YouTube revenue and recent good ones

There's an interesting trend in YouTube land lately, which is prominent creators talking about how little they make from YouTube/Google itself, instead needing brand deals to advertise a product inside their videos to truly make a living.

For high-end channels that put out weekly videos, they often have a team of 4-5 people behind the scenes, shooting video and editing it all and getting everyone paid but it doesn't make sense based solely on YouTube/Google's ad income. Instead, they take a break into the middle of their video to talk about SquareSpace or BetterHealth, and the creators I follow admit they get $5k-$30k for those ads, while the same video might only make a few hundred bucks from YouTube. When I hear this, I'm both shocked at how high the ad rates are for an embedded ad read but also how little YouTube/Google pays their creators.

This post from a cookbook author who ran a cooking channel for several years shares comprehensive accounting on her real production costs and her actual Google ad revenue. It's a little bombastic since she claims she "loses" $10k a month (until she reveals the brand deals cover those costs), but her story is similar to one I've heard dozens of times before, which is: if you create videos on YouTube with the production level of a network TV show, you'll never be able to pay for it with views from YouTube ads.

I don't know what YouTube is going to do about this, because the amount of people that rise to this level is a minuscule amount of their total uploading population, but on the other hand, those network TV-quality shows are what draw most people like me to watch YouTube day in and day out. But it's interesting that the environment YouTube created isn't self-sustaining at the high end. Unless you're Casey Neistat doing literally every single thing yourself, you can't pay for all the hours required to produce videos by a team.

The one thing I will note is that the cookbook author reveals Google keeps 2/3rds of total ad income, giving creators one third of what comes in. That seems ridiculously high and something YouTube should adjust to better support their creators.

Good recent YouTube videos

This Bob's Burgers parody is amazing, the voices and jokes are scary accurate to the wonderful show I love.

I recently finished the second season of Andor (and jumped right into a Rogue One rewatch) and the whole series was utterly fantastic about how it tackled big subjects and felt like an adult show about something I always thought of as kind of silly as a kid. Anyway, amidst all the recaps and wrap-ups I watched on YouTube after I finished, I loved Stephen Colbert talking to the director/writer Tony Gilroy and actor Diego Luna for an hour about the second season. It's fun, funny as hell, and loaded with insights about how Gilroy approached the project.

Another fun one: Will Forte in a business meeting sketch where he has no idea what the script is and has to improvise while everyone else drives the scene. It's funny, but when you realize no one is swearing and people get nervous when someone makes a joke about divorce, you suddenly realize this is a Mormon comedy show that's apparently popular in Utah. Still, great comedy often comes from restraints and I'm even more impressed with Will Forte's chops knowing he can't touch any controversial subjects to get a laugh. He really threads the needle here.

I caught this Kickstarter project making a splash but I'd never heard of a UV printer and didn't realize what was possible with it until I watched this about it.

It's pretty remarkable, as UV kind of combines 3D printing with inkjet printing, but it also works on almost any surface and this really feels like a major shift in desktop production. If you're an artist of any kind, I would strongly suggest you spend 30min watching this to see how it works because I could easily see Etsy stores exploding with cool custom stuff thanks to printers like this new UV one.

Philips in the Czech Republic gives away 3D printer files for replacement parts, so you can keep using their products instead of throwing them away to get a new one because you lost one of the adapters. This would never happen in the US, but I really loved seeing a big global company take on a good project like this.

This Dyson new kitchen vacuum demo is so simple and spartan and reminds me of the old days of Steve Jobs doing simple live demos on stage 30 years ago. It's such a refreshing break from the overly scripted demos that film on location with perfect lighting and sound. It's just an old guy showing off his latest invention that looks like a pretty promising product.