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The website is currently unavailable. Welcome to another edition of Wisecrack Live! Thank you for joining us this Thursday, May 18th. Michael will be with us in just a moment. We’re excited to see so many green names in the chat and thank you for joining us once again.
We have lots of stuff to talk about, including how people who make YouTube content make money and how the economics of it all work. We don’t have politics or values here at Wisecrack, only the accumulation of capital investments.
We also have a video coming out soon on fascism by Theodore Dorno. Our friend Tom Wyman helped us research and write that one, so be sure to check out his work if you haven’t already. And there’s also a video coming out on child labor soon. Stay tuned for more information! it better and I think that’s the same thing with like capitalism and all these other systems that we live in you know
Karina says My med school increased tuition and in response to the outrage they give us one free month of Better Help. That’s dark. Chris says part of the disconnect is that wisecrack have ad reads by on our talent people on the age of 70 aren’t used to seeing regular things anymore. Leo Perez says The anti-capitalist wisecrackers recommending ways to make more money is interesting. Thornback says Does Abbott Elementary romanticize and trivialize the very real institutional problems in our public school systems? Nate Lynch says You can use a car but you still need to be aware of what the effects are and what we can do to make it better.
Commenting on these remarks, one might say that while it is possible to be ideologically opposed to capitalism, it is also important to be aware of the material realities of the world. As Leo Perez’s comment suggests, it is interesting to see anti-capitalist wisecrackers recommending ways to make money. Thornback’s comment regarding Abbott Elementary brings up the issue of how the show may be romanticizing and trivializing real institutional problems in public school systems. Finally, Nate Lynch’s comment highlights the need to be aware of the effects of using a car, and what can be done to make it better. Back in the day, you used to spend around $5,000 for an ad read. Now, not all of our videos have ads, so maybe we don’t. Let’s say we end up with 8 videos in a month and 4 of them get sponsorships at $2,500 each. That brings us to $10,000. On top of that, let’s say we make $12,000 from AdSense, bringing us to a total of $22,000 a month.
Going back to our old math, that’s close to a living wage if we’re just paying for employees. However, if we’re still taking into account freelancers, and the fact that we are owned by a company that doesn’t just want to break even, it’s still not enough to be “balling”. We also have to consider rent, studio fees, and equipment costs.
Someone asked why people hate on Mr. Beast when he’s making harmless content. I’m not being a hater when I’m quoting him, but he’s rich because his YouTube videos are commercials for his products.
When asked what changed, the market got saturated and companies are spending less on advertising due to the recession. Additionally, our ads come through agencies, so there are a lot of people getting a cut along the way. That’s why it’s important to have a consistent base of income from Patreon, which is not affected by the market the same way ads are. from an ad read and I understand why I totally get it and I was like okay like I’m not I’m not doing this and we didn’t do it um
I recently reached out to several companies to explore potential partnerships, and I’m excited about one in particular. We have a great video coming out about psychedelics in the movies and the culture industry, so please check it out! In response to Chris’s question about our wisecrack demographics, we are about 70-75% male, 18-35 years old, and 50-60% from America, with the rest from all over the world. We have become more gender diverse in recent years, but we still have a way to go. We have done ad reads with brands we like, such as vitamins, athletic greens, and refreshing hard seltzers. We have also done ad reads with brands we don’t necessarily love, but if we consistently say no to all ads, it puts us in a dangerous position. We have to be mindful of the ethics of this, as it can be seen as a contradiction if we purport to have a set of cultural values that are critical of the status quo and capitalism. As an example, we did not do an ad read for a for-profit university, as their business model necessitates students taking out high-interest loans. im is an audience worth targeting
Considering such an upward trajectory of the crater industry, this VidCon was much anticipated and broadly it didn’t disappoint. It was however, different from anything anyone had seen before. Companies competed for attention with photo booths, free snacks, and interactive attractions. Fans showed up in droves and creators pulled healthy audiences to their scheduled talks. But it felt different all right. Tiny said, “What’s the line between actual trolling and friendly trolling being funny?” Major media outlets took notes. Many identified the change in presenting sponsor from YouTube to TikTok as a potential “Changing of the Guard”, while others noted a relative dearth of big name YouTubers in attendance.
What everyone covering the event missed was perhaps the biggest change of all, away from the conference floor itself and tucked away upstairs and off-site. Platforms, companies, and agencies quietly competed for creators’ attention in exclusive backstage lounges and parties set up by the likes of MetaJelly, Smack, YouTube, Carrot, and Snapchat.
The crater economy had grown into a matured diversified, $100 billion dollar business. But behind all the pomp and circumstance of the big events, the stiff competition between the different platforms, and the wining and dining by agencies, companies, and brands, is of course the creator that gets in.
I’ll say this: there’s a big introduction that gets into the money stuff. I’m just trying to get to that. As an example, let’s say there’s a YouTube creator with 2 million subscribers who averages 1 million views per video. How do they make money and how much?
Well, the well-known core of any YouTuber’s income is AdSense, the system that serves the ads before, during, and after videos. So, again, here’s where we get into it AdSense stuff. This hypothetical channel could expect to earn about $4,000 in AdSense revenue for their million views based on a typical revenue. And again, think about that $4,000 for a million views – like it’s not really that much when you think about it.
And then, so that money right there, we on a good month will have between two and three million views total. So, when I gave you that number before that we might make like $10 to $12,000 a month, it’s based on RPM of $4, meaning they earn $4 per thousand views.
However, there is a wild inconsistency on AdSense RPMs from creator to creator. The AdSense system’s selling point for advertisers is its ability to target ads to be served to audiences with particular geographies, demographics, or interests. So, again, that’s what I was saying before, companies would rather use the AdSense model than pay people a customer.
All has to do with how valuable their audience is. Thank you for being here and liking these very nice advertisers. Only pay one-fifth the average to reach customers in Brazil, likely as Brazilian spending power is lower. So, if our hypothetical channel was produced in Portuguese and therefore had a big chunk of its audience in Brazil, it likely would earn a lower than average RPM on those million views. The creator might only earn $1,200.
Meanwhile, advertisers value audiences with particular interests quite highly. Creators making videos about business or finance tend to have quite high RPMs because there are loads of investment platforms, banks, crypto companies, and others competing to get those valuable advertising spots seen by an older, wealthier, financially savvy audience.
If our creator made a US-based English language personal finance channel, they might earn $8. So, and see that point there right where they get into the fact that like a personal finance channel or something makes more. This is why there’s so many [] channels of [] scammers being like, “This is how with drop shipping I made all this money” or like they do that [__] because by being scammers it puts them in a position to like get ads from companies that that think that kind of audience is worth targeting. Vine fostered talent and developed fame, but nobody could figure out how to make money from the platform’s six-second videos. Advertisers and creators thus pivoted to more expensive platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Twitch was the only one to successfully monetize, offering their creators memberships, donations, affiliate links, direct architectural phone panels and calls, and subscriptions to their favorite channels. This approach has turned the platform into one of the industry’s most powerful, with roughly 300,000 of the 2 million self-identified professional creators existing primarily on Twitch.
Recognizing the unmet potential of short-form video, Tick Tock appeared in American app stores in the same year Vine officially shut down. The rise of this easy-to-use and hyper-creative platform has been meteoric, with 115 million downloads worldwide in Q1 of 2021. Despite this success, for the vast majority of Tick Tock creators, making money from the app is difficult. To alleviate this, Tick Tock introduced a $200 million Creator Fund in 2020, offering paid music promotions from record labels, sponsored posts, and cash gifts direct from audiences during live streams. ikes
Despite creators making money on Tick Tock, the app’s continued growth and static pool means that as of January 2022, creators were making only 2.5 cents per thousand views, a worryingly low number compared to the 5 cents per thousand views they used to make. This has left the door ajar in the race for users in 2020, as meta launched Reels, Snap launched Spotlight, and YouTube launched YouTube Shorts, all of which closely resemble Tick Tock.
In 2021, Meta announced plans to invest 1 billion dollars in its Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon Prime Subs is where some money comes from. Furthermore, it is estimated that each view of a creator’s content generates economic value, yet the creator only gets half of it.
Creators have recognized that the more of those three cents they can keep, the better. Additionally, ADHD heads have had doctors tell them there is a national methylphenylate shortage, making it difficult to get a relatively simple and easy produce medicine that helps them function better. The final word today is that we use ads to continue making videos, and we will commit to the idea that the sketchier the company we have to use is, the more radical we’ll make our videos. You will notice that our videos are not shy in the things we call out. It is important to note that our sponsors have no say in our videos whatsoever. We have been subscribed for years and appreciate the support. Let’s think of some products that we can start producing together. Lastly, our streams go up as vods so you can always go watch it later and we do look at the comments.