How Much Money My Creativity Earned in 2020 [S4E04]

In this companion episode to S4E03, I wanted to break down the highs and lows of revenue from my YouTube channel in 2020. All in all, there are currently ten revenue streams, so this episode covers the why's and how's behind each one, along with how much each stream earned at its highest and it's lowest. 

I can't emphasize enough that this is not a boast- I just think it's helpful to have some sort of reference of what's possible in terms of earnings for someone in my current position. And of course, I never intended to earn any money form my YouTube channel when I originally started it, and I think that beginning a creative endeavor purely for the sake of earning money is almost a guaranteed way to fail. But that's just me. 

If you think this is helpful, I'd be happy to follow it up with an expense breakdown too. Yay finances! 

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S4E04 | Series Episode 67

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hello and welcome. My name is Tom. This is the Enthusiasm Project Season Four, Episode Four, and today we're gonna kind of pick up where we left off last week. Pick up because the song is is a ska song now. Pick it up. Anyway, last week, if you haven't listened to that episode, I actually will encourage you to listen to it. It doesn't really matter if it's before or after this one, but this is a nice companion to it. I know it's not the most um creatively we're not talking about creative philosophies, creative principles, you know, your motivation and that kind of stuff. It's very much more nuts and bolts financial stuff about a creative endeavor. But if you didn't hear last week, I went through the whole process of how my wife Heather and I started our LLC and how I've spent the past year since then sort of setting up my channel to be able to handle revenue, you know, setting up bank accounts, organizing all that stuff, uh handling taxes, savings, just those sorts of things where basically if you have a creative invent endeavor that is generating more than $600 a year in revenue, you should probably be aware of. And even if you if you don't have plans to take it really big or scale or anything, it's a good idea to have that foundation in place. And you never know what will happen in the future. And so if you have these things there, you're just gonna be protecting yourself and putting yourself in a good position for whatever the future may bring, which hopefully is all you know good things. Uh, and in that episode last week, I asked, I was very unsure if I thought that it was gonna be helpful or obnoxious or anything like that. Because sometimes when people talk about money and revenue, especially with you know YouTube and online creative stuff, it can quickly veer towards the obnoxious side of things. But I got more positive feedback than I think I've ever gotten for an episode for that. So thank you to everybody who sent messages and feedback, and it sounds like it was very helpful for quite a few people. And uh, I also got feedback that today's episode would be helpful as well, which is essentially just a revenue breakdown for 2020 for me. And I think that putting this info out there is helpful. I'm sure if you've spent any time at all on YouTube, especially at the end of the year, somewhere in if not your subscription feed, in your recommendation feed, there's gonna be a video where somebody's like, This is how much YouTube paid me, and the thumbnail probably has them looking shocked and the numbers like kind of blurred out on their screenshot or something. And sometimes those can be helpful, sometimes those can be sensational, but I wanted to just sort of break down where I'm at in terms of channel growth. Right now, all the revenue, well, actually almost all the revenue is coming from the YouTube channel, or at least through the YouTube channel, and nothing is coming from from podcasts. I've never monetized the podcast, but the the ways of doing so wouldn't be necessarily entirely different. Uh, just the numbers would be different because podcast numbers tend to be significantly lower than YouTube numbers. But just to give you a frame of reference, um when I started my YouTube channel in 2017, I had no intention of monetizing. I I expected to view it as a hobby, you know, like I ride bikes also. I ride a bike because I don't have multiple bikes. And I that's just a hobby, you know. So if I spend money on the bike and spend money on the wheels and money on a little bike computer or whatever, I'm not trying to go, oh my gosh, how am I gonna make this money back? How is this gonna generate revenue for me? It's just sort of like this is my hobby. I'm gonna put money into it. Same with music, instruments, stuff like that. And that's pretty much how I viewed YouTube. This was a passion project on the side that I wanted to put money into, and that was that was okay. So if I needed to spend money on a website or I needed to buy a subscription for music or whatever, I was happy to do it because the costs weren't super high, and it just sort of, you know, was kind of par for the course. I had no intention of making that money back, and it wasn't until um 2018, so maybe like nine months after I started my channel, that I started doing Amazon affiliate links, which kind of happened organically, and I'll explain that when we jump into it. I've talked about it before, and that was where I first started generating revenue. I didn't, even though my channel became eligible for ads in, I guess it would have been the summer of 2018, I didn't put ads on the channel until January of 2020. So I held off on that until uh ad revenue would be what I called a life-changing amount of money, which is which isn't as uh it doesn't have to be as grand as that sounds, but I I knew that you know if I was gonna make a hundred thousand dollars a month on ad revenue, that's a very easy decision to make. Because I just hate ads and I don't want to put ads on videos and I don't like watching videos with ads. I just finally caved a while back and bought YouTube premiums so I don't have to watch videos or watch ads on videos. But I'm not I'm not a fan of ads, and you have no real say over what the ads are, if it's not, you know, an integrated sponsorship or anything. So I'm just not a fan of it. I didn't want to put it on my channel. So especially at that time, had I put ads on my channel, I would have been making like 80 bucks a month, which to me wasn't worth it at the time. I was more than happy to spend $80 on my YouTube hobby, you know, every month. And so yeah, $100,000 would be a very obvious yes, but $80 was an obvious no. And I kind of went back and forth to find, you know, $10,000 would be an obvious yes, $200, probably not. And for me, it was sort of somewhere around the like three to five hundred dollar range I would have considered life changing because that's that's bills, you know, that's um that's car payment, that's electrical bill, that's you know, that's savings stuff for the channel. That that's a decent, what I would consider life-changing chunk of money to come in every single month. And uh that's that really didn't happen until January of 2020. So uh that was when that kind of started. And then I started adding in, well, even prior to that, I guess in 2019 I started adding in more affiliate programs. And uh late 2020, I started adding in consulting. So now there are, let me count them. I have my little spreadsheet up here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten revenue streams currently uh from my channel that could that go into it. So it's not just one thing, and this is why I think it's so interesting, is because there are times as I as I spread out and added in more streams, what I noticed was sometimes a certain revenue source could go down. You know, like you like like to see the numbers go up, and January 2020 was my lowest month last year, and December was my highest earning month. So that you know, that makes sense as the channel's growing and the the earlier months would be lower than the higher ones. But there are individual streams where like one month would be the highest, the next month it would go down somewhat significantly, but because the other streams were there, the overall total of income for the month would actually be higher than the previous month. So that's where it really concretely showed me the value of having so many different streams was because if one kind of takes a hit, the others can sometimes make up for that. And this is, you know, if you if you know me and you've been listening, you you know that I'm very paranoid about things and security and savings and and stability and that kind of stuff. So when I'm looking at channel revenue, I'm thinking I'm very aware of the instability. And so to me, having so many sources helps provide a weird way of finding stability. So just to give you an idea, when I first started um monetizing in 2018 with Amazon affiliate links, that year I made $700. I started in like March, and then by the end of the year I'd earned $700. I bought a guitar. I bought my uh 50s surf green strat that had literally been in my uh wish list online for 11 years. So that was cool, and I was like, wow, like this is a guitar that I am playing because of money that like my YouTube channel earned. That's amazing. So that's that, and it was over 600 bucks, so I had to do you know a whole tax thing and stuff like that. So first year was $700 in 2019. The following year, my channel earned $6,000. So that's a pretty huge increase to go from $700 to $6,000. And then 2020, last year, my channel earned $50,133.38, which is a definitely an amount of money that's gonna get my attention. Um, and that's why I wanted to have the this conversation. Um, because I'll be honest, that's not as much as I make at my full-time job. My teaching job pays significantly more than that currently. But 11 years ago, when I started teaching, I started at $48,000 a year. So to me, where I was like, my YouTube channel last year generated over $2,000 more than I made my first year as a full-time contracted teacher with a degree, uh, master's degree, and a teaching credential. And uh that was sort of interesting to me. Now, of course, there's no health insurance or vacation or or any of that kind of stuff with the YouTube channel like there is with the teaching job, but that kind of shows me, hey, maybe there's if these trends continue into the future, this could be this could be a really uh this could be a viable thing, I guess. And I don't want the reason I'm having this this conversation here on the podcast versus on my YouTube channel is one, because I don't really do YouTube strategy videos. That's not why people come to my channel. Two, is because I don't want this to be a how to make money on YouTube thing. I don't want it to be like, wow, quick hacks to grow your channel. Because it's not that, but I want it to be informational. Like, how much can you really expect from this stuff? Or at least, like, if you're familiar with what I do, how much is he earning from this stuff? Again, knowing that I didn't start it for money. Um, and I think that's really crucial because if you're wanting to jump in and you're wanting to do these things specifically to earn money, it's gonna be such a ridiculous uphill battle. You know, you're gonna you're not gonna earn money. Like I said, I didn't monetize my channel for two and a half years. I guess I didn't wasn't eligible for the first year, so even a year and a half then after I monetized, I I didn't, or after I was eligible to monetize, I didn't actually monetize because it wouldn't have been worth it. And even when I did my first month of 2020 with um AdSense monetization, I earned $127. So, you know, yeah, I'm not gonna be uh quitting the day job with my $127 YouTube paycheck. So let's oh no, actually, I lied. That was uh I I guess they gave me money from December of 2019 because things are kind of delayed a month. So that was $9, actually, was my first uh AdSense paycheck. So anyway, what I want to emphasize before we dive into this is that this is not a how-to guide, and I'm not a financial advisor. And this is definitely not a boastful thing, even though I'm excited to see the channel grow and to see like a little bit of strategy and effort pay off in a bunch of different ways. Um and it's it's also, you know, obviously there's no guarantee on results, even if you do exactly the things I do. It doesn't mean the numbers are going to be exactly the same because there's an infinite number of variables that can change things up. Like Amazon affiliates is a really good example. For some reason, I think that I do really well with Amazon affiliates. That's usually my biggest revenue source. Um, and I've heard other people, not just with similar size channels, but sometimes with significantly larger channels, making significantly less through Amazon. So I don't know. Well, I don't know what what the deal is with that. But um, so you know, just because you join it doesn't mean your revenue, your income will be the same. Um, so what I'm gonna do is go through each of these sources. I'll explain a little bit about it and how it works for my channel, and then I'll also tell you the highest amount I made last year and the smallest amount I made last year and and when that happened. So uh I hope that's helpful. And that's really the only reason that I wanted to do this is because you can kind of see through this why it was so necessary to go through the steps we talked about last week of forming the LLC and the bank account and all of that. So we'll just we'll just dive in, I guess, right now. Um going through it's really in no particular order, but Amazon is the first one. I just have a Google Sheet that I kind of keep track of things in. It's nothing fancy at all, because I'm not a professional accountant uh at all. So Amazon affiliates, uh, let me explain how that works if you don't know and and why and when I started using it. So Amazon affiliates, if somebody clicks on an affiliate link in your video description, it will take them to Amazon. They can buy whatever they want, and then you get a percentage of the sale. They don't even have to buy the thing that you're linking to. So if I'm linking to a camera like the EOSR, and they click that link, they see and they're like, eh, I'm not interested in that, or it's too expensive, and they go and buy something else. I don't know, a record player, toilet paper, whatever, I'll still get a percentage of their sale. And I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe your tracking thingy is active for 24 hours. So anything they buy on Amazon uh within the next 24 hours will go, you'll get the commission from it. And the good thing about it is it doesn't affect them at all. It doesn't change prices, it doesn't change the products they see, it doesn't affect their shopping experience. It doesn't cost you anything. You're just basically getting commission because you referred someone to make a you referred someone to Amazon and eventually they bought something from Amazon. Amazon could not care less what it is that they actually bought. So that's pretty much how that works. And for me, it works organically because since my channel's pretty gear focused, there's usually something in every video that people are gonna want to link to. And that's where this started. So I want to emphasize the importance of the organicness of Amazon affiliate stuff because I will fairly regularly be accused of making videos just to push affiliate links, which I can promise you I've never ever done and would never do. But even in the early days of my channel, I would make a video and I know people are gonna want to know about the thing I'm talking about. So I'll put a link in the description. And I, as a viewer, always appreciate that because there's been lots of times where I'll find a video and I'll want to know about the thing the person's talking about, but there's no link. And so I'll have to go like on Amazon or BNH or wherever, and I'll try to try to like, is this the one? I'm like pausing a frame of the video and looking at the description and like trying to see is this the exact is this the same one there? And when they just link directly to the thing they're using, I appreciate that because I know it's gonna be the exact thing. I'm gonna get the right thing that I saw in the video. So that's what I did. And I was kind of like weirdly proud of like, it's not an affiliate link, it's just a regular link. So like you can tell I'm not trying to make money on this, which is oh weird, it's a very weird flex, but okay. And it was my Canon 16 to 35 F4 lens review video that I made in spring of 2018 that kind of turned the tables because I made this lens review, it's a thousand dollar lens. I just saved up and bought it. I hadn't I needed a wide angle lens, I hadn't bought a lens in years, and I bought that lens and made a video about it. And the video did really well. And even though the channel was under well under 100,000, or sorry, still well under 100,000, it was well under a thousand subscribers at that time. The video did well. And within the first two weeks, I had like five people who had said, Hey, I bought this lens because of you. Thank you for helping my decision. And when the fifth one of those comments came in, I was like, I've just sold $5,000 worth of Canon lenses. This seems interesting that people would make a buying decision based on my recommendation. And at the time, I think Amazon's like the camera lens commission was something like six to eight percent. It's like six to eight percent of five thousand. That's a decent amount. Like, if I if I had done nothing different except put in a different link, I would have had like why not do that? So that's when I realized, you know what? I'm gonna be putting in the affiliate links here. So you just go to Amazon. If you scroll down at the bottom, there's a little thing that says become an affiliate. You can click on that, you enter in your info, you can put in your tax stuff. If you've got your LLC up and running, that's where you put it as a payment source. And then basically, they have a link, like an affiliate link builder page where you can look up products and then you get the link, and that's what you use in your description. I use Genius links, so I don't use the direct link that Amazon gives, I use Genius. I'll explain that in a few minutes. Um, and then that's pretty much it. And you put the links in your description. You do need to make sure you have a disclaimer in your description that says these are Amazon affiliate links. You earn a commission. Um next to each one of mine, especially because I use Genius links, so it doesn't even say Amazon in the thing, in parentheses, I will put where it's from, which most of them are Amazon, and some of them are like Sweetwater or or other places, but I always put the actual retailer in parentheses next to the link, which looks ugly, but technically it is what you're supposed to do. And then in every video, I just have a video description, like a continuous document that I just paste in the description at the bottom that has all of my gear and stuff, because that's for me one of the most common questions I get constantly. What camera are you using? What lens are you using? What camera? What lens? And so I just sort of tried to answer those questions here. So my description has contact info, it has music affiliate links, and then it has video gear, which has my cameras and my lenses, it has audio gear. I kind of broke it up into sections. You can go to any one of my videos, click on the description, and see what I'm talking about. We've got lights, tripods, and bags, basically anything I think someone would have a question about or be interested in. I put in an affiliate link. It's kind of long, and I think that's what annoys people sometimes. But legitimately, these are the questions I'm getting asked a lot is about all this stuff, or sometimes it's questions I don't even people don't even know they have until they see it. When they go through the description and there's a link that says like motorized slider, and they're like, oh, that's how he does the those smooth shots. He uses a motorized slider. Which one does he use? Click. And so it can actually be helpful. It's not unlike if you were ever to be a student in one of my high school classes and I give an assignment prompt. In the prompt, I don't just tell you what to do, but I always try to address like every question. You know, if we're doing something like a mini documentary, I don't just say, hey, make a documentary about something, but I say, like, it needs to be this long, it should have this many interviews. This is how the graphics should be handled, this is where the music should come from. Like, try to answer just every single question that I know a student is gonna have. That's kind of what I do with my descriptions. So, in addition to, you know, those things will be in every video. Um, and in addition to that, if I make a video about a specific product, like I don't know, here's a road pod mic review. Obviously, there's gonna be a link to the pod mic. But if there's something else that I think people are going to ask questions about, I'm trying to anticipate their questions. Like, for example, I use these colorful XLR cables, and a lot of times when they show up in videos, people always ask, hey, what are those colorful cables? So I might put a link to that. If I use, you know, a certain boom arm, or usually it's like anything unusual that pops up on screen. I know like people will ask questions about it, or sometimes if the video's been out for a while and I notice I'm getting a lot of questions about something, I'll go back and add in the link because people are clearly interested in it, and that's why I like affiliate links because they're they're a win-win situation. The people can find the thing that they're looking for, and then I get a commission for it if they choose to buy it. But I don't have to spend time in the video talking about it. I don't have to do a one-minute ad read about my affiliate thing. I can just put in the link. I never have to mention it in the video, just the disclaimer in the description, and it's right there. So feel free to check out the video description. If you want to copy and paste any parts of mine, um, any of the disclaimers or the structure or the formatting or whatever, feel absolutely free to do that. Um, one thing I will point out, and this is something I think might lead to why I've had better luck with Amazon. I know we haven't even talked numbers yet. I promise not all of my explanations will be this long, but Amazon's like the biggest one. Um, one of the reasons I think I've had better luck with Amazon is because I don't try to be cute with my product descriptions. And I know that there's a lot of people who I think would be put off by writing like Sigma 24mm 1.4 lens because it sounds way too technical. So they're gonna put like my vlog lens, or you know, best camera ever, my big camera. My small camera, the big lens. And I get it. And I don't have any definitive quantitative evidence that this is not effective. But I know that generally my Amazon performance is higher than average for my channel size. And all I do is put the exact thing. So like I'm looking at says Canon EOS R. And then I did put main camera, Sigma 24 1.4 Art, main lens. And everything else is literally just Sony RX 100 Mark V, DJI Mavic Mini, GoPro Hero 7 Black, Rodecaster Pro, Rode Pod Mic, Video Mic NTG. Like it is just the product name. If there's something that's a little confusing, like nobody's gonna know what a Glide Glide Gear TMP100 is, so I put GlideGear teleprompter. You know, no one's gonna know what the what is it, the other one, the GlideGear OH 100, my overhead little rig thing. So I put overhead camera rig. So if it's something kind of obscure and strange, I'll put, you know, I'll I'll I'll maybe kind of translate what it is into the description, but I try as often as possible to put um to just put the product name in the description. I think that's I think that's really important. It seems to like add some clarity and it it just seems to work. So feel free to check that out. Anyway, jumping into Amazon. My lowest paying Amazon month of 2020 was January, which makes sense. Last January I earned drumroll please $507, which is pretty freaking great. I mean, I don't know where you're working right now, but if you could just get a $500 a month raise, that would be pretty cool, right? I have my little calculator here. What's $500 times 12? I know it's basic math, but uh I am not a math person. The six thousand dollars a year right there, just from just that. But where it gets better is my highest paying month for Amazon was December, of course, which by the way, December is usually the highest month because of the holidays and people are spending. So you will typically see numbers go up towards the end of the year and fall in the beginning of the year, sometimes the middle of the year, there's a lull too. But my December Amazon was $3,300.89. So $3,300 just from Amazon, which is more again, when I started teaching, my take-home pay was $2,800 a month of that $48,000 that I was making. So my Amazon by itself was $500 more than I made a month as a teacher. You know how much more work I had to do as a first-year English teacher to get that $2,800 than I had to do to paste some links and some video descriptions to get $3,300 from Amazon. So I'm a pretty big fan of that. I'm curious this year, so I'm trying to see how these trends continue. I don't have it's I'm recording this. I guess you'll be listening on February 1st. So happy February if you're listening the day this comes out. But I'm recording this on Saturday, the 30th, so I don't have all of my January 2021 numbers yet. But currently I can tell you my January Amazon is is already at 3400, so it's even higher than that, um, which is shocking to me because I expected it to go down because it's January, so um that's just that's a great number, and I'm very happy to see that. And just for a frame of reference, um, I didn't cross the $1,000 mark until April of last year, which was kind of crazy because in March I made $567, and in April I made $1,400. That was a huge jump. And then I went $1,400, uh, June was $1,100, July was $1,100, August was $1,200, September was $1,600, October was $2,300, November was $2,200, and December was $3,300, clearly because of the holidays. Also, just an important side note, most of the affiliate programs pay out a month behind. So like Amazon, um, or maybe sometimes even two months. So, you know, January, like I said, if I'm making $3,400 from Amazon, I'm not gonna get paid that in February. I'll probably won't, or maybe I will get in February. I probably won't even get it until March. So it's always like kind of delayed, which it could be kind of nice because you're like, oh, I had a really bad month on Amazon this month. Oh, but wait, I'm getting the great check from from two months ago. Amazing. Uh so anyway, those are my Amazon numbers for last year. The next one, uh, which is the second largest source, is Google AdSense. So ads on YouTube videos. Um, the least amount I made, I mentioned this earlier was January. That was $127. And the most, the highest I made in AdSense was November, which was $2,710.49. So started the year, the lowest of the year was $127, highest of the year was $2,700. That's a pretty dang big difference. Um, and I did have several videos do really well, like within the first couple of weeks or month or two, get like hundreds of thousands of views, and that made a difference for sure. Um, and then they kind of stopped. So in December, I made $2,300. So there was a $400 dip in ad revenue from November to December of 2020. Um, and that that was where I still that was where I was kind of worried because I was like, oh no, that number went down, and a couple other numbers went down in December as well. But December was still by far, spoiler alert, my most profitable month of the year. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But having despite the fact that I added ads to my video in videos in the beginning of the year, I didn't cross the $1,000 threshold until the summertime. So um in August I had $916, and in September I had $1,400, and then October $2,500. And also for full disclosure, now that those videos that popped off have uh you know died down, my current estimate for end of January is uh pretty much like even $2,000. So it's it's gone down since then, but I mean going back to what we were calling life-changing amounts of money, thousands of dollars? Are you kidding me? Like, and the thing with ads too is I only put skippable ads before and after the video because I don't like ads. Um and it was hard to it was hard to get to a point where I was comfortable doing that, but I don't put ads in the middle of the video and I don't put unskippable ads, both of which would pay more. So if I had mid-roll ads and I put unskippable ads at the start of my video, my ad revenue could increase, especially with mid-rolls. It could, it could potentially um my estimate is get close to two or three times the amount I'm bringing in right now because mid-roll ads pay so much more because it's you know the person's attention is already given to the video. I just hate them so much and I don't want to ad my video that I don't want to enable them. I can't imagine, unless there's like an emergency or something crazy, ever wanting to put a mid-roll ad on my video. I've seen a few people do it effectively, where like um, I think it was Bright Sun Films, which does like abandoned videos, but each video is like a little documentary, and he does like almost like act breaks, just like a TV show would. Like something ends and it's pacing and it fades out, then it goes to a mid-roll ad and then it comes back and starts it. So it feels natural. I I don't I can't do that, but I've seen people do it where it doesn't feel as like I'm watching this video about a camera lens, and now I'm getting screamed at about frosted flakes for five seconds, and now I'm back to camera lens, and you just feel like your brain exploded for a minute there. So, anyway, the more ads and the more aggressive ads you play, the more money you'll get, but I also am not interested in that because they're terrible. So just you know, it's up to you to decide what works for your channel and your audience. This is what what works for me personally. Uh, the next category is Artlist. So uh two years ago now, I made a video comparing Artlist and Epidemic Sound for royalty-free music. And I just made that video because I had both services, but and they're both great, but their licensing is totally different. And so I wanted to make a video that explained that. So I made that video. After I made the video, independently, Artlist and Epidemic reached out to me. Artlist was first, and they were like, hey, we really like this video. Do you want to join our affiliate program? Um, you know, if people use your link, they'll get two extra months. So you get 14 months. This sounds like a pitch now. You get 14 months for the price of 12, um, for you know, at no extra cost. And then you get uh, I think it's at the time it was $20 per person that signed up. So I said, sure, no problem, because lots of people, again, in the comments were like, I just chose, you know, whichever service based on your recommendation. And I was very clear that I use both. And then after that, Epidemic contacted me and they're like, hey, we see you have an Artlist link. Do you also want an epidemic link? And so I joined their affiliate program as well. So I have both of those going, and uh Epidemic was 30, and then Artlist late last year um boosted mine to 30 as well. Because Artlist has been pretty darn good for me. The uh the weird thing about Artlist, which isn't weird, they just pay out quarterly instead of monthly. So I track the the revenue every month, but you don't actually get your payment until you get paid every three months, uh, which is not great if you need the money, but it's wonderful because the paychecks are bigger because it's three months at a time. So, you know, that's kind of nice. Um, so just for a frame of reference, um in quarter my art list was pretty consistent last year. So quarter one of 2020, it was $1,900, quarter two, it jumped up to $3,100, quarter three, it jumped way up to $3,800, and quarter four, it jumped way down to $2,600. So there's a little bit of a roller coaster there. Um but yeah, and that's uh that's that's how that works. But the lowest amount, so that's sorry, that was the the paychecks last year, but the monthly amounts for Artlist, um February was my lowest month at $480, which actually let's see here, because that was 480 divided by 20. So it's 24 people signed up. Uh my highest paying month was August at $1,600. So what is $1,600? I was still doing 20 at the time. That was 80 people signed up. Dang, that's a lot of people signing up for Artlist. But Artlist is great, and also the people at Artlist are great, which makes me enjoy it very much. They're the they're the ones who are like so willing to sponsor videos on my channel, but I and they're willing to go with like every demand I have, but I just keep like getting too nervous and saying no. I think next time they ask, I might say yes, though, because they are pretty great. So lowest for art list was $480, highest was $1600. Um, but the again, that's per month. You don't get paid for every three months. Uh next is epidemic, it kind of works the same, except you do get paid monthly for epidemic. Um, for me though, it's it's not been anywhere near the numbers of Artlist. My lowest paying month for epidemic was February, same as Artlist, actually, and that was $90. So it was three people signed up. My highest paying month of 2020 for epidemic was July, and that was $680. So um well, how many people was that? It was a lot more than that was 22.6. I don't know, half a person signed up. Um that doesn't make sense to me. No, okay, I don't know. It was half a person signed up. I must have gotten oh no, oh, because my sponsored video that I did with epidemic in 2019, that was for their business account. And if people sign up for business, that's a higher commission. So I think a couple people signed up for the business thing. That makes sense why it's not such an even split. Um, but there you go. But this is why it's interesting too, though, because uh in talking with Peter Lindgren, who I have a podcast with, he's also a member of both affiliate programs, Artlist and Epidemic. And you know, if you make a lot of videos, eventually it just there's so many royalty-free music services. I'd be interested in trying in having others, but there's only so much I can manage. I really love Artlist Epidemic. Epidemic mainly for their catalog, it's huge and awesome. And Artlist for their licensing, which is perpetual and universal. So uh they have their they each have their strengths. But the reason I bring up Peter is because he has both programs, but his are totally flipped. Like his epidemic is through the roof and his art list is is much, much smaller. Whereas me, like art list is amazing and epidemic is much smaller. So that just shows we don't know why. We're doing the same things, you know, like we're making the putting the links in the same places, but people for whatever reason our audiences are leaning towards different things. So that's why it's important to know that even if you just do exactly what Tom tells you to do, uh, you're not gonna get you the numbers aren't guaranteed to be the same because it really does depend so many things on your individual channel, audience numbers, all that stuff. Um, the next category is sponsorships. So this is easy because the total number for the year is zero. Every month, it's just a big fat goose egg. I didn't do any sponsored content in 2020 at all. So that's an easy one. Uh there we go. Uh and that was a sponsorship would be um specifically a paid, like a paid ad read. You know, this video is sponsored by so-and-so, and they'll have given me money to to say that and to make that video. I didn't do any of that last year because it just didn't fit, and I just didn't want to, and I wasn't comfortable with it. Um, not that I never would, but if I do, it would be with a company that wants to go through that wants to follow the ethics statement and will allow me to do the ad in a way that's not, hey, let me just talk about this unrelated thing for two minutes of your time because I won't do that. So there we go. Uh so maybe I'll never see a sponsored thing. I don't know. Uh the next thing, so this is where things get a little interesting because those had been my my revenue sources for for a while, and then this point is kind of ones I started adding on later in the year. So the numbers are a little funkier because they weren't even there the whole year. Um, so in July, I started using Genius Link again on Peter's recommendation. And what Genius Link does, there's a lot of things that it can do. But the reason I wanted to use it was because since Amazon is such a a source of revenue for me, I was only using the US Amazon store, Amazon.com. But my audience isn't just in the US. That's where most people are, but there's also a lot of people in the UK and Germany, India, Australia, and you know, the rest of the world. Um, and each country has its own Amazon site, you know, like Amazon.co.uk or um, you know, every every country has a different URL for their Amazon. And each of those Amazons has its own affiliate program. So what that means is if somebody didn't essentially my affiliate links wouldn't work for someone who didn't live in the US. I think they would still go to their Amazon, but it did nothing for me. It counted as nothing. So what Genius Link does is it's it's smart, and when someone clicks on your link, it it figures out where they're at and it sends them to the right store. So if someone in the UK clicks a link, they'll go to the UK store if they buy something, then I'll get that payment. Um, and that's really cool. The downside to that was you have to individually set up your new Amazon affiliate counts for every country you want to you want to participate in. And you know, they serve like pretty much all the countries, so you don't want to do probably that many programs. I I think I do, I can't even remember because it was a took a while to set it all up, but I I know I do uh the UK, Canada, Germany, um Australia, Spain, and I'm probably missing one or two more, but that might that might even be it. I get a lot of viewers from India, but India uh doesn't let you sign up for their affiliate program currently unless you live in India. So I live in not India, so I can't sign up for their program, even though that's where a lot of viewers come from. And so the tricky part though, for me at least, I could not get any page translations to work. And so when I'm going through like French Amazon, it's all in French, and I'm trying to navigate it. Fortunately, it's like it's the same navigation tree and the same forms. So once you've done it in a few English sites, I was more easy, I was easily able to then figure out this is what they're asking here and put the right info in the right places. But it was a little tricky. And signing up, that again is just where I use like the LLC info that we started. All the money goes to the the business checking account for the LLC. And so once those are up and running, uh then you can go through Genius Link. So technically, my genius category is international Amazon revenue, but um but I just kind of batch it all together, is I just call it genius. Um and it gets a little more complicated too because genius does cost money, and it and the money's depending, depends on how many clicks you get. Um, and for me it ends up being about like $60 to $80 a month, which is like more than I would want to spend. Um, this is like more, I don't I don't have any bills that are sixty to eighty dollars a month that are not for like our house or the electricity or something like that, car insurance. Um, so it's to spend that much money on like this ancillary service seems insane, but it brings in more than that every month. So even if you take like here we go, uh altogether my highest grossing month of all the international Amazons through Genius Link was December. That was $960. So minus the $60 I had to pay to use Genius Link, that's $900 that I just wouldn't have gotten before because I wasn't part of those affiliate programs and had no way to direct those people there. That's just something to be aware of. Um, so that's that's important. And at the end of the month, it is kind of funny when I go, when I log into my international accounts and I have to and I want to get the numbers, like I don't want to wait until it's deposited a month or two later into my account. I want to know, okay, it's the end of, you know, it's usually the first of the month. I'll go through and look at the previous month on all these things. And you have to go to their sites, but it's in all the different currencies. Sometimes it's euros or pounds or francs or whatever, or do you even have that anymore? I don't know. Um, or Canadian money. And uh it's kind of then you have to like uh convert it. So I I kind of like it. Like it sounds like a hassle, but it's sort of fun to be like, wow, look at me. I'm doing international business and all this stuff. And of course, because you are doing business internationally, when when you sign up, they ask you that are you a US resident? Um, it's you know, it affects the tax forms they send you and stuff like that. So it's very important to fill that stuff out accurately. So that's everything through Genius. I do use Genius also to just be a link shortener sometimes when I want to shorten a link. And I like Genius for Amazon because they also will uh monitor when something goes wrong. So if a product goes out of stock or discontinued or a page gets taken down, it will alert you and you can change it. And you can change the link in your genius account, and then it will automatically redirect all the other links. So you don't have to go back to like hundreds of video descriptions, you can just do it all right there, which is pretty amazing. Um yeah, so that's that's pretty amazing. And then they do have a choice page, which I don't have enabled, but you might have seen. So that's when you click on someone's affiliate link, like say it is for a microphone or something, and instead of taking you directly somewhere, it'll take you to a page that lets you pick. Do you want to go to BNH? Do you want to go to Amazon? Do you want to go somewhere else? Um, and that's a cool thing if you have specific retailers you you like. I haven't set that up yet. Um, mainly because I do have a BNH affiliate account, but their back-end area where you have to like create your links is just so confusing. I like can't figure it out. And clearly other people can figure it out, so it's just me, but I I just don't like it, and Amazon's is so easy that I just I've just been sticking with Amazon. I know I'm probably leaving money on the table there, but that's a cool option that I'd probably explore. But anyway, like I said, December for all the international Amazons through Genius, $960 was my highest. My lowest was July, that was $204. That's actually the first month that I did it. So um be interested to see what it is actually at the end of January, because I don't know yet. Uh the next category, which I only had for November and December, that's when I opened up consultations, which we've talked about in previous episodes. Um, that was so it's kind of funny. November was my lowest month, and December was my highest month. There are only two months. Uh, but that's been cool. That's the one thing that's like not directly YouTube channel related, really. Um, and that is basically um people were sending me emails going like, hey, I want to pick your brain, I have questions about this. And I'm more than happy to answer. I mean, I'm more than happy to talk about gear and and all this stuff, but the number of messages just increased to a point where I couldn't I I couldn't spend 20 minutes replying to each one, that would be the whole day, you know? And so if it's a short, quick question, like, hey, you know, my roadcaster does this weird thing, how do I fix that? And I can just say, like, hey, I don't really like being tech support, but I can if it's an easy answer, I'll just say, Yeah, do this thing. Um, or if it's like a quick recommendation or something like that. If it's an in-depth question, because sometimes people will say, like, hey, can you send me an entire equipment list of what I need to set up a studio with prices and links and all that stuff? And I'm like, no, that's like a ton of work. I'm totally not gonna do that. And and other times, you know, people will ask like these really in-depth things, or they'll say, like, I do just want to meet up with you and pick your brain about something. I'm like, yeah, that sounds cool. But the ben there's no real benefit to me for doing that, which I know sounds selfish, but like at this point, with basically two full-time jobs, time's a factor. And just sitting around giving free advice all the time. Like, I have a channel with hundreds of free videos that all have free advice, so you can go check those out. But otherwise, like, you do need to pay me for my time. Unfortunately, I'm I'm I feel literally like blessed because uh it just seems like I have the right audience, I guess. And I'm really grateful that what it was was people kept offering, hey, I want to talk to you about this. I'm more than willing to pay for your time, more than willing to pay because they actually respected the time and the knowledge and that that sort of thing. But I was still saying no until Heather finally convinced me, you you're just leaving money on the table. You should do that. So I was like, okay. Um I settled on $200 an hour as my rate, and I set up a booking thing through my website. Um, and I opened up kind of limited hours each month, which is basically all I can do. And, you know, it's it's sort of tricky because I know I'm on California time and or Pacific Standard time, and there's people from all over the world. So sometimes I will get emails from people who who have questions like, hey, I'm in this time zone, you know, the only available appointments are like super early in the morning or in the middle of the night or something like that. And there's just unfortunately not much I can do about it. And that was just something I had to, you know, know going into it was yeah, that this it these are the available hours. We will see what happens. And people started booking them. And if I get to the point where they're consistently booked, then I could I really couldn't open up more hours, so I'd probably end up just raising the price uh because it's it's really like the maximum amount of hours I can allocate each month. So it's pretty limited, but it's been great. Like that's been a really, really fun thing to do. And the $200 price was for a couple of reasons. One, that was the amount that was worth it to me, because it's you know, it's taking, it's either taking time away from my personal life or it's taking time away from me working on my own creative, you know, my YouTube channel, making a video, something like that. So, what is the amount of money that's worth it for me to walk away from those things? 50 bucks ain't worth it. Like I would rather do my own thing. I would rather, you know, because also with the consultations, I prep for them. I try to figure out who the person is, what they need, have some things ready for them. There's the hour-long consultation, then there's a follow-up, because I, you know, usually we're talking about equipment, so I'll follow up with I will follow up with that list then of like, here's the gear we talked about, here's descriptions of why you might need it, here's prices and and links and stuff. And I don't put affiliate links in that. I guess I could, but that just feels like I'm double dipping in a weird way. So I don't put affiliate links in those follow-ups, but I just I just do that, you know, there. And I try to make sure that they have that the same day as the console or the next day at the latest. So that takes time. And then of course there's just the basic, you know, studio setup, you know, tear down time. Not that that's huge, but you know, I gotta like you put on pants and stuff, so I gotta pay for that. Uh, but anyway, so that's that's that was a number for me that that made sense. And also considering like the stuff we're talking about is stuff that has taken me a long time to learn. So you're it's not just that, like, oh, it's an only an hour of your time, but it's like, yeah, it was years and years and years of experience to gain the knowledge that can be helpful right now. And what I have found too is the people who are willing to pay that price are so much more serious about what they're doing. Um, so what that means is like they don't irk away when they have a question and I say, Yeah, you'll need to buy something like an A10 mini, or you know, you can connect this with that, but you'll need it this thing over here. You'll have like they don't suddenly freak out and go like, oh, but how do I I want a roadcaster for a hundred dollars? Like those problems don't happen because the people have already spent $200 just to spend an hour discussing, discussing their creative idea or or problem solving. And so they're invested in it. And it just seems like it's a really high quality group of people. And it it, you know, I like I I'm a public school teacher, so hey, I'm teaching people they don't have to pay to be in those classes. My YouTube channel is entirely free. So this is for the person who wants to take it to that next level. If you want to sign up, you can go to HiMyname is Tom.com slash consulting. There's my there's my sales pitch. Um, but anyway, uh that's that's a relatively new thing. In November, um I made $193.90. So it's $200 an hour, but so I only had one consultation in November. That's when I set that up. Um, but people pay through PayPal, and PayPal takes a percentage. So the amount I got was $193.90. In December, it was $581.70. So there's a couple hours of me getting to talk to some really cool people about super fun projects, get an extra $580 that month. So that's very, very much worth it to me. And then we're just continuing on from there and seeing where that goes. Um, the next one is the Sweetwater Sound Affiliate Program, which I'm a part of. And it's that's mainly because I do so many audio-related things that Sweetwater reached out to me and asked for someone to be a part of their program and just sort of build a working relationship. Like maybe we could do other things in the future. I've used them for years. They have amazing service. So I try to use their links when I think like this is definitely a product I would buy at Sweetwater. I'll put the Sweetwater link or I'll put the Sweetwater and Amazon link in the description. I've only been doing that since November, so it hasn't been huge, and I don't even have Sweetwater links in every video, so it's literally maybe like five videos have the links. Um, and in November I earned $70.74 from Sweetwater. In December, I earned $139 from Sweetwater. So there's that. The next thing is um Buzz Sprout, actually, where I host my podcast. I was fortunate enough to um be invited to join their creator program, which is awesome. And it's basically like a support program. So it's access to you know, community and people, and if you got questions or ideas, they can kind of help you out with that. It's pretty amazing. It's very much geared towards we're like they're supporting the creator versus the creator supporting like they're not using you, like it's very much like I don't have to do anything, and they they are supportive of me in any way that I need, which is kind of amazing, and it's one of the many reasons I love them. And that is uh, hopefully it's okay that I say it, it's a hundred bucks a month, you get a little stipend for it. So um that's cool. Like they just every month there's a check that comes in. I actually take home $96.80 out of that hundred dollars. So that's uh that's happened for two months, November and December, because November is the month that I joined. Uh, and that's the same every month, so it doesn't change. The last one is a new one which has been pretty amazing, and that's the Ecamm Live affiliate program. So most of these, as you can see, are affiliate programs. Um, Ecamm is the streaming software that I use. There's links in, you know, actually there are links in all of my descriptions now for Ecamm. And, you know, specifically if I'm making a video about ECAM, I'll bump the link up a little higher. So, you know, even though like something like the Canon EOSR is down in the description in every video, if the video itself is about the EOSR, I'll move that link up to the top because that's where people would want to find it anyway. Um, but eCAMs they have totally different ways they pay out depending on if someone signs up annually or monthly or whatever. And then depending on how they sign up, you could get either a one-time uh like commission or you could get a monthly commission if they're paying every month. Um, it's been amazing, it's been like wildly supportive. So November was my first month with Ecamm, it was $345.60. And December was my second month with them, and that was $1,066, just completely bananas. Uh, I think it and I had an Ecamm video do very well in December, so that makes sense. I am not at that number for January, I promise you. So those are all of the current revenue streams, the highs and lows, where they're at. Um, a couple other things to add in. I am working on my uh first course, which is all about podcasting. So if you want to sign up, you can go to hi, my name is Tom.com slash wait list and sign up there uh to get you know updates and info and stuff. I haven't I've literally not even sent out an email to the mailing list yet. So you're not gonna get spammed, I promise. Um, but that's there, and I bring that up because uh the goal is to have that course out no later than the end of this academic year, hopefully sooner in the spring, and and then future courses after that. So courses will then be another revenue stream that's coming in, which isn't really through the YouTube channel necessarily, but it it's just you know added on to this stuff. So things like the consultations and courses would be separate from YouTube. Everything else is pretty much directed through YouTube. If I were to ever monetize podcasts, that would go through there as well. I don't really have any plans to do that just because I only have so much bandwidth in my brain. And you know, the podcasts have a different value and and everything. So um, let's look at a few totals here. So, again, I I can't emphasize enough that this is not about boasting or bragging. This is I just want to provide this info for you because also I forgot to mention at the beginning, in January of last year is when my channel crossed the 10,000 subscriber milestone, and in January of this year, 2021, is when it crossed the 50,000 subscriber milestone. So that 40,000 growth over the year is pretty big. So, you know, you can you can kind of track in a lot of these, you can track that growth um as the channel grew, the the revenue grew. I have no idea how that curve looks. Like, does it continue at this scale? Does it dip off? Does it increase? I don't, I really don't know. Um, so we'll we'll kind of see, or we'll uh you know, and any of these could change if Amazon changes their commissions or one of the affiliate programs shuts down, or they're mad that I talked about this and I get kicked out of something. Those those could change. So um, you know, that's that's just part of it is not really knowing. And and for the most part, earlier in the year were the lower numbers, later in the year were the higher numbers, but there are things like especially art list and epidemic, my highest months were in the summer, um, which beat out the the later months. So just hopefully that that gives you an idea. Now, what I want to do is look let's look at the monthly totals. Let's wrap this up by looking at the monthly totals. So my lowest earning month in 2020 was January, and I, you know, I didn't even have one, two consultations, sweetwater, buzzsprout, or eCamm weren't even sources until the end of the year. So um, this is with fewers fewer revenue streams coming in. The channel made eleven hundred and ninety-four dollars. So that's not bad, right? For you know, I just started putting on ads, and that's that's pretty much eleven hundred dollars. Okay. Um, and then it went up. The best month was December, of course. The channel made $9,400, $9,472.39. That's huge. Um, that is more than I made at my full-time job. So that was kind of a big deal for me because uh there were a couple milestones actually. Um I guess the first would have been October. October was where it matched my take-home pay for my full-time job. So, you know, my you have your gross pay and then all the taxes and insurance and all that stuff. You get taken out, and then you have your your net pay. Um, October was the first time that all the YouTube revenue or all this revenue matched my take-home pay, which is a big deal to me. It's not the same because, you know, that doesn't include all those things like taxes and insurance and whatnot, but that was still a little milestone. November was the first month that it matched, that it exceeded my take-home pay. And December was the first month that it actually matched the gross pay. So officially in December, I made it, I might have even been slightly more on YouTube. Um, but it was basically totally even between my actual job gross pay and my YouTube, or all what I'm calling us YouTube, even though it's not all YouTube, but gross revenue there, which is a very big deal to me. And that's why I that's kind of where it's like, hmm, this does have my attention in terms of practicality of what is the next step and what is the next move. And my next move is to do nothing different, to just keep doing what I'm doing and see where that goes. I know there are ways I could take a ton more sponsorships. I added it up once, and I think if I said yes to every sponsorship opportunity in my inbox for a month, it would come out to something like another $3,000 a month. Because most of them are like weird little companies you've never even heard of eyelash serums and things. So we can make an extra $3,000 a month doing that, which would be huge, but it wouldn't be long, probably one or two months before people got very tired of those sponsored videos and numbers dropped off, and all the other numbers got hurt. So I'm not interested in doing that. You know, I could increase my ad sense by just pumping in a ton more ads on my videos, mid-roll ads, all that stuff, unskippable ads. But I think people will get really tired of that. I would hate, I would just not, I don't want to work really hard on a video to have it interrupted by an ad for a company that I don't even know like what the company is, especially if it's a company I don't even like, and now it's like interrupting a video that I spent so much time and effort on. No, thank you. So kind of, you know, I want this to be my way of doing things and seeing where it goes. So continuing that, we will see what this trend is. I'm real curious at the beginning of 2021, past the holiday season, um, what the numbers are going to be. So, you know, while you're listening to this, if you're listening to it on the day it came out, maybe I'm right now totaling up the numbers for January to get an idea. But I'm very curious, especially like the first quarter of 2021, to see where those where those numbers go. Does it plateau? Did it go down? Did it go up? Um, I won't really won't really know for sure. The biggest jump last year though was uh between November and December was crazy because November was $6,900 and December was $9,400. It's like a and that was largely in part because of eCam and consultations is what is what changed that um that so much. But going back to something I mentioned at the beginning, um that huge that's like that's probably the biggest single jump. In March, my channel made $1,800, and in April it made $3,200. That's a huge jump too, especially with fewer streams. That's crazy. Artlist just went bananas that month, and then in June it made $2,900, and July it made $4,000. So that's another huge jump there. Again, mainly it looks like because of Artlist. Um, and then December was $6,900. Or sorry, November was $6,900, December was $9,400. That's a big jump as well. But what's interesting though is in December, um, my my ad sense went down $400, my epidemic subscriptions went down $110. Um, and other things kind of went up. So two things actually went down pretty significantly, but overall it was still a much higher earning month, um, which I just think, again, concrete example of why having multiple streams is important. The other thing that I did was I added up all of the lowest months. So, you know, for Amazon, my lowest month was January, for GeniusLink, Amazon International, it was July, for consultations, it was November. So I just took the lowest months of every source and added those up. And that came out to a grand total of if I had basically my worst month ever, like where it was just everything earned its lowest amount in the same month, if that were a thing that happened. That month, that theoretical month would have generated $2,000, $2,018.24. So $2,000, that's a decent, like very decent supplemental income, but it's absolutely not like anywhere near a full-time income. Um, but if I did the opposite and I did my highest months, and there was this hypothetical month where each of the channels earned that amount at the same time, or each of the streams earned that amount at the same time, the total was $11,078. That's huge. That is absolutely full-time income happening there. Um, so that's uh there's no there's no concrete end. It's just sort of that's where we're at. Those are kind of what the numbers look like. Um, and again, doing this the way I'm doing it is my own way, which is also, like I said, I've never made a video just to put in an affiliate link. I've never, you know, I've never gone against that ethic statement that we've talked about so many times. So I'm sure I could grow this faster if I did that, but I don't want to do that. I want to do it on my terms, whatever your strategies are, whatever methods you're using, you do need to make it your terms. Um, it needs to be good for your channel, it needs to be good for your audience. And it can't, it this it is getting tricky as it's like, well, what if that were a main source of income? Then you'd have to, you'd have to want it to grow more. But I I want to always remember that, like, yeah, the thing I started doing all this literally expecting to lose money. Like it's a hobby I'm sinking money into. It's nothing I'm expecting to earn money on. And then suddenly a few years later, it's like, oh, you earned $50,000 from it that year. Um like I I I want to find ways to make sure that that stays balanced. So I hope that was helpful. Um, I know again, probably not I I I enjoyed it, it was good for me to dig through this. So I hope it was good for you too. Um, if you found it helpful, I'd love to know. So feel free to send me a message. You can reach out to me at so darn tom and all things, send me an email, um, you know, leave me a comment on YouTube, whatever, and I'll uh I'd love to know if this was helpful. I could kind of continue this little mini-series and talk about expenses every month if if you think that'd be valuable. Things like, you know, we talked about Genius Link is you know, $60 to $80 a month. What are the other things had to pay for software to set up scheduling, pay for web hosting, um, pay for royalty-free music services, all that kind of stuff. Pay to have my videos captioned. Like there are um a lot of expenses, so you know, we could take we could take this a step further then and look at here's the revenue, but here's the expenses. So, what's the actual you know, profit, I guess. Um, I could do that if that might be an interesting thing and just kind of want to know what the operating costs are for a channel like mine, you know, where it's at right now, and running it the way that I run it. Uh, but I I just genuinely hope this was like a down-to-earth, very clear, transparent discussion of what some of the revenue numbers look like from these sources in a situation like mine. So I'd love to know if that were helpful for you. Uh, if not, you don't have to tell me about it. So um I we will get back to you know like creative type stuff and everything, but um for now I I'm actually really enjoying this. So I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great week, and I will see you next time.