I suspect that if you add up all the money Youtubers make, and you divide it by all of the man hours people spent trying to make a living off of Youtube, “poverty stricken PhD candidate” would start to seem like a good financial decision.
It’s just like any other fame/luck based career. The top 2% make 98% of the money. Back when blogging was the new hotness, I read that 98% of bloggers would never make a single penny off their efforts. Which seems crazy to me considering how easy it was to build a quality blog and throw AdSense on it, but that was the statistic.
That’s why, with any potentially lucrative hobby where success is based mostly on luck, you should only do it for fun while you save enough money to try it out for a month or two to see how you like it as a job. But you shouldn’t quit your day job until you have some GOOD evidence that you’re not going to be dirt poor if you pivot to doing your hobby full-time. You need a good following and a GREAT safety net before you make the jump.
It was possible to make money with a blog. I had a niche one for years, I didn’t make much, but nonetheless I got money from it.
Then Google changed how Adsense worked and paid.
It then became impossible to make money unless, you guessed it, you were the top x% of bloggers.
I supported my family with my blogs for around 6 years. Then things started changing, and I didn’t like what they were changing to. I have zero interest in creating vapid bite-sized blurbs, or YouTube videos. So, I sold the sites and moved on with my life. Granted, the transition wasn’t as seamless as I made it sound just now. It got hard, and I was broke as fuck for a while. It ended up working out well for us in the end though.
Welcome to the academic precariat.
I was expecting Toby McGwire. I’m pleased with the switcheroo.
