One data point from a successful YouTuber is interesting but I'm not sure about the extremely valuable part. If anything, it probably leads to a lot of people thinking they can make >$100K/year making YouTube videos and they almost certainly won't.
I'd say its the opposite, you're talking about a channel that gets 10M views average per video while being kid friendly and targeting probably the audience with the most spending power(middle aged males in the US), you'd think they'd make far more than 100k/year.
The data makes sense to me but not the interpretation. My 2.5yo son loves watching Lego assembly videos on Youtube during his TV time, which is of course tied to my account, which therefore means I contribute to his middle aged male statistic. Perhaps I am having a tough time empathizing but I find it hard to believe droves of men my age are watching Lego assembly videos in the background.
You'd be surprised, I myself know several and I have no interest in the hobby to be adjacent to their circles. Anecdotally it seems like MLP all over again, but even more skewed to the adult demographic, which does make a lot more sense to me than MLP at least.
I was thinking exactly this. How many of that demographic are actually playing it for kids using their account? But I also know it is a very popular hobby for some people. My brother started a lego city group on Facebook and it exploded totally organically to tens of thousands of members. He was shocked!
Fair enough. Although I think a lot of people outside much of the HN demographic would consider making $100K/year from YouTube videos a pretty good deal. That's probably more than a lot of documentary film makers bring in. So I'm not sure how many would takeaway "Crap. This guy's pretty darned successful by YouTube standards and he's still just bringing in a fairly modest income--with no benefits etc."
I think most people, ignoring the specifics, would consider making 100k/y from youtube a pretty good deal, but well there's the specifics. Let's not kid ourselves 100k/y is not a modest income, but surely he should be the example of the guy that would get rich off of it, lego's mr.beast or whatever.
At the end of the day there's already huge amounts of youtubers showing their mansions or whatever to influence the gullible viewers, the ones who would miss the nuance of his situation would most likely fall for them anyway. There's already an abundance of blatant "false hope" being peddled far harder and wider, the chance of his objective analysis being misinterpreted by people is as far as i'm concerned insignificant.
It's valuable in the sense of giving some sort of feedback. The way many streaming services compensate people lacks any transparency and is basically making them compete to generate product blindly.
