It only took 14 years and 4 months but I did it :) I used to celebrate Flickr Milestones too which by the way as of today is 5.6 million view of my photos with another half a million of my photo stream and half a million of my albums but still, that’s pretty amazing that YouTube has surpassed Flickr and to be quite honest, while I established my channel in 2006, things really didn’t start heating up until 2015 when I purchased my 2016 Golf R.
Today, I have 8,836 subscribers and my videos are viewed 150,000 times a month. Yes I recognize that for someone who has THAT many views, I should have more subscribers but I’ve always tried to be as natural and organic as possible where I don’t ask people to subscribe because then I am in debt to doing things for them. Instead I just like to make a video for myself and if people watch it, great. That mentality has translated to where only 4% of the views on my videos every year are from subscribers. The rest are people who find the videos via YouTube or Google searches for specific topics.
The really impressive number that I like to sit back and just think about it the fact that I’ve uploaded 1,241 videos. That’s a LOT of videos when the average is 15 minutes per, you’re talking about 310 hours or 13 days of video I’ve uploaded in total with most of that being done in the lat 5 years.
As for pre-tax income, it’s not that impressive. I’ve made $14,142.87 USD in YouTube money with my 7 million views. YouTube also says that the watch time of all videos combined is roughly 320,000 hours of human life wasted watching my video. That’s pretty sad when you think about it.
I much prefer views milestones to subscriber ones primarily because of the accessibility of it. It’s estimated that I’ll be at 10 million views by June 2021 (just 8 months from now) but unfortunately I won’t be at 25,000 subscribers for 1 year and 10 months (8/14/2022). 25,000 subscribers is when I finally unlock all of the YouTube Creator perks. You finally get a wall plate to show off at 100,000 subscribers which, at this rate I’ll hit in 4.5 years (4/14/2025). I’ll be much more happy that at the same time, I’ll have hit 100 million views. Extrapolating my earnings so far, I’ve made 14,100 USD in 7 million views so at 100 million, I should have earned 202,000 USD from YouTube revenue. Earning an extra 200 grand over the next 5 years is honestly way more exciting than having 100,000 subscribers :P
One more remark too, my catalogue has a pretty good staying power. If I stopped uploading today, I’d still average roughly $200 a month for the next 10 years in revenue since my videos all have a long tail associated with them. They get very few views initially (since I have so few subscribers) but rack up many thousands of views over many years from now as people google search for oil changes and other how-tos over time.
Anyway, this all started as me being stoked about 7 million views. Not bad for just random videos posted by some dude in New Hampshire.