Transcript of How Much $$ YouTube is Paying My Small Illustration Channel in 2023

started this YouTube channel at the end of last summer and I was able to get it monetized in December and today I hit 10 000 subscribers in this video I'm going to talk about how much income I'm making through this Channel and all the different things I've learned since launching it eight months ago at the end I'll also talk about some other channel related revenue streams so definitely stick around for that because they may surprise you I know they surprise me a little bit also to celebrate hitting 10 000 subscribers I'm gonna do a little contest and giveaway so I'll tell you more about that later I decided to make this video because when I started my Channel I didn't really know what to expect in terms of the possibilities of earning revenue and monetizing my channel when I try to do some research I'd find stuff for like huge Channels with just tons and tons of views and like all this crazy money they were making but there wasn't a ton of information about like smaller channels maybe art based channels channels like my own about illustration if you didn't if you didn't know that already so for me it was hard to tell if there was even like a way to earn a somewhat decent amount of money making videos if you weren't getting millions and millions and millions of views so hopefully if you're a smaller Creator and you're curious about these same things maybe this video will shine some light on that and provide some helpful information for you the main way I make a living is as an illustrator and as an illustrator I've always thought it was really important to be transparent about pricing and share information about that kind of thing and not be so secretive about financial stuff I think there's a lot of that in this industry and because of that there's so much confusion about how to price things and it's all just seen as this sort of like magical calculation and you know when you're starting out as an illustrator it's very confusing and it's very hard to price things and know what you should be charging and that's not good for anyone in the industry so I always try to be transparent about that stuff and share information about what a project should cost or you know how I estimate things but even as someone who's been doing this for over a decade it's still confusing and every time I price something you know it's still a little bit weird more transparency in the industry would help everyone but now naturally I feel the same way about YouTube so because I was unsure if this channel would make any sort of financial impact on my career clearly money was not the reason I started this channel so let's talk a little bit about why I started this channel so I think there was two initial reasons the first reason was that I'm also a skillshare teacher I noticed that a lot of the people who do really well on skillshare also have YouTube channels that they could sort of provide some of the information do some tutorials and then lead people to their full classes that made a lot of sense to me I thought if nothing else this would help drive more people to my classes on skillshare and I could earn some more income from that and then the other thing that pushed me to start this channel was actually an old Channel that I had that was not related to illustration at all several years ago after like a 10-year Hiatus I decided to start skating again that was something that I did a lot all through my life and then just sort of stopped for a while and I was having a lot of fun doing it and started just like recording some random stuff with friends and like decided to post them videos and make a joke about being old and skating and I called it roll over the hill as like a reference to being over the hill get it mostly I was just posting like skating clubs but then at one point I made some videos like talking about the stuff I was using when I was skating and I started getting like a lot of really positive feedback on those videos and people talking about how it was really helpful and they enjoyed listening to me talk about stuff which was also weird to me but I was like huh this is kind of fun I enjoy doing this and it seems like people like to listen to me for some reason I wouldn't want to listen to me but other people do so since I was having fun with that I was like what maybe I should think about doing this for illustration and the stuff that I do all the time and stuff that's like my main focus so I had that in the back of my head and the skillshare stuff and then for whatever reason I just said you know what I'm doing it and I just committed to it and for me as someone with ADHD most people think about that as like not being able to like Focus or anything like that but for me one of the biggest things is just this like hyper Focus where I hyper focus on like one thing and I'm just like all consumed by that and it's hard for me to think about anything else so I was just like watching tutorials about video stuff about like making videos and editing videos all while I was like doing my other work it was just like all I was thinking about I think the main way I Justified the time commitment to myself was the idea that it would drive people to my skillshare classes and that would in turn make money to offset other things one of my goals has been to try to offset my dependence on client work I've been doing tons and tons of work for different clients over the past 12 years and you know I want to focus more on just like making stuff that I like to make and sharing that stuff and like doing more with my online shop and like online classes and different products and stuff like that YouTube seemed like the best platform to sort of build a community and facilitate that all happening so because I already had some classes on skillshare and I had dabbled making videos with my other YouTube account felt like I had a little bit of a head start and I could sort of make decent quality videos it's crazy to think that now because when I look at the videos that I made at the beginning of this channel I sort of cringe at the Quality I feel like it's it's not good enough and when I look at my previous skillshare classes you know I feel the same way except for the one that I launched recently which I've elevated my production quality but I think because I hyper Focus so much on this YouTube thing and like watch so many tutorials and like I was watching videos about gears and like about gear not gears about like video gear and recording gear I learned a whole bunch of stuff I'm clearly still learning I make mistakes all the time I 100 lost track of what I was talking about I started making the videos I had a I was filming everything on my iPhone at the beginning that's how I did my skillshare classes I had like one panel late that I bought for skillshare and I had an external microphone that I was using to make the audio a little bit better but anyway when I committed to making this channel I decided that I had to make at least one video a week that's like what I saw online as being like the bare minimum for consistency and I always knew that consistency was like a super important thing for me I sort of built my whole illustration career based on a daily drawing project that I did for 14 years where I was just posting new work online every single day and that was how clients found me so I felt very strongly about consistency and it's very easy for me to go like all in on that so I was like one video a week no matter what so I was posting new videos each week and just trying to like get better with each one and after watching too many YouTube videos I ended up convincing myself that I had to buy a new camera which is the one I've been using here which is the Sony zv E10 just switching to this camera I was like wow just dramatically better and just couldn't believe what a difference it made coming from the iPhone and I was just like this is crazy but the thing is this is pretty expensive and I didn't just buy the camera I bought the camera and a lens to go with it now I'm just like spending all this money and not making any money on on YouTube and it was just like it felt a little crazy but for some reason I just had it in my head that like I had keep going maybe it was delusional in December I was able to get my Channel monetized Through the YouTube Partner program and this was really exciting to me and just sort of even though I didn't know how much I would make from that just it was just that I could start earning money on my channel I was like okay it's fine that I bought a camera this will justify it and now I'm gonna be making money and I use that to sort of keep me going and justify the expense and the time I was spending on all this stuff in fact it sort of made me go a little crazier I ended up converting a space in my basement to like a totally new office space so I had more room to do this and have a bigger setup and you know I needed this for work anyway but I really sort of built it around doing it for the YouTube channel that was like my main thought in the back of my head but I was like well I need the extra space to work but did I really but anyway this is where I am love my new office so glad that I did it but uh boy howdy that's an expensive project but in the middle of the construction to build this office I got my first YouTube AdSense payment are you ready it was thirty four dollars so not great but hey it was money from YouTube I had made a bunch of videos probably spent a thousand dollars on gear probably more if I'm really thinking about it and I was building a new office to justify this sum 34 payment but again maybe that's delusional but I was like that's fine I'm keep going it's gonna it's gonna get better it's gonna keep going up uh making some momentum and I kept moving forward so although thirty four dollars was a bit of a reality check it didn't really deter me because I was seeing my subscriber count go up and up and up and My Views were going up and I was getting a lot of really really nice positive feedback and that feedback was just really inspiring and made me want to keep going so if you're one of those people thank you so much you kept me going when probably could have stopped pretty easily so my next payment went up to 73 dollars if you're good at math that's a double decker not double decker I just it means my payments doubled I got double what I had the previous month so I'm like well if this this is the momentum maybe it's gonna double every month I didn't really believe that but I thought there was a possibility and on top of that whopping 73 dollars I was also starting to earn a little bit of revenue from affiliate links I'll talk more about that later so I guess I want to talk about some of the struggles with starting a new channel I think for me one of the biggest issues which is still an issue is just how time consuming it is another part of my ADHD is just a severe time blindness I have such a hard time judging time estimating time anything to do with time and I can lose so much time mostly in the editing phase of the videos a few different times since I started the channel I tried to like Outsource the editing of the videos and it didn't go that well I'm sort of particular and I'm also not great at scripting my video so sometimes the recording process can be a little chaotic and there's a lot of weeding through footage to get something useful and also with like the tutorial type videos it's hard for like a random Editor to know what can be cut what can be like made high speed and as a result when I tried to Outsource the editing I'd get it back and then I'd spend a whole bunch of other time re-editing it so it wasn't that helpful another thing I've been dealing with is that I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I'll just obsess over trying to like make the video quality better or making sure the audio is okay or like trying to set up an angle or like try to change up angles to make it more interesting it's all it's all very time consuming and it's all stuff that I I don't really have time for like as I mentioned I'm an illustrator and I'm balancing a bunch of client projects at the moment I'm also teaching a class at one of the local universities so all of this stuff is hard to balance while trying to be crazy perfectionist on making these YouTube videos another thing is I'm bad at making shorter videos like I try to make something quick and it ends up and ends up being long and I'm also really unable to know what kind of video is going to be something that I can do quickly like I'll choose something like oh this will be a quick video that I can do and then it ends up taking me forever to edit for some reason so the takeaway is I have no idea what I'm doing and as a result of all this I'm always like finishing my video at the last possible minute to get it uploaded for Tuesday because that's the random day I chose to upload videos each week in addition to Fridays I do Adobe Fresco tips every Friday a little shorter video in February I launched memberships for my channel where members would get access to like exclusive videos longer uncut videos member exclusive live streams all kinds of stuff like that and on a side note there's also going to be a Discord Channel that'll be coming very very soon when I first launched the channel memberships I was completely terrified I was sort of convinced that no one would join them I'm like why would anyone even want to join this I almost didn't launch them and then for a while I was like well maybe I can do a patreon I had one in the past that ended up stopping because I felt like I wasn't putting out enough stuff to make it valuable for my patrons but I thought you know with YouTube this will be much easier I can just post exclusive videos and like it'd be a lot easier to do that kind of stuff when I was on patreon they didn't have the video integration so it was very hard for me to like make special exclusive stuff for my patreon it was also a struggle to decide whether to like relaunch the patreon or do the YouTube channel memberships the reason for that is with the YouTube channel memberships YouTube takes a 30 cut which is kind of a lot patreon takes a very small cut currently I'm still thinking I don't know maybe I should just switch over to patreon but that's a totally different topic quickly after launching my channel memberships I had several people join as members those initial members are still channel members today which is amazing so you ogs are amazing and I'm so glad that you are members and I'm so thankful for you supporting my Channel today the channel has 37 members which kind of blows me away I feel like that's really great and I'm just so I don't know humbled or honored or whatever and that 37 of you are monetarily supporting this Channel and finding that much value in it and wanting to be a part of this so can't thank you all enough so even though YouTube takes a 30 cut of the channel membership income it's still bringing in around 240 a month and that's a decent chunk of change in February I made 150 on YouTube so although that's not a huge number it's still double what I made the month before that and I remember starting to feel like this could actually turn into something that might justify all the time that I was spending on it in March a few of my videos started getting some some more traction I think they sort of got picked up by the YouTube algorithm the main one was a video I made comparing procreate in Adobe Fresco that video is currently well over a hundred thousand views which is kind of crazy also sort of bums me out because it's one of my earliest videos and the quality is not the best and you know remember what I said about being a perfectionist I also need to redo that video because there's a lot of things that have changed since I made it and people love to point that out in the comments a couple other videos that got a big bump that month were my paper like 2.0 review is it the 2.0 whatever the new paper-like review and my review of the iPad Mini both of those are over 20 000 views which is pretty good so as a result of that algorithm action my subscriber count and my view count started to go way up and my YouTube income jumped to over 800 for March this was definitely encouraging it felt like a massive amount of money but when I think about it that's still less than like one client illustration project and I'm spending dramatically more time making you know four to eight videos each month but regardless it's substantial and I was very happy about that this month my videos don't seem to be getting that YouTube algorithm bump that they were getting last month in fact the video I posted today is uh not doing good at all in the video I posted on Tuesday not doing good either so I'm hoping this isn't a sign that things are going downhill for me but even with the lack of support from the YouTube algorithm this month my channel is still set to bring in over 700 for the month and that's mostly supported by an increase in channel members so thanks again members another thing I didn't consider when thinking about how this channel could earn income was affiliate links when I did my first review video I think it was the paper-like screen protector I registered for the Amazon affiliate program so that I could get links that when I share them in my video descriptions and people click on them I get a little commission if someone makes a purchase I don't push this stuff too hard but it's still been a nice addition I think I average around 100 to 150 a month from Amazon affiliate commissions and since joining the affiliate thing I've also become a member of the Amazon influencer program whatever that means but it gives me my own Amazon storefront where I can provide links to all the stuff that I use and stuff I recommend and stuff like that which I always Link in my description and when people buy stuff from there again I get a commission on that and aside from Amazon I've made roughly two thousand dollars from my other affiliate links for like the brushes that I use the Retro Supply Co brushes that you can find in the description as well as some of the iPad drawing stands that I've reviewed so although these tend to be smaller amounts here and there they all sort of combine into a a pile that's starting to be a decent income Source certainly not full time by any stretch of the word but it's getting somewhere not that I even have the goal to become a full-time YouTuber or anything like that that's not what I want to do I love being an illustrator but I'd like to sort of spread things out do a little bit of this do a little bit of that make some of my own stuff just do a little bit of everything so what else have I learned in the eight months since I launched this channel well one thing is the community that I've built on YouTube is amazing I I can't believe the amount of support and just the nice comments and great discussion and joining in on live streams just it's it's just been a pleasure and it seems like this community is just so much more likely to actually buy the products that I make like my books or fonts or just other things that I have available than what's ever happening happening then was ever happening on Instagram even though I have a much larger following on Instagram and speaking of Instagram that's another interesting thing when I started this Channel and started to get more subscribers I assumed it was just coming from the following that I've built over the years on Instagram but I did like a little poll in my community Tab and was just like asking some of my channel members how many of them had been following my work from Instagram and then came over here or how many discovered me on YouTube and the large majority discovered me on YouTube which is crazy to me I don't know why it's crazy but just feels weird but it's also kind of cool that it's like a new audience if you're watching this video right now let me know in the comments if you had seen my work previously on Instagram or any other platform or if you've been following my work for a while or you have no idea who I am and you just happen to stumble upon this video and make it all the way through it which if you did thank you I've seen my shop sales go up consistently as this channel has grown and I can see through the traffic Source people directly coming from my YouTube channel at a much higher percentage than would come when I share those same links on Instagram even though I have four times The Following over there I'm really excited about how far this channel has come in the community it's gathered to celebrate reaching 10 000 subscribers I'd love for you to make something based on one of my tutorials or using my new skull font and then share it with me and then I'll choose three of my favorites and send the creators a bunch of stuff and then I'll make a video featuring those as well if you want more details on this check out this other video or to talk about that exclusively I didn't want to merge it all into one video because that could get confusing also I think I'm legally required to say that YouTube has nothing to do with this contest they're not responsible for any of my Shenanigans this is just me doing a fun little thing fun level challenge you've been not called a contest a YouTube make kick me out they're very particular about contests YouTube is not involved they have nothing to do with this but you can find out here I'm gonna re-research the rules for having a contest to make sure I follow all of them and put them in this video okay thank you all good talk