I was surfing YouTube after a bit of writing and stumbled upon a video. It was a good video, and I enjoyed watching it a lot due to how beautiful and articulate the creator was. In her mid-length post, which you can watch below, Jazz Nicole explains how there just isn’t as much money as there used to be in social media. Jazz explains how in the past, she went viral posting hair tutorials and was able to amass an audience of over 200,000 subscribers. This is a lot on any platform, and for a while it allowed Jazz to earn between $3,000 and $10,000 per month on YouTube. This is not a small amount of money by any means, but nothing crazy if you’re living in the United States. Surely as a celebrity, somebody like Jazz would be able to increase her earnings and become a multimillionaire as a result of her YouTube channel. Right?
This wouldn’t be the case.
Jazz explains in her video that she is now earning very little as a result of her YouTube videos. She is kind of enough to show her full earnings report, and we are given a view of a month in which she manages to rack up only 45,000 views.
Even with a high RPM (revenue per mille or revenue per thousand views), this isn’t nearly enough for Jazz to earn a good living on social media. Jazz goes on to explain that she used to offer a course on social media marketing and that she had to take it down because the world has changed. For a minute, I felt really discouraged. I’m a new blogger. Does this mean that I’m completely screwed? I decided to take a look at Jazz’s YouTube channel, to see what I could find.
When I looked at Jazz’s channel, the first thing I did was check the view count. I was surprised by what I found. Despite being on YouTube for over 8 years, Jazz only had 14 million views. I looked at her videos and sorted them from oldest to newest. Her oldest videos had hundreds of thousands of views. I checked her newest videos, and they were doing much worse. Jazz was now getting less than 3 thousand views on all her videos. It was tragic, and I immediately understood what had happened. Jazz was used to the old world of YouTube, one without a recommendation engine, in which her videos would be automatically pushed to all of her subscribers. Those days are over. Now, everyone’s videos are pushed based on quality and interest. Everyone is competing with everyone, and you have to be consistent in order to get ahead.
Most aspiring content creators completely fail to grasp the reality of creating content. They assume that they can simply go viral, post a few videos every year, and earn residual royalties. The fact of the matter is that there was simply no chance of this ever happening. The only reason it occurred in the past, was because the platforms weren’t yet competitive. Nowadays, everyone is on social media, lots of people are posting, and most people aren’t able to earn from it. So it logically follows that in order to stand out and make money using content creation, you’ll need to work harder and smarter than most. Getting wrapped up in a fantasy of being a celebrity, hanging out, or even worse partying as an influencer or content creator will only lead to disaster. Thankfully, most people will fall into one of these traps. This means that getting ahead only hinges on you not being lazy.
What are the lessons to be learned?
Creating content doesn’t necessarily need to be difficult, but you do need to be consistent. If you aren’t consistently involved in the content creation process, you won’t have the reach necessary to earn a good living solely from advertisements. Nowadays, you need to create products and do the consistent work required to get the eyeballs required to buy your products. Selling products is now a requirement for making money online. Global digital ad spending was over $600 billion in the past year. This sounds like a lot of money, but there are about 1.5 billion websites on the internet. And about 5% of that ad spend is on YouTube alone. E-commerce is a $6 trillion per year industry. This means that it’ll likely take immense amounts of effort to make money from ads, no matter what you’re doing. The most likely way for a content creator to make money is through products, courses, and merch. These things bring in far more money than online ads.
Content creation is still, and will likely always be the primary focus of the internet. If you control the content and the traffic, you’re in charge of the marketing. This means you will have a massive advantage over brands that try to use paid ads to garner traffic in the future. Being a content creator still has a lot of potential upsides, it’s just that the game has gotten more competitive and consolidated. So this means that going forward, he who controls the marketing channel, really controls the sale of the product. Being a content creator will make you more powerful than ever, especially as paid social media becomes a thing in first-world countries. Building a brand will become increasingly important as relative spending on advertising continues to decrease. From now on, being a content creator will require getting consistent eyeballs for your content. People need to be seeing your products every day, so that some of them can buy your stuff. This means that the days of releasing one video and sitting back are likely over for most. Nowadays, the name of the game is about getting a niche audience of people to buy your stuff. In addition, those living in countries that are poorer than average have an unfair advantage when it comes to creating content. It is simply more worthwhile for people in poor countries to produce content than it is for those in wealthy ones. This means that if you want to become a content creator, you should likely become a digital nomad. You’ll probably benefit from living in a low-cost-of-living country. You’ll be less stressed, be able to save more money and have a higher chance of being able to raise a family. That, in my opinion, is the true beauty of being a content creator. If done correctly, you have the opportunity to be your own boss and live wherever you want. You just have to do the hard work, and make sure that hard work is consistent. Make sure you also have a strategy in mind. Not all content is created equal. If you do those things, you’re likely to eventually find an angle and succeed. Check out Jazz’s video below, it’s a good one.
