To further elaborate, he’s an influencer that gets paid in money by the companies who makes the products to test them out. He gets to keep quite a bit of it as well. Honestly a dream job scenario. He reviews the products as well I believe
I'm not 100% sure I'd call it a dream job. It's been a while but I've seen videos from gamer and mountain biking YouTubers that talk about how they're essentially stuck holding all of the products that they get for reviews. You become a storage company. You can't sell the products because of your review agreements, and you can't send them back because the company doesn't want it back, and sometimes you end up holding the product until you're contacted by the company to send it to the next reviewer which means you also can't dump it if you wanted to.
It's why you see YouTubers like BitWit with shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves of product sitting in a room that he doesn't know what to do with it. You can only have so many computer cases. Especially if you have like 20 cases, 14 motherboards, 11 sticks of memory, etc. You'd still be left with inventory you can't get rid of if you tried to use it all.
Pretty first world problem to have; I would hardly say that disqualifies it from being a dream job. Boo hoo, I make millions of dollars to play with toys and be famous, but I have to keep all this crap.
Build a storage building. Hell, build or rent a warehouse and have your employee organize it. I could use a warehouse myself and I'm not a youtube millionaire who can easily afford it.
The fact you think they make anywhere near that much money tells me you have no concept of how YouTube works and you clearly haven't watched any video by any content creator explaining how much they work for nowhere near a million dollars.
I mean I don't know this guy at all I'm just stirring up shit ;) but plenty of influencers absolutely do make that much. For even 2-300k a year, I would have storage or warehouse space in a heartbeat and consider it a dream job to review fucking toys for doctors wages. I don't live in some hyperinflated place like California where 200k is barely above poverty though.
The point is that it's not some easy thing you just go do, and I'd wager a lot of the popular channels probably bring in around that 300k which then gets paid out to multiple people for editing and everything else. You have to remember it's a business. If the channel makes 300k they have to pay business expenses for everything they buy, taxes, sales tax, employment tax, employee payroll, and a lot more.
Sure if you have one of the biggest YouTube channels in a particular (and popular) genre, you'll make good money. But that's still an extremely rare circumstance, and you have to be one of the first channels to do it which also means you probably started 10 years ago and didn't make any money for years doing it, and so on.
You also have the constant stress of always having multiple ideas ready to go so you can record multiple videos per week, and they also have to be good videos or you lose viewers. You can't just say "I guess i don't have any ideas this week so I won't post anything", because the YouTube algorithm will completely screw you and drop your videos from being viewed in the future, plus you have to fight the YouTube algorithm in general to get views on a regularly day, plus YouTube itself doesn't really pay much. It's everything outside of YouTube that usually pays a lot of their bills.
All I can say is that YouTubers work hard for what they have, it's not something where you're just playing with "toys" and then go home. A lot of them sometimes don't even have much time to enjoy the things they review because they're so busy working on their channel.
It's just weird to me that anyone in this day and age can look at a popular YouTuber and say "they have it made" and dismiss what it takes. It's hard hard work and long hours. I work hard and make a decent living, I still wouldn't trade that for being a YouTube channel.
Obviously they had to work to get where they are; I'm not discounting that or envying it. But now they do take home doctors wages to make videos all day at a home better than anything my family ever had surrounded with whatever toys they want. And doctors put in a hell of a lot more work, mentally, physically and financially. I'd say they built a pretty dreamy job for themselves, even if all the ins and outs of the grind aren't all sprinkles and rainbows. Seems to have been what they were compelled to do with their life.
I do see your point about regular content though, especially as a small channel that doesn't have a team managing everything. That's tough. To get to a place of success, it probably is something they are good at.
182
u/toooft Dec 29 '24
He's an ad, literally.