https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI0XduyaVas

I got an email the other day that said I was no longer eligible to put ads on my videos because they changed the requirements. Now you have to have at least:

• 1000 subscribers to your channel and
• 4000 hours worth of your videos have to watched by people in the past 12 months

It’s not a big deal since I only made, like, a couple bucks a month off YouTube. Mostly, it was kinda funny to be able to say that I was a professional YouTuber. So I was curious how close I was to the new requirements and I was surprised to find out that I actually had already met the first one. That’s surprising because I don’t know of anyone that’s subscribed to my channel. My wife doesn’t even watch my videos. I was also surprised to see that I was actually about a quarter of the way to the second requirement. So that’s what gave me the idea to do this video.

My kid asked me why it takes so long to make a video. In his mind, if it’s 7 minutes long, it should take 7 minutes to make. Well, here’s a rough breakdown for this video:

• 1 hour for the script
• 1 hour for prep (costumes, accents, locations)
• 6 hours for principal photography (costume changes and many, many takes because I mess up a lot)
• 2 hours for post (adding music and editing)

My revenue is typically a little under $1 for 1000 and I generally get 100-200 views per video (which is about 99-199 more than I would expect). Even if I could put ads on this video, I’d guess it’d generate about 25 cents of revenue, which is a hilariously low return for 10 hours of work. So that joke in there about it being less than minimum wage at even 125 times the revenue is true.

So why do I do it? I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. When I started, I had these fantasies about being able to do this kinda thing for a living. And I’d get kinda stressed about it. But now, it’s just a fun thing to do. I think having a good job and stable finances is a big part of it. The tricky part is finding the time to do it all because, as you can see, I’m pretty slow at this. But as it turns out, Dyson had a track meet and a kid birthday party to go to this weekend and my wife was fine with taking him on her own.

Oh, about the “music” in the video: I just made up the “outro” thing and improvised the cheesy piano thing at the end. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they were things my unconscious remembered hearing from somewhere else. These are things I’d be concerned about if I were doing this professionally. But one of the joys of doing something as a hobby is that you don’t have to worry about these kinds of things.