• Moderators, please send me a PM if you are unable to access mod permissions. Thanks, Habsy.

OT: American Politics

christino-football.gif
 
MindzEye said:
Eh, I want to see more information on earnings here, what people consider "full time" to be, etc. It's really easy to get monetized on youtube and it pays a surprising amount (depending on your niche). RPM's are typically in the 3-20 dollar range depending on how ad friendly your content is. Even on that low end for something like political content (which pays dick most of the time, one of the lower paying niches), if you're a smallish channel with say 50K subs you're probably getting 100-200K views over the life of the video (and this is lowballing, the content is kind of evergreen...at least some of it is). So say 100K views per video at $3.00 USD RPM and you've made $300 USD per video over it's lifetime. Release 5 videos a week (it's politics, there's a ton of content, controversy, etc) and you're at $1500 a week (eventually). Growing the channel out doesn't look like this obviously, but once it's even gotten to that level it's a solid full time job, and that's only one platform. That's not including other monetizable platforms or appearances, not including Patreon.

Basically, the influencer economy isn't really a bubble. It's just taken all of the eyeball money that used to only go to the big content producing corporations who owned the distribution mediums, and it's been spread out for anyone that makes good enough content to draw some attention.
Click to expand...

Yeah, not sure what he meant by “bubble” - that’s not a bubble. Agree that we’d want to see earnings - might be top heavy? Some people might be using it to supplement income? Dunno.

I think the more interesting issue is that these people are generating income with dependencies on private ISPs and social media platforms. So distributors are there lurking and there could always be challenges caused by legal or tech changes (net neutrality?)
 
I think the numbers above overrate how to get that many views. And politics channels probably pay less than average.
Like a semi-political channel like CityNerd has 300k subscribers, but his latest videos are in the 125k-200k range, and he only gets that by posting once a week. Mr Beat has over 1m subscribers but most of his content is less than 100k views. Plain Bagel has almost 1m subs and again pulls on 100-200k per video. Those aren't channels that will get casual viewers tuning in, most people don't casually browse YouTube and be like "ooh an explainer on voting systems".

With patreon and other sponsored ads I'm sure some of them get up a little higher. But even those channels are probably only really able to run that way because every now and then they get a video that hits it big and spikes to 600k or 1m views. And they're probably the exceptions in the ecosystem too since they have stuck around for years.

Whether it's a bubble, it's hard to say. The barrier to entry is pretty low (anyone can start using their phone camera). It's probably not much of a bubble since there's always people failing out, and always eyeballs on the screen. The bigger question is how many of those "full-time" influences are basically running dry on their savings trying to be full-time and will have to quit when their savings run out. But there's probably always someone else who thinks they can be the next big thing and will jump on.
 
LeafGm said:
I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it’s a coordinated red herring to distract from the John Kelly/Hitler stuff. Or how he keeps spouting off publicly about how he’s going to go after “the enemy within”.
Click to expand...

Some of it is the "OMG there's something terrible coming", so when it drops that he like only mildly groped some under-age girl at an event, people are going to be like "OH I thought it was going to be so much worse" and dismiss it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top