The amount of advertising Revenue YouTube generates per year is staggering.... $19 billion in 2020, and se to be considerably more in 2021, thanks to Covid-19 meaning more people have been online watching YouTube vids during lockdowns.
If that 2020 ad revenue was shared equally among the 6 million creators who qualify for YouTube's Partner Programme then each creator would have received around $1700 a year, after YouTube took its 45% cut.
On the face of it that looks like a decent result for 'little guy' - $1700 a year for making videos is a NICE side income, but, as you might expect, that ad revenue is not shared equally, most of it gets sucked upwards to the 'Dinosaur' accounts with over 1 million subscribers.
None the less, there are hundreds of thousands of YouTubers earning a decent income through YouTube, doing what they love, and maybe a million more earning a decent second income.
And to be honest, garish though YouTube is this Platform does offer an opportunity for ordinary people to make a living or 'make it big' through making content about whatever it is that floats their boat - from pure lifestyle videos, to educational videos, from crafts to gaming, albeit with that content being 'tweaked' to fit the market - but that's markets, we all have to adapt to those to survive.
What are your chances of earning $10 000, $50 000, or a $100 000 a year on YouTube?
This is a tough question to answer - I made an attempt here, but treat it with a pinch of salt as YouTube black boxes the averages.
In the absence of this (public interest) data we are left with private companies and individuals having to do interviews to find out - Business Insider does this and reveals that it's possible to make a decent supplementary income even with a few thousand subscribers, but the 'living wage' doesn't come into affect until you're up to tends of thousands.
But earnings aren't as simple as subscribers. Your chances at making a decent amount of money depend on the niche area your producing content for (gaming, lifestyle, crafts?), your competition, the fickle audience and of course the quality of the videos (ONE viral video out of one hundred could make you thousands a year), and the amount of ads your viewers click through to!
All of these variables mean that for MOST content creators income is likely to be variable, especially with new competition coming in every day, and so IF 'making money from YouTube' is your sole goal, this is probably the fools way to go, given the black-box nature of who earns what.
The problem for Newbies is Saturation by older accounts
There is something of an early adopter advantage which older YouTubers have, not to mention celebrities on YouTube - so many views go towards them, possibly because they can use a portion of their earnings to keep their search rankings up (paid, of course, to Google).
And most things you might want to do with a new channel have already been done, are being done, professionally by established YouTubers - fitness, make-up, stunts, travel, hell, even just 'lifestyle videos'.
Of course there are new and niche ways of innovating, and some people will invent these, which I guess is one of the ways of using YouTube to make a living going forwards.
The problem with YouTube is that you don't see the casualties....
I think that for everyone that makes it, every Josh Logan, there must be a thousand aspirants who started out trying to be a YouTuber and just gave up, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of dead channels that are now dormant, failed testimony to the fact that there simply isn't scope for all of us to make it big, despite our best efforts.
But of course, you don't see these channels, they're not going to show up in searches, and many would have been taken down by the people who failed to gain any traction with their attempts to be YouTubers.
Instead YouTube shows us primarily the successful, that's what it does, that's what it is designed to do.
NB - Even the successful sometimes lament it, such as in this video.... Burnt out at 19 in which the content creator bemoans having everything she wants, but still being miserable...
YouTube - probably best used as PART of a broader business
While I think your chances of making money purely out of YouTube just by making lifestyle videos are limited, YouTube could be very effective as part of a wider business plan - this woman who makes candles and sells them is a great example (and actually she does OK out of ad revenue too)
I can see this working for anyone selling crafts or services such as fitness lessons, independent education, and many other things.
ALTHOUGH - Erica (above) does have the PERFECT look for her business and YouTube - she's attractive in a homely and slightly nerdy kind of way, if there was a line up and you had to pick the candle maker, you'd spot her immediately.
But I'm not going to hold someone's looks against them, Erica is still a great example of how to use YouTube the right way - use it to amplify your already existing business and enjoy the additional earnings on top, just don't rely on them!
But relying purely on YouTube ads is going to remain a pipe-dream for most users on the platform.
Final thoughts
YouTube doesn't have to show us the distribution of earnings, but I think it would be in the public interest for this particular company to do so - anonymise the names and give us the big-data - show us what the actual chances are for DIFFERENT kinds of topic-channels being able to earn what kind of money, and how this breaks down.
There are hundreds of millions of children who want to be YouTubers, at least this data would be a move towards letting them make an informed choice before they start blindly vologging themselves to death.