- We have childish bunches in today,
because we're gonna be talking about
some serious adult topics, money.
♪ Money money money. ♪
So when you work in a new, confusing, media world,
and you work for yourself, people are often like,
how though, how do you make a living.
And I'm all for having open conversations
about money, it can be a bit of a taboo
but I like breaking down taboos.
And we've got sex, we've got chronic illness
and now we've got money.
So that's what we're going to do today
and I even have some diagrams for you.
Aren't you lucky.
So before we get into it just a bit of my backstory,
I started making YouTube videos in 2011.
It started out as a hobby and then
it kind of turned into a part-time job.
I graduated university in 2014,
moved to London with the aim
of trying to make this my full-time gig
'cause I was loving it so much
and then 2015 went full-time.
When I moved to London I got a part-time job
and I was doing my own YouTube stuff
and it took me 10 months of doing that
before I was in a financially stable enough position
to quit that part-time job
and just go all-in on my own projects.
And so that was in 2015 and now we're in 2019
so I've been full-time at this job for four years.
And in that time I've branched out,
I don't just make all of my money on YouTube,
I also write books and I do podcasting
and I do Instagram and other things that we will get into.
So I do have several different revenue streams
but until last year I'd never actually figured out
the breakdown of the percentages of what earns me what.
So, last year I wrote this blog post
where I'd basically taken all of the transactions
of all the money coming into my accounts.
This is not including expenses,
so it's like what I spent on my business,
so everything that was coming in and I categorised them
and I created a fancy, little pie chart.
I'm gonna leave the blog post in the description
if you're interested in looking at that.
But what I discovered from that year,
so that pie chart takes in the tax year of 2017 to 2018
and 80% of my income came from brand deals.
And I was like, oh boy, all of my eggs
are in one basket, and that is terrifying.
So after seeing that breakdown I realised
that I needed to diversify my income.
There is absolutely nothing wrong
with doing brand deals,
I just didn't want to be completely reliant on them
because you get paid more depending
on like, how many views, or your engagement
and things like that and so I didn't want to be reliant
on numbers, I wanted a bit more flexibility
and security when it came to my income.
So there were two areas of income
that were really low in that 2017 to 2018 year
that I thought I can quite easily try and push these up
to spread out the income a bit more.
Obviously I didn't want to be earning less money overall,
I just wanted it to be spread out a bit more evenly.
So those two areas were my Patreon and affiliate links.
So Patreon is like a membership site
where you can give a little bit of money each month
to creators that you want to support
and in return you get some special access, some perks,
like it depends on what the creator wants to offer
in return for what price, basically.
And then affiliate links are trackable links
with different brands that if I post like say,
an ASOS link or something, or a Lovehoney link
'cause that tends to be the ones
that I make the most money off.
If you buy anything through my affiliate links,
I get a little commission on that.
So those are the two areas that I wanted to focus on.
And, I quote, something that I said
in that blog post from last year.
Ideally in a few years time,
I'd like brand deals to be at 50%.
Bearing in mind, that it was at, like 80%.
And also in that year, Patreon was at 1.6%
and affiliates were at 1.3%.
So that is super low.
And then we get to the last financial year.
So this is 2018 to 2019 and here is my beautiful pie chart
that I created again.
I'll probably do another blog post with the actual,
like breakdown of what each category entails.
This is gonna be more like a broader video
about how I make money online.
But, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, beautiful pie chart.
So the first thing that you will notice
is that the brand deal's slice of the pie
has gone down, and oh my God, to be honest,
like I hadn't been keeping track of this
throughout the year, I literally just created this
the other day, and I was just like, holy shit,
I did it, it worked, somehow, I don't know.
So brand deals is now at just under 60%.
So I am well chuffed with that
and then the other thing that I'm well chuffed at
that I managed to do is that affiliates
is now at 10.2%, that is from all of you buying sex toys.
Like 100% that is from you guys
using those Lovehoney discount codes that I give you
and buy yourself some toys to please yourself.
So, you're welcome, and also, thank you.
And then my Patreon has gone up to 6.2%
which I'm also well chuffed about
but I also wanted to build my Patreon
so at the moment I just have three tiers on my Patreon
but I'm going to be revamping that all very soon
which is very exciting because also,
another thing that I'm probably going to be able
to incorporate into my revenue streams going forwards
is I'm launching a new podcast soon
which you'll hear about in the future at some point.
And so I'm gonna be incorporating
some specific podcast rewards
into my Patreon, so you'll see all of that
kind of like getting announced around the same time.
I'm not sure when yet but follow me on social media.
You'll be updated there.
So those are the three main things that have changed.
The brand deals, affiliates and Patreon.
And the actual size of the pie didn't get any smaller
even though the size of the brand-deal pie got smaller.
And what I mean by that is that overall
I didn't make less money in order to do this.
So that is a good sign.
So doing something like this,
like making a pie chart out of my income
really helps me visually to see where
my income is coming from and what I should focus on more
and what I probably shouldn't focus on anymore.
So what I have gathered from this pie chart
is that merch just isn't making me any money,
like, there's probably not much point
in me doing merch anymore.
So what is happening is that my merch store right now
is 50% off everything.
So, go and grab it whilst you can.
Once an item is sold out, that is it, it is sold out.
So I mentioned on Twitter
that I was going to be making this video
and asked if you had any questions.
One big one was about the different revenue streams
and I feel like I've covered that
but I you want more detail then definitely check out
the blog posts, going into detail of each of the pie charts.
But I also got questions in general
about how brand deals work.
And I think that's because brand deals
are probably the most visible kind of monetization
that influencers, content creators get.
And so it's the one that people are more curious about
I think, like, how does that work, how do you work brands.
So as I'm quite established in my career right now
and I have a manger who does a lot of the negotiating
and reaching out and all of that stuff for me.
Most the time, brands come to me,
I'm not reaching out to brands.
It's very rare that I'll be reaching out
but it does still happen.
And it's if, there's a brand that I really, really love.
But I don't always, like, email,
sometimes it more of a like, I'll DM them on twitter
or I'll DM them on Instagram
or try and do some kind of like social media interaction
before doing the like, hard email sale.
And also some brands like to do it that way around as well,
like they they become buddy with you on social media
and then maybe you'll get an email
being like, hey you wanna work together.
So the main kinds of brand deals that I do
are YouTube videos and Instagram posts
and also Instagram stories, the price of those varies.
Like it really varies depending on what kind of content
they're asking for, who the brand is,
the timeline, et cetera, et cetera, budget, da-da-da.
So all of that varies and then as I said,
I have management and they take a cut off
all of the work that they get from me as well.
You'll probably have seen that there are brands
that I work with on multiple occasions.
Like I made a whole series of videos with PlayStation.
And I very often do videos with Always
on different campaigns and with brand deals
that are across multiple videos or multiple posts
or whatever it is, it isn't always like per post,
it's more of a, for the whole thing.
So for example, with the PlayStation deal that I did,
I got paid one sum for all four videos.
However, it you divide that sum by four
that price-per-video is lower than what I would do
like one branded video for.
But that's because I see value
in working with brands over a long period of time
and also it's that guarantee of income as well.
So yeah, it super varies.
And of course you will see that I disclose
when it's a sponsored video so they'll be like,
AD in the title,
thumbnail, and I'll say in the video
that the video is sponsored by XYZ.
When it comes to sponsored videos,
brands tend to get like one round of edits
so you'll them the first draught of the video
and then they will come back with any changes
that need to be made.
There is a contract in place, stuff like, things to say,
things not to say, it is a very different experience
to making a video that isn't sponsored.
There's just a lot more to do
and the timeline is much longer as well, so.
If a brand came to me today and was like,
we want you to make a sponsored video for us,
because also I plan my content in advance.
Like the earliest I would be able to get them in a slot
on my channel is like a month from now.
So, those branded videos that you see on my channel,
they have usually been in the works
for a few weeks to like two months in advance.
That's how long the process has been
from the original email
of like hey, do you wanna work together,
to the video coming out.
Someone on Twitter specifically asked,
have there been any deals that you've said no to
because of principles.
And yes, yes there have.
So there's been lot of deals
I've said no to for all sorts of reasons.
It's not the right time,
it just doesn't suit my kind of content,
the price wasn't right, loads of reasons,
but yes, there have also been times
when I've said no because of the values.
So I'm not gonna name any names
but it was a newspaper and I don't agree
with the values of a certain newspaper
and they wanted me to promote a new app of theirs
and I said, no.
There's the great thing about having a manger,
I didn't say no, my manager, very politely, said no.
Whereas I would've been like, are you kidding me.
Somebody asked, what's your biggest expense
when making videos.
And that is a really good question.
So when specifically making videos
I would say the biggest expense is gonna be equipment,
so camera, mic, lighting, editing software,
the computer, laptop that you do all of that on.
So those are the one-off big expenses.
The other thing is the ongoing expenses
and I had never calculated this before
because I don't have a business, financial manger person
to do that for me so I calculated
like what I'm actually spending on my business.
And I figured it out for a year.
So in one year, what are my regular expenses.
So that includes things like subscriptions,
domain names, web hosting, and then people.
Now people are the biggest expense.
That includes my salary that I pay myself,
my accountant, editor, publicist
and also I'm hiring, slash, just hired, an assistant.
So I took into consideration all of those expenses too
and so my total, yearly costs are about 40,000 pounds.
And that doesn't include one-off expenses.
So that number doesn't include things like my equipment,
things like oh, I need to travel to this place for work
to do some filming, da-da-da, here's money for that flight,
or whatever it is.
So that is like, ongoing, yearly costs.
So that was really useful for me to calculate
because what that means is that I now know
that I need to make over that
in order to survive, basically.
So yeah, to answer your question,
what is the biggest expense with making videos,
I'm just gonna say with this whole job in general,
the biggest one-off expense is equipment.
And then the biggest ongoing expense is people.
Someone else asked,
how do you budget with fluctuating income.
And that's a really good question
'cause this happens with a lot of freelancers
is that it just changes, month-to-month, week-to-week,
like jobs coming in or maybe there being a real dry period
but I'm really lucky in that I am not living
paycheck-to-paycheck through my business.
So always have a cushion there that if there is
like three months of like no brand deals,
it's just like, where is the money, then I'm gonna be okay.
And also I kind of know the general patterns
of like when there's lots of brand deals
and then when the brand's quite down.
There tends to be no work in January and February,
there's nothing, but then, things pick up around springtime
and then in the lead-up to Christmas
is also usually like a big spike as well.
General blanket rules, but again,
I have a cushion, just in case.
Another thing that people want to know about is,
how demonetisation works.
Oh boy, what a hot topic, hot topic.
So yeah, one of the other way ways that I make money
is through adverts, appearing on these videos,
on my YouTube channel, and it's called Google AdSense.
So because of the nature of some of my content,
being about sex and all of that stuff
I often get demonetized, most of my videos
are fully monetized, it tends to be
the ones about sex toys that get demonetized
and age restricted, so just a quick note about language.
Demonetized means that no ads are running on your video.
You can't monetize that content
and when a video is age restricted
which means only people who are logged in
and are over 18 can watch,
that video is completely demonetized, (speaks gibberish).
I'm like 95% sure that's the case.
The other kind of demonetisation
which isn't full demonetisation
is when you get the little yellow dollar symbol
next to a video and that means limited to no ads.
So they've kind of gone, maybe not suitable
for all advertisers and so you'll only get
some companies willing to advertise
on the kind of content that you make.
And that is often sex-related, or LGBT-related,
so you still make money on those videos
just nowhere near as much.
Here's the other thing, even with most of my videos
fully monetized I still do not make a lot of money
from AdSense and I didn't realise how much of a problem
that this was until me and a friend actually
fully compared our analytics and how much we were earning.
So, there is this thing called CPM,
and that is, cost-per-mill,
as in 1,000 views, and so you get a CPM
which is how much you're getting paid per 1000 views
on your videos and your CPM changes per country
so it depends where those views are coming from.
So, the U.S. and Australia for me
have higher CPMs than the UK
even though most of my audience are in the UK.
So if I have like a fully Australian audience,
that would be great for me
because their CPM is way higher.
And this next thing is kind of what's unclear to me
but somehow in terms of the type of channel that you have,
either overall like the type of videos that you make
or it's some kind of internal thing
of how YouTube labels your channel,
that can alter your overall CPM.
So, to the example of my friend and I.
We took a look at our last month analytics.
I'd had six times as many views as him
and about six times as much watch time in minutes as him.
So, you would think, I would have six times
the earnings of him,
because that would make a lot of sense.
No, no, no, he had twice the amount of earnings as me.
And that is because we think of the kind of content we make.
So mine is like sex-education based
and then his channel is like tech, productivity,
YouTube, e-skills based.
So there you have it, obviously this is just something
that we observed on our own analytics.
There's no like confirmation of whatnot
from YouTube and stuff and it is part speculation
but also, like holy shit, six times as many views,
half of the amount of earnings.
Just saying, so that's why I need
to diversify my income, (speaks gibberish),
or, just become a tech reviewer, on YouTube,
become a male tech reviewer on YouTube.
So I think that is a nice,
uplifting point to leave this video on.
I really hope that you've enjoyed this video
that you have found it useful, please do give it
a thumbs up if you did and let me know
in the comments if you have any more questions
about money, and making money online as a YouTuber,
social media influencer, I'm really happy
to answer them and be as open as possible.
Make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell
and I'll see you in my next video, bye.
(upbeat music)