So over the weekend I was doing some non-porn surfing on the Internet when I started to read a discussion thread on how much YouTube content creators make on video views. The original discussion was on something else entirely but it took a tangent to YouTube and the money you can make off it.
In one particular comment, someone estimated that one specific YouTube dude was making several million dollars a year on his videos just through views, not ad clicks. This a guess, as even the comment author pointed out, but it seemed to be backed up with some logical assumptions. The most interesting thing, besides that multi-million dollar figure, was that this YouTube dude primarily makes videos of him playing video games. Yes, that’s correct, he just records himself playing video games.
Ok, let’s just toss aside the millions for a second and assume he makes $1M a year doing this. That’s just stunning. You can be a millionaire by simply playing video games and putting videos of you doing that on the Internet.
For a long time, mothers all over the world would commonly say to their children, “you’ll never amount to anything if you just sit there and play video games”. For many of us, we had twist reality a bit to make that statement false. Sure we loved video games but no one would really pay us to just play. We had to go to school and learn stuff, and then make video games. It was hard work, certainly harder than just sitting at home and playing Xbox 360. Hell, even testing video games is hard work. You’re often playing broken parts of the game over and over again. Let’s not forget those eSports guys that make lots of money playing in tournaments. While they do get rewarded handsomely, they have to be in the top ten in the world in their specific game. It’s a lot of effort and it can be stressful.
This YouTube guy though, he just sits and plays the game normally. He doesn’t even have to be that good at it, certainly not top ten in the world. Someone will now literally pay you lots of money to just play video games.
So you might question the amount of money there is to be made in such gaming related videos. I was a bit skeptical too but then I have seen some anecdotal evidence. I’ve been following two particular YouTube content creators for a few years now. Both recently started a gaming channel, where they simply play games and record the game and their commentary. One of these guys never really struck me as that much of a gamer before but now here he is playing and recording all the new releases.
You know, if I knew there was this much money in these gaming YouTube channels, I would have done this a long time ago. I would have recorded hours of footage of me playing Atari 2600.