 11/21 I finally got paid for October's AdSense. Amazon affiliates are the same, you have to earn at least $100 to be worth their time, so I just finally hit that as a total, and should get a payout in December. TeeSpring pays via PayPal and hasn't worked yet. Patreon pays out once a month and tacks on a $0.25 fee to do so (not unreasonable IMO). So for all of the work I have put in since July, I have only seen about $200 total.
I like the idea, thanks for sharing the info!
I also continued working on polishing my intro and outro reels. To that end, I commissioned an artist to create my new logo:
I paid $50 for the artwork and $200 for The Gof Rockerz band to record the soundtrack.
Looking at your numbers...
Have you considered streaming to twitch?
The requirements for affiliate (earn money) aren't super difficult:
And its a rolling 30 day window. And once affiliate, unless you do something terrible against the TOS, you are affiliated and don't have to maintain anything to remain affiliated (3 viewer avg or streaming 7 different days a month). And you can direct upload vods to your YouTube channel.
Once you are affiliated, payout is paid at $50 USD on the 15th of every month if you meet the threshold. It may be worth at least proposing the idea to your current audience to see if they'd want to watch long form, zero edits of you painting models or even playing Warhammer with friends who approve of being on camera. Of course maybe this wouldn't work with your content, but it would be an additional stream of side income.
In reply to DjGreggieP :
That's a great idea! I'll look into it.
It's another month, so time for statistics again.
Additionally, I made no videos on my car channel, added 35 subscribers (2449 total), and made $42.73 in AdSense (-$5.05).
So December net was $233.71, a $29.32 increase.
December was an interesting month looking deeper. The daily views were down big time the last two weeks overall, but the views that were there were spiked on older videos. I'm guessing most people were busy with family/holidays, and the ones that weren't (or trying to get away) were binge-watching old content. The channels that I follow were very mixed, with most putting out no videos for a time and some doing a "best of" or compilation, and very few doing regular original content.
Despite making far less videos, I still saw a huge increase (14.3%) in revenue thanks to a combination of Patreon growth, Amazon affiliate, and teespring sales. I focused a single video on each of those branches (new Patreon exclusive video, what to buy for the holiday video, and plugging my shirt design video). I've found that focusing on one of the income streams per video focuses the viewers as opposed to shotgunning every single thing I do in every video.
I did try Twitch and did 2 streams. I simply do not have much truly quiet/free time to stream, and a sizable portion of my audience is overseas and it's not good timing for live. I was hopeful to stream a lot this week and managed to do none. I also started a discord server. I had a couple of ideas for the car channel and simply did not have time. I am floundering in my personal car hobby, so my content has followed suit. Finally, I started seeing actual payments come in as well, with teespring paying out on the 11th, Patreon on the 12th, and AdSense on the 21st. I still have not received a dime from Amazon.
Just posting because I am following along here. Thank you for being transparent with the metrics. I'll return with some questions later for sure.
One comment that caught my eye on page one was the 6:1 ratio of work:length of video. Can you elaborate on your process and the time taken at each step? What softwares are you using? How much video are you capturing compared to what is published?
I can nerd out on this all day, each question you answer will generate 2 more from me, so beware :)
In reply to ProDarwin :
I can tell you the 6:1 ratio doesn't apply to our live videos. That's usually just slapping on a bumper and an overlay with the host name. It's probably closer to 1.2:1 unless there's a problem with the recording that needs to be fixed. We do shoot with two cameras so we have a backup in case of a glitch and because it makes it easier to do 4k.
If we're doing an installation video, it's probably a much worse ratio than 6:1. Our "Project Ron" build series was a major undertaking. They've been viewed a lot more, but enough to justify the effort?
We've started monetizing our videos on the FM channel, mostly because it gives us more control over things like ad placement and allows us to link to the products in our videos (important when you're actually an ecommerce site and not a professional content creator). Looks like we've made $52 in the past week with about 19k views and 2.2k hours of view time - and that's with the Project Ron videos demonetized thanks to some backing tracks that weren't chosen with monetization in mind.
Of our top 10 videos over the past week, only one (number 10) was an edited install video. All the others were shot live.
ProDarwin said:One comment that caught my eye on page one was the 6:1 ratio of work:length of video. Can you elaborate on your process and the time taken at each step? What softwares are you using? How much video are you capturing compared to what is published?
I can nerd out on this all day, each question you answer will generate 2 more from me, so beware :)
I welcome the questions! They help me make realizations as well. The 6-to-1 ratio is pretty consistent on my 10 minute to 20 minute videos. (Not including the time I took to do the actual building/painting I talk about on the video) Basically, from the time I set up the shot to when the video is ready to watch (not including upload time, but including editing, tagging, etc) is roughly an hour for a 10 minute video and 2 hours for a 20 minute video. Shorts take way less time (no editing, no real upload work, etc) and longer format videos top out that 2 hour working time and then add time on actual shooting. Re-shoots happen sometimes with bad lighting or focus, or if I really flub what I'm saying (usually repeating myself or getting two concepts mixed up). The painting videos where I have to shoot over multiple days are the hardest because I forget what I talked about already.
So the hour you spend making a 10 minute video ready for prime time... what does that entail? I guess what is the editing/tagging/etc. process like? What softwares do you use?
ProDarwin said:So the hour you spend making a 10 minute video ready for prime time... what does that entail? I guess what is the editing/tagging/etc. process like? What softwares do you use?
For my Warhammer channel I film exclusively on my phone (Galaxy S22 Plus) and use the Studio editing software. There's about 10 minutes setting up the shots and preparing to film, about 20 minutes to shoot (including changing camera angles, retakes, and testing), 15 minutes to edit, 10 minutes to upload (not including the actual upload time, this is literally naming the video, writing the description, tagging, and merch links, cards, end screens, etc), and 5 minutes of post upload work (changing status to monetized, sharing link). These are all rough, back of the napkin numbers. The "easier" the video, the less time it takes (single subject, single shot angle), and the more complicated the longer. Editing is the biggest time sink, especially on large and involved projects.
On the car channel, I film with a Yi! 4K camera and a pair of GoPro 1's and edit on my PC using DaVinci Resolve. There's a ton more work into those with splicing the on-car footage, and the editing is intense. I do not enjoy the editing part.
Javelin said:I film exclusively on my phone (Galaxy S22 Plus) and use the Studio editing software.
Definitely was not expecting that! I'm still old school enough that I don't view phones as creative tools (aside from raw camera capture).
I've used Davinci Resolve before. If doing videos daily, its probably awesome. But for a once in a while thing, the UX is not the most friendly. Many other editors seem to be nothing more than splicing clips together (cant add overlays, etc.) so I was wondering if you found a middle ground solution.
We use phones for cameras for our channel as well, partly because they can stream the live setup easily and you can move them around without much trouble. FauxPros are used for on-car stuff.
Our post work is done in Adobe Premiere.
For car related stuff I used a myriad of used go and fauxpro's I've picked up. I use Adobe Premiere for post production for both car and gaming content.
Gaming is recorded with OBS and can be either 'easy' playthroughs (just play, record, talk about the game) with minimal editing required (intro, outro, saved in a format that is YT friendly to reduce upload time), or it can be complex requiring multiple cuts and things spliced together with music added and extra footage added from in game camera recording mods and the editing can take as long as recording the content. I haven't edited a video since about August now when I finished my last playthrough, mostly due to time.
ProDarwin said:Javelin said:I film exclusively on my phone (Galaxy S22 Plus) and use the Studio editing software.
Definitely was not expecting that! I'm still old school enough that I don't view phones as creative tools (aside from raw camera capture).
I've used Davinci Resolve before. If doing videos daily, its probably awesome. But for a once in a while thing, the UX is not the most friendly. Many other editors seem to be nothing more than splicing clips together (cant add overlays, etc.) so I was wondering if you found a middle ground solution.
The new Studio app on Samsung phones is ridiculously good. I can edit lengths, splice, put in transitions, sticker overlays, text, individual clip sound levels, etc.
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