#my youtube revenue doesn't even pay out most months

[welcometohellfilm]

Hi! I loved W2H2 part 1 - I wanted to ask if there's a timeframe planned for the next part? Are you looking for additional guest animators?

Sometime next year hopefully! And I'm definitely open to guest animators/clean-up artists! But I also can't really afford to compensate a professional, reasonable wage. So far, any help I've had has been people offering to work pro bono, which is incredibly generous and I'm grateful for that, but I can't reasonably in good conscience ask people to help out for free. I am willing to work out some sort of payment, but it's... just... gonna' be embarrassing, y'know? I absolutely can't pay anyone what they're worth. BUT! If that's not an issue for people, it's a discussion I'm willing to have! If you (or anyone else) wants to guest animate some shots, send me a reel or some of your work and we can talk about it!

[beatrice-otter]

There is FINALLY a women's hockey league that pays its players a living wage. There's been women's hockey before; the National Women's Hockey League was founded in 2015, later becoming the Premier Hockey Foundation. They got bought out in 2023 and rebranded as the Professional Women's Hockey League. Unlike its predecessor leagues, PWHL players should not need to work second jobs to have an income to live on in addition to playing hockey; the PWHL has minimum salaries. All players must make a base pay of at LEAST $35k, which is crap but at least it's crap you could theoretically live on. But most of the players are going to earn more than that, because there is also a team average minimum. The salaries for the whole team combined have to average out to at least $55k, and the top six have to each make at least $80k. But these are base pay rates; they also get a housing stipend ($1500/month) on top of that and a "daily meal allowance" when traveling, and all of these rates are contractually obligated to increase each year (3%). It's still peanuts compared to men's hockey, of course, but it's something you could make a living at, at least. And when you add in the housing stipend, a full-time player is actually making a minimum of $53k/year.*

Anyway! The first PWHL game took place on January 1, 2024, and you can watch the games on the PWHL Youtube page. I hope they do well, because female athletes should be treated (and PAID) better and while "a living wage" might seem a low bar it is still one that women's leagues too often fail to clear. So far, they seem to be doing okay; the January 5th game (Minnesota vs. Montreal) SMASHED the previous record attendance at a women's hockey game. 13k people attended; the previous record worldwide was a game with 8k attendees in Sweden. The North American record was 6k, so this is double that.

The thing that interests me is that they are CLEARLY not branding the teams, they are branding and repping THE LEAGUE. None of the teams have a name other than the city they're from; none of them have a logo of their own, just the PWHL logo; the uniforms are pretty identical, just different colors. (each city name printed diagonally down the front.) I read an article that the teams are expected to each rebrand themselves next year, but I'm still surprised that they're not trying to build up any kind of team loyalty from the start, just league loyalty.

The closest I get to being a hockey fan is occasionally reading hockey RPF (there are a TON of great writers in that fandom, if you've never checked it out before). But I support women's sports, and with games being on Youtube it will be pretty easy to just stream it on my TV (muted) while I go about my evening. I know it doesn't ad up to much in ad revenue, but it's something that costs me nothing. (And it's not like I'd be going to a game in person even if I lived in one of the six cities that has a team.)

*If you're wondering "why do they pay base salary + housing allowance instead of just saying what the whole salary is up front" I'm guessing there are tax incentives to do it that way. It might be either tax deductible for the team or untaxed for the player, or both.

[blazehedgehog]

Roughly how many hours do you spend working on your major videos? Have you ever tried to figure out what sort of hourly wages you earn when you divide your YouTube and Patreon revenue by time spent working on content? I get the feeling that it's becoming increasingly difficult to make videos for a living, but I don't have any hard numbers to support that suspicion because creators tend to keep that info close to their chest (for good reason)

It's not really something I can easily measure. This isn't like I'm traveling to an office, clock in, focus on work for four hours, take a 30 minute break, work for four more hours, and then go home.

I try to do that, certainly, but there are also a lot of days where I get distracted for hours at a time with something on twitter, or discord, or whatever. Depending on the job, that could happen at real work, too, but not as much.

Like, when I worked at the thrift store back in Colorado, they actually patted me on the back for being one of the few people they had who took it seriously. Sure, I often took long lunches (45+ minutes) but they didn't seem to care and they were very happy with my work ethic outside of that.

Being your own boss is very difficult and unfortunately I am in a place where my work space is the same space where I do everything else -- I eat here, I sleep here, I relax here, and it can be hard to shift gears between different modes.

So I can't accurately tally up how much work I do in a given day because some days I work for what feels like 14 hours and some days it feels like I only work for a few minutes. Most of that depends on the stage of production -- script writing seems to be the slowest grind these days. Capturing footage goes the fastest. Cutting the final product together is where the longest, most intense hours come in.

I do, however, routinely think about "hourly wages" when it comes to Twitch, because they print "here's how long you streamed vs. how much you earned" in pretty black and white terms. Hopefully I don't sabotage anything by saying this (I know Youtube Networks don't like you sharing earnings analytics), but the two Twitch streams I did for Halloween, I streamed just under 6 hours and made about $9. That's, like, what, $1.50 an hour? Not great.

(But it was also totally impromptu, super low key, and in the middle of the night. More "for fun." I didn't even break 10 viewers for most of it.)

I will say, though, bare minimum, this has been one of the more profitable years for me on Youtube. But I need to do better.

Which natureally leads me to wonder what the purpose of this ask is.

As my Patreon has grown over the last couple months, and I've declared I'm finally making enough from it to cover my food groceries, I've had people ask how that's possible because I'd need more money for rent and things like that. Which is true! I cannot cover rent yet. I pay what I can when I can to my brother for the room I am staying in currently and I keep my fingers crossed that the hammer doesn't drop.

I have sat around and had a lot of panic attacks whether or not I can make this work. Doubts and questioning whether I can get things up high enough fast enough to make a dent in... I dunno, life, I guess. I don't need people drilling me about it, because I'm already drilling myself every second of every day.

For now, as long as the number keeps going up instead of down, I am going to close my eyes and pray for the best.

(Further reading beyond this point becomes very serious and heavy.)

To some extent, this is what my Mom wanted. When she went in to the hospital last year and her leg mysteriously broke, she came here to live at my brother's. Same room I'm in now. And I had this sense that even if she recovered, she may never drive again, she may never walk again, so by the end of that second or third week we sat down and had a loooong talk, because it was clear that no matter what else happened, there was about to be a shift in the dynamic.

So we cleared the air. There was a lot of crying. Up to that point, she had still acted like The Mom. She did the cooking, she did (some of) the cleaning, she managed all the finances, she was the head of the household. I'd offer to cook dinner and she'd either refuse, or only let me cook for myself only. Like, there would be times where she'd be full on asleep on the couch or whatever, and if she heard me trying to cook, she'd get up and try to shoo me out of the kitchen so she could fix dinner for us.

But after her leg broke, she was traumatized. She'd been suffering from very bad sciatica (back pain) for a long time, and every time she'd go to the hospital, they would brush her off and push her out the door. The circumstances in which her leg broke were horrible. She told us time and time again she begged them to go easy on her because her leg hurt before it broke, likely due to weak bones. After it broke, they refused to believe her. I think she said they left her laying in bed in the worst pain of her life for hours because they didn't think her femur actually broke. I actually saw her during this time and she was writhing in her hospital bed, barely coherent. It was awful.

That hurt her mentally as much as physically. My strong, independent, "I'll do it MYSELF" mother was suddenly frail and timid and prone to crying over something as small as me forgetting to make her a cup of coffee.

So even though it was a months and months and months before we knew she was actually just dying of cancer, I knew we had to sort things out and shift the balance of power. Even if she made a recovery, nothing would ever be the same again.

And when I brought up the prospect of taking Youtube more seriously, she was all for it. She said that "I always told everybody you were going to be famous some day."

My impostor syndrome never really rationalized that. In that moment, and especially now in retrospect, I believed her, but prior to that moment, all the praise she had given me over the years smashed in to a brick wall and ceased to exist. But it was her, when I'd have my one video a year take off, tell me about the "serious money" I could be making if I applied myself (which I never did, because she was my safety net and my comfort zone.)

And then I think about all the times she tried to tell me how smart I was, and about how, when I was 14 years old, there was some manager from IBM that "wanted to talk to me" because I had made a game in Clickteam Fusion over a weekend to sell at a craft fair she was attending.

Or how she'd push me to give out business cards to people who would compliment me on my Redbubble shirt designs when I'd wear them out in public. She always wanted me to hustle and I never had the drive or the energy for that.

I am trying to summon the energy up for that now. And it's hard, but at least I'm trying. Am I trying hard enough? Shit, I don't know. Maybe ask all the sleep I've lost in the last three months. I used to be the kind of guy who would zonk out and fall asleep within two minutes of my head touching the pillow, but now I routinely lay in bed for close to an hour, wondering and worrying if I can make this work.

As long as the number keeps going up instead of down, I am going to close my eyes and pray for the best.

I would like to end this saying that I'm pretty sure you aren't actually drilling me or anything like that. Honestly, no need to apologize. I always expect the worst from these asks and nobody is ever really that mean, outside of like... what probably amounts to one guy.

You're fine. And hopefully I'll be fine.

[artfulimpersonator]

this goes out to every arfulimpersonator fan that doesn't want to see kw and his pets starve. youtube ads have not been making any youtuber as much money as they were use to. without ads these youtubers we all love will be forced to stop making videos. so please click on the ads for artfulimpersonator so they can make enough money to live and make more cosplay stuff for us. - a very worried fan

You are correct about this. Ad clicks are honestly the only way most YouTubers can make enough money to keep making new videos. I am not sure what has been going on with YouTube revenue lately, but I have heard from even extremely high income YouTubers confess that they are not making near enough money to keep YouTube as their full-time jobs anymore. I have never made enough to keep it as much anything more than a hobby, that helps pay for itself and my pet’s food. Thank you for the concern. I am trying my best to keep on making videos, because I do enjoy making them. But it has been difficult sometimes, because last month I only had $30 worth of food to last me and my pets that month. This month I just bought $16 worth of food, because my pets come first and their food went up in price. I have been fine though and my pets are doing amazing. I couldn’t be more thankful for what I have, because I know I am blessed and it could always be much worse. I love you all so much and will be continuing all of my efforts to be there for you all and keep making fun videos. I am also out of school now, so a higher paying job is on its way. My life is not perfect, but it is a blessing and I am thankful to share my blessings with others.