I Made $9K from my YouTube Channel in 2022 and it's Powering my Company
In the spirit of transparency, I'm sharing some stats around my medium sized YouTube channel and how it helped me start a semi-successful business. In my opinion, this pattern of YouTubers using their distribution to build companies will become increasingly common, so I hope this is a helpful data point!
I run a channel designed to help software engineers grow their career. I started 2022 with 26K subscribers and ended with 71K. Here's a graph of my subscribers vs revenue each year (I started 3 years ago):
Some highlights from 2022:
- I made $9,020 with a CPM of $12.91 and RPM of $3.60
- I had 2.6M views across all my videos
- My best month was November, when I made $100+/day for several weeks
- My worst month was July, when I made < $10/day.
YouTube has been instrumental in growing a community/mentorship business I started in the middle of 2022, Taro. The vast majority of paying customers initially discovered us through YouTube, and this income stream is how I'm able to make a livable income ($100K+ booked in 4 months).
I also attribute the audience (and our ability to get feedback quickly) as one of the main reasons we got into Y Combinator.
For those of you thinking about something similar, here's why I'm bullish on YouTube as the basis for many consumer products:
- You don't need to spend (waste?) time vetting sponsors and haggling over terms.
- You can build a much deeper relationship with your audience if you bring them off YouTube.
- Depending on your audience, their willingness to pay can be very high if you deliver a unique product.
This idea of creators becoming brands was actually discussed in a recent episode of the All-In podcast by David Friedberg. I included a clip at 7:43 in this video:
Let me know if you have any questions!
Rahul
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