I wrote about different ways you can turn your passion for landscape photography into a business and even broken down the quarterly results of my first year on YouTube. This time around, I’d rather approach my results as a YouTuber than as a photographer creating YouTube videos. Last year, I transitioned away from focusing entirely on photography and researched more into vlogs, personal content, and travel with a heavy photographic influence. Whichever direction you decide to take on your own journey, YouTube can be a great way to engage an audience and develop a loyal following for whatever you’re passionate about.
Direct revenue from YouTube
I created 110 videos in 2022, garnering about 550,000 views. Many of my videos average around 1,000-3,000 views, which is pretty small to do full-time. As you can tell from the above information, I made about $3,100 from ads, which is nothing to talk about considering the amount of time and effort required to create those videos. This is why you must diversify your revenue streams if you decide to start making videos.
When you’re a “microchannel” like mine, views will never be your way of earning a full-time income. Even many of the biggest landscape photographers who create YouTube content don’t earn a full-time income just from views. With that in mind, let’s see how much I’ve earned from the audience I’ve grown over the past few years.
Revenue thanks to YouTube
Most of my income last year came from supportive audiences. Last summer, I switched from making weekly videos about photography to making almost daily videos about my life while traveling to Alaska. In that time, I’ve built relationships with quite a few viewers, which you’ll see reflected in my revenue breakdown in the form of donations and favors. I can’t recommend this method to everyone because it depends a lot on your personality and the content you want your channel to be.
- Donations: Between direct donations and on YouTube, I’ve earned about $5,600. I received a tremendous amount of support during my travels through Alaska, with one person donating over $1,200, which I still don’t believe. Remember, this is very specific to my own experience and also an extremely inconsistent source of income.
- Patreon: I didn’t start my Patreon until the last quarter of the year, and it brought me around $900.
- Calendar: $1,000. Living on the road means I can’t store and ship my own calendars, so it’s hard for me to sell them at a reasonable cost and profit margin, but I still enjoy making them every year.
- Digital assets: About $4,500. This includes presets for my calibration video ($5 each), several phone wallpaper packs ($10 each) and most importantly, mine Lightroom editing tools ($99), which is what I spent a lot of time developing, reflected here, is the bulk of this revenue.
- Branch: About $700. This is a combination of different software together with Amazon affiliates. I do very poorly in gathering branch related documents, so that is reflected here in my small profit.
- Sponsored Ads: I forgot to include this in my video above, but I made $300 from sponsoring the video. This is one of the best ways to earn a steady income through YouTube and definitely one that I am constantly trying to grow.
- Evaluate: I tried doing a paid review of a company, which you can explore in the video above with my thoughts on the experience, which I will never do again, but I earned about $400.
While these streams don’t correlate directly with my YouTube channel, some are still a result of the audiences I’ve built by disseminating my work through YouTube.
- Fstopper: Yes, that’s right, can you believe Fstoppers paid me to write this? Joking aside, Fstoppers is one of my most stable sources of income, while also helping to get a follower or two, which is extremely valuable. I made about $4,000 last year.
- roll: I made $2000 from Instagram last year but this is a slightly misleading statistic. You can find my breakdown on this is herebut after they switched my view target i just aim for the minimum payout of $100 per month as an easy way to make money.
- Workshop: I held a workshop in Colorado last year, it was a great learning experience and a perfect event in every way that brought me around $2,000. Technically, this could be related to YouTube, as conference attendees mostly find me there. However, all the effort and effort is more for a service, so I included it here.
- printout: I spent a ridiculous amount of time managing and growing a seamless print shop on my website last year and ended up selling five huge prints for a profit of around $500. Most of those prints are from friends or family, which is why I included them in this section. The reality is that prints don’t sell as well, and that’s why if you follow any other landscape photographer on YouTube, most of them have stopped trying to sell individual prints.
When you add it all up, it comes out to about $24,000, which is almost enough for a single guy living in their car without health insurance. Jokes aside, that’s a lot of money when you look at the bigger picture, but it’s wildly contradictory. I worked harder last year than I have in my entire life, and it has been rewarding in many ways. The support I felt was absolutely unbelievable, and I am still speechless as to how it happened. However, escalating thoughts about trying to earn a living income continued to grow, as the accumulation process was slow and inconsistent.
One thing to note about my personal experience is that I am a terrible businessman, doing a terrible job at taking advantage of profits. I reject many products, reviews, supplements or anything of this nature in the hope of finding a way to continue doing this “my way” instead of a more profitable way. If I focused my channel more on gear, created more Lightroom tutorials, and created more evergreen content, I could easily double my stats right now.
My reason for choosing a path that hurts me so much in those metrics is that photography to me is more than just editing tutorials and gear, and there’s loads of saturation in these areas. that area. Combine that with knowing that if I focus on those areas more and everything will look like a job out of place. The result is acceptance that I may not be “successful,” but I’m sure I’ve tried to find my own path. Thank you for reading and I hope these insights and numbers shed some light on the realities of being a full-time YouTuber.
