How I Earned Millions in 2022

so people always seem to wonder how much money YouTubers actually make which is why in this video I'm going to break down my 12 different streams of income across the last six years of this journey of being a YouTuber if you're new here my name is Ali and I used to work as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service but three years into doing this YouTube channel thing things started to take off and so I decided that I was going to take a break from medicine and explore this internet career more as a full-time thing and in the last six years now it's been an absolutely wild Journey that has completely changed my life and so on this channel I'd like to share as much of the behind the scenes stuff as possible now I do these videos every year where I document the business revenue and our costs and like the ups and downs and the failures and Lessons Learned along the way but I want to give the usual caveat that nothing in this video is intended to be a flex and since starting to do these videos where I've been super candid about the numbers I've had hundreds of messages from people who've been inspired by some way through this sort of thing and as I break down what this has looked like over the last six years you'll hopefully see that this is by no means an overnight success story so essentially for each of these 12 income streams I'm going to show you how it's changed from 2017 through 2022 I.E the last six years I'm going to start with some content text around how this thing actually makes money and how you can potentially get started with it if you want income stream number one YouTube AdSense so Google has this program called AdSense which is how most YouTubers make the bulk of their money and that's essentially those five 10 15 30 second ads that you see before videos now generally an Advertiser will pay Google to display that particular ad and then depending on essentially how many people are bidding for that ad that dictates what the price of that particular ad is and so YouTube is getting a certain amount of money from advertisers for displaying Those ads and they do a 45 55 cut so 55 of what they get paid by The Advertiser gets paid out to the Creator and essentially what that means is that anytime you watch or even Skip One of Those ads then the YouTuber who the video that is playing on gets paid a certain amount of money so what is that amount of money well it varies massive amount depending on what kind of Niche you're in depending on what country you're in and it all comes into this number called RPM which is revenue per meal which is revenue per 1000 views so how much is that Revenue well it really depends on how much advertisers actually want to bid on a particular Channel or a particular topic so for for example if you're a finance Channel your Revenue your RPMs are very high because finance companies are bidding on ads on those channels and finance companies have loads of money but if for example you do content aimed at students or you do content mostly aimed at people in countries where the purchasing power is not great then the revenue per meal the RPM goes way down so across the last six years on YouTube this is what my own RPM has looked like so I first got monetized and written around April 2018 and at the time I was making 70p which is about one dollar ish per thousand views but we can see that over time as the channel has grown it kind of dips it goes up and down and then towards the end of 2020 we were getting to the three pound level of RPM which is great that means I'm getting three pounds or 3.50 ish for every thousand views on the channel but we can see that around about April May 2021 we we've got this big spike uh a that Spike was probably driven by the pandemic where loads more people are online but I think also that Spike was driven by that was when I started making vaguely Financial themed content and so the handful of videos that I have about passive income or about investing and stuff are massively skewing the RPMs for the channel as a whole and we can see that these days the RPM is around about six pounds seven pounds per thousand views so every thousand views we get on this channel the channel will make around six or seven pounds now if you want to be eligible for this money you have to join the YouTube Partner program which is essentially when YouTube starts paying you for the ads that they display on your videos but to join the partner program you need to have at least 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 hours of watch time so if you get one viral video and then loads of people watch that video it's easy enough to hit monetization but a lot of creators will spend ages months if not years sometimes struggling to get to that 1000 subscriber or 4 000 hours watch time Milestones so that they can actually become monetized and start earning money from YouTube so looking at our stats in 2017 I made a grand total of 2.27 off of the YouTube AdSense program this was mostly because this was pre-monetization in April 2018 that was when we got monetized and the channel made sixteen thousand four hundred and fifty nine dollars in AdSense that year and just for a bit of context in 2017 I started the Channel with zero subscribers that year I made 65 videos and in 6 65 videos the channel grew to 1 600 subscribers yeah and then in 2018 half of that year I was still in medical school and the other half of the year I started working as a doctor in 2018 I made 85 videos and the channel grew to 125 000 subscribers for all of 2019 I was working full-time as a doctor so that year I made 64 videos the channel grew to 487 000 subscribers and in total we made 42 385 in YouTube ads in 2020 I was working most of the year as a doctor this was pandemic times but then the final four months of the year that was when I took a break from medicine and so that year I made 104 videos including five shorts and in 2020 the channel absolutely exploded and Grew From 487 000 subscribers in 2019 to 1.32 million in 2020 and this was almost certainly the pandemic effect as well where loads of people were online because well it was a pandemic and that meant that our total AdSense revenue for 2020 was 129 262 and then we came to 2021 and this was my first I guess full year as a full-time YouTuber although even then I was only kind of doing the YouTube channel part time and working on a bunch of the business stuff but that year we managed to publish 86 videos and 12 shorts the challenge grew to 2.5 million subscribers and in 2021 our total AdSense Revenue was 464 552 and then we come to this year 2022. so this year we've only managed to make 58 videos which is on average just over one video a week and also 25 shorts the channel has grown to 3.6 million subscribers which is pretty cool and this year we've done around 653 299 in terms of YouTube AdSense this has mostly been driven by just a handful of videos like passive income ideas and how to invest and videos about making websites where it seems that videos about finance and also about websites are the ones that have the most advertisers bidding on them and so these videos can make a stupidly enormous amount of Revenue just off a single video alone and I think what's cool about that is for example if we look at this video there's nine passive income ideas video which is a video I made I think a year ago a year and a half ago in total this is done 164 500 pounds in Revenue which is just absolutely insane similarly I did a video about how to invest for beginners a 29 minute long video where I just broke down how to get started with investing in stocks and shares and what that process looks like and again that video alone has done over 100 000 pounds in Revenue just for that video and if we look at this page over here these top three videos passive income ideas how to invest for beginners and how to build a website in 2022 just these three videos account for a third of all of the revenue that this YouTube channel has made across like 510 videos but also I think it speaks to the power of choosing your Niche like if I were starting a YouTube channel today completely from scratch I would probably choose something in the finance or business Niche because I would need to get like less than 10 times fewer views to get the same amount of money and so that kind of sensible decision making would feed into my into my strategy for a YouTube channel income stream number two Amazon Associates okay so now we're getting into ways of monetizing off of YouTube and actually most of these other income streams that we're going to talk about are ways to monetize not directly on YouTube itself and Amazon Associates is the world's largest affiliate program essentially the idea is that you can be a YouTuber of any size in fact you can be basically anyone and you can sign up for an Amazon Associates account now what this means is that you sign up for an account on Amazon and you give them your details all this kind of stuff and what that means is that if you're sharing links to Amazon product pages let's say you make a video recommending some books and you put links to the books in the video description which is something that I do quite a lot you can tag those links with your special Amazon Associates ID that means that anytime someone makes a purchase of one of those products through your link you will earn some percentage of that sale from Amazon so it might be 0.1 it might be one percent it might be two percent it's like small numbers like that but if you're selling particularly high value stuff like a camera gear that costs thousands of dollars or you just have a huge audience and you're able to sell lots of stuff through Amazon affiliate links these numbers can add up slowly over time so in 2017 I made a grand total of the zero dollars from Amazon Associates but in 2018 I managed to make 548 in 2019 we made 1 554 in 2020 we made 7194 in 2021 we made twenty nine thousand eight hundred and eighty six dollars and this year in 2022 we made forty four thousand one hundred and sixty three dollars off of Amazon Associates now interestingly these were the links that drove the most traffic so I I had a video about my evidence base skincare routine earlier this year which seemed to remarkably go viral and in that in that video we had links to like a moisturizer and a face cream and stuff like that and in that video I was not being sponsored by those companies by CeraVe or altruist or anything at all I just mentioned the product because I like them and we put Amazon affiliate links in the video description so that when clearly 1282 people-ish clicked on those links and they bought those products and so that generated some amount of money for us like one percent of the sale price of that of the item which would have been about around seven cents but if enough people order that then it becomes somewhat interesting amounts of money so essentially anytime I mention a book or a product in these videos which is very often will always put an Amazon affiliate Link in the video description and enough of those like little trickles of income from Amazon add up to get these numbers and so with income stream number two out of the way our cumulative total for 2022 revenue is 697 462 dollars so far income stream number three affiliate income Okay so we've talked about how Amazon Associates is one way of doing affiliate income I.E where someone buys something from a link and you get some percentage of that sale but actually a lot of YouTubers monetize through alternative affiliate programs as well now these tend to be deals that you would negotiate on your own so for example I have deals with around 10 different companies that I use for various things and so either they'll have an affiliate program built in or I'll email them and be like hey I would love to promote you because I'd use you already like do you have an affiliate program so something like epidemic sound which is the service that I've been using since 2017 and paying 15 a month for since 2017 to get background music royalty free background music for this channel we have an epidemic sound affiliate link which is always in the video description and if someone signed up to a trial will earn a certain amount of money from epidemic sound similarly there's a website hosting platform called ghost which I've been using since 2016 so for the last seven years now I've been hosting my website on ghost we have an affiliate deal with ghost where if someone signs up with my link then we'll get some recurring commission based on that similarly physical product like I have an affiliate link for this keyboard that I use quite often I've got an affiliate link for the paper-like screen protector which is the screen protector I have on my iPad and so these things aren't like traditional sponsorships which we're going to talk about in a sec where a company pays you to present an ad in the video it's more like if you recommend the product and you put the link in the video description and then if someone happens to buy the link then then you'll get some percentage of that sale now the thing with Amazon Associates is that those percentages are usually quite small but if you're speaking to a company directly and if they like you and you have a good relationship with them you can get for example instead of one or two percent affiliate commissions you can get 10 or 20 or 30 or even 50 affiliate commissions and so that makes affiliate income one of the larger sources of income for a lot of YouTubers that I know and the cool thing about affiliate income and Amazon Associates as well is that you don't need a certain audience size to start making money from them and usually what I recommend to people because I teach people in my part-time YouTuber Academy more on that later is that you might as well sign up for Amazon Associates from day one because even if you have like 10 views on one of your videos and you mention a book and if someone buys that book it's just kind of nice to know that you've earned like five or six cents from that someone buying a book and it fuels the fire of motivation to keep continuing with this stuff so I've been using the affiliate links since day one on my channel where no one was watching any of my videos because I knew that hey at some point it'll be nice to earn a few dollars here and there even if it's not very much anyway when it comes to affiliate income these are what the numbers look like for our channel so in 2017 made a grand total of nothing from affiliate income because that was my first year of building up I didn't really know you could do this I didn't really have any relationships with existing companies in 2018 we also made absolutely nothing from affiliate income other than Amazon Associates in 2019 things started to get interesting and that year we made 37 561 from affiliate income and I think that was mostly through the paper-like screen protector for the iPad now that was pretty sick because at the time that was almost exactly how much money I was earning working full-time as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service around about 37 38 dollars and so the fact that this YouTube channel was able to earn that much money essentially through me plugging an iPad screen protector which I still use on my iPad to this day completely blew my mind and that was one of the things that made me realize hang on I've been doing this YouTube thing for three years now maybe maybe this is actually going somewhere maybe there is something here where I could where it could turn into a viable stream of income even outside of my day job as a doctor anyway in 2020 we did 162 859 in terms of affiliate income in 2021 that number was 178 315 and this year in 2022 that number is going to be around about 235 665 from affiliate income and the cool thing about affiliate income as well is that it's very non-auduous like I have all these different deals with all these companies but it's not like they're giving me deadlines and saying you have to mention this in a sponsored video which is what sponsorships are like more on that in a sec and it's just like Hey whenever it makes sense to mention a product we'll just happen to put the affiliate Link in the video description so it's very natural it's very easy I really like doing affiliate deals and I kind of prefer them compared to sponsorship deals because sponsorship deals are a little bit more audios but anyway so far from these three in streams that means our total revenue for this year is 933 127 by the way if you're enjoying this breakdown so far I would love it if you can smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm apparently it really helps income stream number four YouTube sponsorships okay so now we're getting into interesting territory because YouTube sponsorships for bigger YouTubers can often be a far bigger source of income than YouTube AdSense itself now you've almost certainly come across YouTube sponsorships if you have spent any amount of time on YouTube at all this is where a Creator might say that this video for example is sponsored by skillshare more on those a little bit later or nordvpn or Squarespace or any of these other companies that do lots of YouTube sponsorships and essentially the idea there is that the Creator is being paid to say a kind of AD somewhere in the middle of the video or at the end of the video or sometimes even at the start of the video although that's kind of annoying I try and avoid those ones and this is where things can get a little bit dodgy because as a Creator you're very much incentivized to take on these sponsorship deals because a company is paying you money to say something but then you know depending on the Creator people have different levels of Integrity I for example don't get sponsored by companies that I don't use and so we've been offered so many different sponsors ships they'll they come in literally every single day but I always say if I'm not already using the thing then we're not going to get sponsored by them if they're offering a large amount of money I will often try out the thing and see is it a thing that I'm going to actually start using if the answer is yes and six months later I actually I have been using it consistently then we'll say yes to the sponsorship but if the answer is no then it's just it's just not worth it I've been offered things in the past where I've been like filming stuff and being like Oh I'm promoting a product I don't actually use oh this feels really bad um and I'm I'm I'm pleased to say that in those decisions I decided to cancel the sponsorship rather than plug a product that I didn't actually use anyway all that virtue signaling aside this is a huge source of income for a lot of YouTubers and it's hard to like it's it's quite opaque in the industry depending like like how much money YouTubers or creators would actually get paid for these sponsorships one number that a lot of people throw out is around about 15 CPM uh I.E per thousand views so if you look at your last 10 videos you take an average of view counts on those let's say you've got 100 000 views with a 15 CPM 15 per thousand views you're there therefore getting fifteen hundred dollars for the hundred thousand views that your channel is averaging that's just one way of valuing sponsorships some companies have higher CPM some have lower cpms that kind of thing some companies won't even base their things on cpms at all so for example if Google or Facebook are sponsoring videos for them it's a lot more about like brand awareness and brand Association rather than how many eyeballs did we get on our particular ad alternatively some companies might instead value their sponsorship offers based on the conversions and so generally like let's say you go on my special link to skillshare depending on how many people click on that special link for skillshare skillshare will track the data behind the scenes and they'll say to me next time around be like hey your link performed really well uh we're gonna up your rate or in a lot of cases your link didn't perform very well we're going to like decrease your rate and you end up in this sort of negotiation type thing where you're like playing around with this idea of views and brand awareness and like conversions and all of these different factors go into valuing the sponsorship stuff and this is where agencies can come in quite handy like for example we're part of an agency right now it's called 16th it's great and so they handle a bunch of our sponsorship deals but also we've been doing this stuff for quite a while so now we have a pretty good idea of what our channel is worth in terms of sponsorships I'm not going to give you the exact numbers but maybe if you want you can reverse engineer it from some of the stats but anyway in 2017 made a grand total of zero dollars from sponsored content and 2018 that were like I think when I had around about 80 000 subscribers that was when we got our first sponsorship deal I remember we had one deal from Primark and another and another deal from Rosetta Stone in 2018 which was pretty sick we also had three deals with with these three other companies but then the marketing company that was representing them went bust so I never got the money but anyway uh in 2018 uh the money that hit our account was uh seven thousand six hundred and nine dollars from sponsorships in 2019 that number was 39 721 in 2020 that number went up to 174 583 from sponsorships in 2021 that number was four hundred and forty thousand dollars from sponsorships and this year in 2022 that number was 598 744 ish dollars from sponsorships now I'm saying ish for this year because there is some level of uncertainty in these numbers firstly because of GBP to us the dollar conversion rates we've used the average like for each of these years like the money that actually hit our account was based in pounds because I'm in the UK and everything is in pounds but the reason I'm saying it in dollars is because dollars is more of an internationally recognized currency and only like 10 of the people that watch this channel are from the UK and generally people outside the UK don't have an intrinsic idea of what their own currency to GBP conversion is but they tend to have more of an idea of what their own country to USD conversion is firstly secondly in order to convert these numbers from pounds to dollars we're using an average conversion rate for the year so for example this year the average conversion rate was 1.2389 but last year it was 1.3757 and so some of the numbers are skewed in favor of last year because the conversion rate was a bit higher but also now that we're a big business and we have to like accounts and management accounts and and stuff those numbers like I'm filming this middle of December 2022 and so those numbers have not yet been fully reconciled for the last like month or two and our accountants are going to be taking all the numbers in and then putting it all together properly and then submitting the actual tax return to his majesties Her Majesty's revenue and Customs I'm not even sure what you call it these days hmrc and so when that happens that's when we're going to get the final tally and so to an extent the numbers for this year are a little bit of an estimate we have all the accounts reconciled up until like end of October and so for the final two months we're doing some estimates based on invoices we have due and based on some extrapolations that's why these numbers may be you know there might be a margin of error of like five percent ten percent hopefully it's not gonna be that high but who knows there's going to be some kind of margin of error just saying that up front in case someone decides to look up our company accounts because it's public information and decidencies a year later that hey the accounts you submitted don't quite match it's because we're doing some amount of estimates when it comes to making this video in particular anyway with these four income streams that brings our cumulative total revenue for the year too one million 531 871 so far income stream number five podcast all right so this is a fun one so I actually have two podcasts one is called not overthinking which is a casual fun little podcast that I've been doing with my brother since like 2019 but actually about a year ago we started a proper podcast called Deep dive deep dive without you can find it on all podcast platforms where I interview entrepreneurs and academics and author and creators and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help help live our best lives and that podcast started at zero about 12 months ago and it's grown to something like 150 000 subscribers on YouTube which is pretty cool and however many hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads I don't really look at the analytics for the podcast or the YouTube channel particularly because I try not to look at the numbers myself so firstly we get some money from YouTube ads because well the podcast is a video podcast and it's on YouTube and therefore any ads that play in the podcast we get some small amount of money towards but we also have some sponsorships on the podcast and these function exactly the same as YouTube sponsorships we might have like a handful of sponsors per podcast and it might be something like skillshare or short form or Heights or like essentially companies whose products I genuinely use who we then have deals with for the YouTube channel but also for the podcast and that's pretty cool anyway in 2017 and 2018 I didn't have a podcast and so we made zero dollars from podcast in 2019 that was when we started not overthinking the podcast with my brother and we had like a handful of sponsorship deals and made 400 that year from sponsorships in 2020 we took on a few more sponsorships and made seven thousand four hundred dollars in sponsorships before exciting that we actually didn't want to have sponsorships on not overthinking because it applied too much stress and pressure to publish consistently which is probably a good thing at the time and so now we're a bit less consistent because we don't have that pressure of a sponsorship deadline and then 2021 was when the Deep dive with Ali abdall the main proper podcast actually started the one that we're actually taking seriously and doing like super consistently and that's growing really nicely and that year the podcast made twenty nine thousand to 258 but this year has been great the podcast has grown an absolutely huge amount it's in the top one percent of podcasts shared globally according to Spotify unwrapped it's in the top one percent of podcast listen to globally according to Spotify unwrapped which is awesome but this year the podcast has in total made around 153 461 now when I made this video last year I said the podcast was actually losing money and it was at the time because we had like I think one and a bit full-time people on the podcast and 29k that we made from sponsorships didn't quite cover their salary but now the podcast is profitable which is awesome because to be honest I would run the podcast even if it wasn't profitable because it's just so fun interviewing these incredible people and learning from them and I've also made a bunch of in real life friends through people that I met on the podcast initially so it's just been fantastic all around would recommend starting a podcast or it's genuinely really hard to grow a podcast often podcasts grow through YouTube clips and through like Tick Tock and other social media type stuff and so it takes a lot of work to actually grow a podcast to the point that it gets monetized anyway with this fifth income stream considered our total cumulative revenue for the year so far is 1 685 332 income stream number six the email newsletter now this is a fun one that's only started making money this year so essentially since like March of 2018 I started an email newsletter where every week every Sunday it's called Sunday Snippets it's still continuing to this day every single week I send an email to the however many people are on the mailing list I think it's almost 200 000 people now started with like 200 but I sent an email to around like 200 000 people with my thoughts for the week and like what I've been up to and what I've been thinking about but also some books or podcasts or music or articles that I've been listening to and enjoying yeah that email is somehow read by all these people every week and that's sick but this year for the first time we actually got the email newsletter sponsored I think each issue of the email newsletter are sponsored now and we've got a load of sponsors booked in for 2023 as well which is pretty awesome and that's essentially the same idea as a YouTube sponsorship but it's in an email and so at the bottom of the email it says this issue is brought to you by skillshare or morning Brew or whatever other company is sponsoring the newsletter that week and if you're interested in making money from newsletter sponsorships essentially it doesn't really matter how big the audience is as long as the audience is targeted so actually there's kind of two ways of doing it in our case we have a very untargeted audience which is quite big and so sponsors are Keen to get their product in front of a certain number of eyeballs but I know plenty of newsletters that have only a few thousand for example subscribers rather than a few hundred thousand subscribers but those few thousand are like very targeted so for example entrepreneurs or CEOs or business owners or creators and so companies that are targeting specifically those people will pay a lot of money to Target even a smaller number of those people rather than in our case which is pay a small amount of money to Target a large number of people most of whom the product probably won't be relevant for and so if you're interested in doing this whole creative thing you actually don't need to become a YouTuber necessarily you can absolutely make a full-time living through writing on the internet through the form of like Twitter or LinkedIn or quora or medium or an email newsletter and if you're interested in learning more this book is sick the art and business of online writing by my friend Nicholas Cole we've been internet friends for the last year and met up a few weeks ago when he came to London to do a podcast recording so there will be an Amazon affiliate link to this book in the video description if you want to check it out but this is actually sick I've been recommending this book to so many people the art and business of online writing and it just shows that you can be a Creator without having to debase yourself on camera like I do every single week and I have been doing for the last six years you can do it through writing if you're a little bit more highbrow anyway the email newsletter made absolutely nothing 2017 2018 2019 2020 and 2021 even though I was writing these issues every single Sunday since 2018 onwards but this year in 2022 we made 97 739 off of sponsorships on the email newsletter which is pretty sick and that brings our total cumulative revenue for this CO2 1783 071 so far income stream number 7 social media Instagram and Tick Tock so we talked about how being a Creator you can also do through writing but also loads of people make money through Instagram and Tick Tock I don't make a lot of money through Instagram and Tick Tock because it's only this year that we started I think we did like a one or two sponsored posts because mostly it's used it's this YouTube channel that I focus on and then my Instagram is just sort of me chilling and doing stuff and my Twitter isn't optically sponsored and my Tick Tock is just me sharing tips about productivity and things like that but we want to try and do a few more sponsorships and maybe affiliate deals on those social media Platforms in 2023 but essentially because I did zero sponsorships this basically made zero money up until this year where actually we made 37 061 through Instagram and Tick Tock and a combination of sponsorships that I think we initially got for the YouTube channel and the newsletter but we kind of upsold them and be like hey or do an Instagram story or a tick tock post or things like that so 37 061 it's nothing to scoff at but not particularly interesting compared to these other different revenue streams although of course for a bunch of creators they're maybe huge on Instagram or on Tick Tock they can make absolutely stupid amounts of money through Instagram and Tech talk content that's sponsored it's kind of funny to see sometimes where you know the amount of effort it takes into make to making a YouTube video is just absolutely huge and I know people who get paid way more than I do for a sponsorship and it's like an Instagram story or it's like an Instagram reel that take that took them 10 minutes to make rather than a video that takes like two hours to film 10 hours to prepare like an editor 20 hours to edit like the amount of kind of how much money you can make for sponsorships and social media uh in terms of the amount of time invested for Instagram and Tick Tock versus YouTube is pretty skewed but having said that YouTube I think overall is a better platform for longevity I hope fingers crossed and also for kind of maturity of the monetization end and like evergreenness and all this kind of stuff which is why a lot of people who are big on Instagram and Tick Tock want to ultimately try and get big on YouTube because they realize the value of an audience on YouTube anyway um all that said that brings our total cumulative Revenue so far too one million 820 133 dollars income stream number eight merch alright this is another one that you're probably familiar with you might have seen YouTubers and influencers and creators generally plug their merch and so we launched these merch we've got this part-time productivity planner by the way these are on sale there's like an end of your sale if you want to buy these Link in the video description and this sort of to-do list um my most important task thing honestly this was a bit of a it was a bit of a side hustle and it was a bit of an experiment to see what it would be like to make physical products because I've been making digital products and courses and stuff for years but there's something cool about designing my own stationery that I wanted to do and it was fun it wasn't particularly profitable because the margins on physical products are just really annoyingly low and we kept on getting comments from people being like Oh my God I can't believe you're charging 25 for a notebook I was like bro you have any idea how much it cost to print like it cost us 15 to like print a notebook because of the small quantities that we're dealing with we're dealing with sort of hundreds or thousands of units rather than tens or hundreds of thousands of units which is where you really get bulk discounts and it was it was a fun experiment I don't think we are going to be continuing these for next year but we are working on another physical product brand which is going to be more around Tech and keyboard boards and bags and that kind of stuff more details on that to come in 2023 and of course we're gonna we're gonna be documenting the journey as we go along but the essentially product in total made sixty three thousand sixty three thousand six hundred and three dollars in 2022 there's a bit of experiment it was cool working with a company to kind of make these and fulfill them and stuff and people do seem to like them which is awesome uh and we have various team members who actually continue to use theirs to this day I used to use mine being being in being fully honest but I actually switched to the bullet Journal bullet Journal method for journaling rather than my own part-time productivity planner for various reasons um but anyway 63 603 this year from merch and that takes our cumulative total to one million eighty three thousand seven hundred and thirty six dollars so far income stream number nine digital products now we're getting into the territory where you can sell your own stuff and a lot of creators will make money through selling digital products so for example I interviewed Grace Beverly who's a used to be a fitness influencer um on my podcast super sick episode you should check it out link down below um but I interviewed Grace Beverly and when she was at the sort of you know her Fitness influencer career as one of the OG YouTubers who was doing Fitness content she was selling like PDFs of work health plans and nutrition plans and stuff for like 35 pounds thirty dollars forty dollars that kind of price range and seemed to sell around about 300 000 units and so just doing the maths of the top of my head is like she's made over 10 million dollars 10 million pounds from selling PDFs which is just insane it's so cool it's super super inspiring but that's an example of a digital product it's like a thing that it takes you a small amount of effort to make once and then you can sell it for generally a smallish amount of money two people and if you sell it to enough people you can make stupidly absurd amounts of money through selling digital products currently we don't sell very very many digital products we sell one and that's something we started selling this year and that is a ghost template the ghost is a website building platform that I've been using since 2016 for my own website and I worked with a designer and developer called Dan to design our own theme for our ghost website you can check it out on other dell.com and loads of people emailed us being like hey can I get this theme I want I want my website to look like yours and so we thought hey why don't we just sell this theme and so this year we have made a grand total of 462 dollars selling this website theme to people who happen to have their website hosted on this Niche platform ghost and also want it to look like my personal website so absolutely nowhere near the 10 million that other people that I know have made from selling PDFs and digital products but it's something we might double with more next year selling digital products we'll see what happens but anyway that brings a total cumulative revenue for this year so far too one million 884 198 income stream number 10 skillshare okay so now we're getting into the final three income sources and these are all based around online courses and this one that we're talking about right now is skillshare now you will have almost certainly come across skillshare at some point on the internet they do a lot of sponsorships with YouTubers and creators including me um but actually the way we make most of our money from skillshare is not through sponsorships it's through the fact that I have around 12 13 I've even lost count I have all these classes that I've made exclusively on skillshare and so essentially people can people with a skillshare subscription it's it's sort of like Netflix you pay I don't know ten dollars a month or something like that um and then you can watch as much content as you want and the payment process for teachers like me on skillshare is sort of like streaming royalties so for every minute of watch time that someone watches one of my classes I will earn some small amount of money maybe like three or four or five cents um but if I get several hundred thousand minutes of watch time every month then and that can correspond to a pretty reasonable salary or income from skillshare so in 2017 and 2018 I made zero online courses on skillshare so no income there but in 2019 end of 2019 was when I made my first online course on skillshare and that was a course around how to edit videos in Final Cut Pro and it took me like a day to film and it took a freelancer a couple of days to edit and that of course has been sitting on there on skillshare since September of 2019 and has been making several thousand dollars every month since then which is absolutely absurd because this one course that took me one day to film and I hired a guy to spend two days editing it and then me a day doing like the final touches like two days worth of work is making a few thousand dollars a month completely passively I never really talk about the course I think it's linked in some of my video descriptions but people just take this course I genuinely think it's really good like I've just recommended it to loads of people being like hey if you want to learn how to edit videos just take this course it's completely free you can access it on skillshare and that course makes several K every month which is awesome but in 2019 we made eight thousand four hundred and seventy dollars through skillshare through teaching on skillshare in 2020 we made four hundred and forty nine thousand two hundred and ninety five dollars on skillshare again blew my mind completely absurd in 2021 that number was even higher and it went up to 859 106 yes that year 2021 I think this was our second highest revenue Source just somehow managed to make 859 000 just teaching classes on skillshare and it's particularly good and I love skillshare so much and we have such a great relationship with them we know some of the people on their team good people because skillshare also sponsored my videos and so when I'm when I'm doing a skillshare sponsorship for a video it means I can plug my own classes on skillshare which is just like Synergy that is almost unheard of with any other sponsor and in fact skillshare actually sponsoring this very video so if for example you're interested in taking classes from all sorts of topics from entrepreneurship and graphic design and interior design and cooking and all those sorts of things you can just sign up for a free trial of skillshare if you're one of the first thousand people to hit the link in the video description you'll get a totally free 30-day free trial and in that time you can watch all of my classes I have like 12 of them there's the video editing one that we've talked about there's YouTube for beginners which is sick it's like 400 as long I think it's it's absolutely incredible loads of people have said that they would have paid like hundreds of dollars for that class but it's completely free on skillshare I've also got stuff around productivity and how to study for exams and how to use Anki flashcards and a bunch of other classes on skillshare you can watch entirely to your heart's content completely for free but just hitting the link in the video description and signing up to a totally free free trial and then once your free trial is over you have the option of signing up to the annual premium membership I sign up for it I pay for it skillshare is genuinely a good place that I go to when I want to learn something specific like I think in Photoshop or I think in After Effects usually someone on skillshare will have created a decent class on that particular thing so I can learn the thing on skillshare without having to troll through YouTube videos so if for example you are interested in taking some online classes including some of mine then you can hit the link in the video description and thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video but you see what I did there like you know this is a sponsored segment from skillshare so skillshare are paying me to say that in this video but I can plug my own classes and so hopefully some people will click the link thus they'll watch my classes and now I get like paid for doing this video but I also get paid for the watch time royalties of people taking my classes on skillshare and it becomes this reinforcing Loop um unfortunately in about the middle of 2022 this year skillshare changed their pricing structure and our monthly monthly Revenue took a bit of a hit on skillshare so actually this year we've only only made 778 131 which is still pretty absurd but it's not quite the levels of 2021 where we did 859 000 and I think I suspect next year it's going to be even lower because I think skillshare has been hit with the recession like everyone else has and is trying to save money but hey you know it's still very profitable for us to continue to keep our classes on skillshare so while it continues to make sense and we're going to keep on doing it and the other thing I like about teaching on skillshare is that it's um it's free for users to access like anyone can sign up for a free trial and then cancel it if they really want so I think it's cool because it gives especially for my classes aimed at students it means they don't actually have to pay for it rather than when my when it comes to my proper actual courses which cost quite a lot of money skillshare is nice to have that kind of low price or free alternative for people that don't want to or that can't afford to pay for the other stuff anyway with skillshare taken into account our cumulative total revenue for the year so far it's two million six hundred and sixty two thousand three hundred and twenty nine dollars so we've talked about one way of selling online courses which is on skillshare where you don't really sell them you get paid watch time royalties but another way of selling online courses is to host them yourself using a platform like podia or teachable or kajabi or Sam card like there's loads of different online course hosting platforms but essentially you get your own website like mine I think is academy.oliberal.com or whatever the subdomain is and then people can directly go on your website and directly pay you some amount of money to sign up to your online course and we have two online courses in particular that we release this year one is called the create a printer course and the other one is camera confidence so the Creator preneur course is a self-paced online course aimed at creators that want to treat their creative thing more like a business so it's got three modules workflow cash flow outflow it's about how to optimize your systems and structures to think of your creative thing more as a business it's about how to make money figuring out what products to sell to your audience and then how to Outsource and build a team and essentially what does it look like if you were as a Creator think of your thing more like a business unless like a creative creative Outlet or whatever anyway I think we sell that course for around 800 and some amount of people buy it every month which is awesome and we also have a much cheaper camera confidence course which is you know a couple of hours long it's some video modules and some workshops and trainings and stuff where I teach people how to be more confident on camera and I think we sell that for 149 so those two are self-hosted courses they're not on skillshare they're not available anywhere you're like you have to actually pay money for those courses or you can sign up to a scholarship if you want because we give out free spots for people that can't afford it but anyway that aside this year was the first year that we did that to be honest the reason we did that is because a couple of years ago I realized that the skillshare thing was probably too good to be true and that this was not going to be sustainable I was like there's no way in hell skillshare can continue to sustain paying us stupid amounts of money every month for us to host our courses on there and immediately I was like right guys I said I said this to the team we need to start making our own courses and hosting them ourselves because when you host something yourself and it's your own product you're not reliant on a third-party platform and their rules so like we saw this with skillshare it's like it had I it was a long time coming but a few months ago they changed their monetization strategy and that immediately took a 50 hit to our revenue from skillshare like me immediately overnight we lost 50 of our skillshare Revenue I was like okay cool fair enough we kind of knew this was coming similarly you know I've got a couple of YouTuber friends that got banned from skillshare and overnight they lost all of their skillshare revenue and this is what happens when you become overly reliant on a third-party platform where you don't control the the asset yourself and so you know we still use skillshare it's still great we still love the team Good Vibes all around but in terms of diversification in terms of just being sensible with kind of how we're making revenue from the business it made so much sense to have our own products that we could sell as higher ticket courses that we hosted ourselves anyway uh we made absolutely no money from self-hosted courses in 2017 18 19 20 and 21 because we didn't have any all my courses were on skillshare but this year we've made actually 179 000 and 26 off of selling these two self-hosted courses haven't marketed them or sold them particularly well which they've just been on the website and occasionally people will buy them and that's awesome but that brings our cumulative total revenue before we get to the final income stream two two million 841 355 income stream number 12 cohort based course sources now in 2020 towards the end of 2020 I started a course launched a course called the part-time YouTuber Academy and we ran one cohort One Life cohort in 2020 and then three in 2021 and then so far three in 2012 three in 2022. so so far we've done seven cohorts of this course and of course it's basically like a live online course where for either four or five or six weeks depending on which cohort it was um people come in we have a few hundred people and then I teach them on like live Zoom calls and we have loads of like accountability and support and feedback and workshops and it's a very very very involved thing it's like doing I guess uh doing like a physical course in real life where you have workshops and boot camps and things like that but it's all online over zoom and we have a few hundred people each time and so far I think we've got like 2 000 something students uh through the cohort but this is what took our numbers to absolutely insane levels so in 2020 we made 282 414 in top line revenue from the cohort uh this is not taking costs into account it costs a lot to put one of these cohorts on we have to hire a whole team for it and a whole bunch of student supporters and there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into it and the team like do a phantom job of putting everything together for these cohorts I don't have to do very much these days I just show up and teach and provide the content and the material and stuff but it's a team that does most of the work so there's a lot of costs associated with this as well but then in 2021 we made an absurd number two million essentially just over two million dollars two million 50 000 ish dollars from the three cohorts of our part-time YouTuber Academy this is absolutely absurd um I think it was middle of pandemic people were flocking to online education um we had so many students take our course we had a bunch of success stories from the previous cohorts of the course so people were like oh sick this is awesome and it just it just absolutely exploded beyond our wildest dreams and then we made a couple of mistakes number one we kept on raising the prices because we were like oh this is just selling out let's just keep raising the prices let's keep adding more and more stuff to it I think we dipped beyond the point where it would became sort of a comfortable amount of money so right now I think the cheapest package for the course is two thousand dollars which is a lot for someone to just take out their card and sell and having spoken to people who do sales and marketing stuff they've all said basically that this two thousand dollar Mark is usually the mark the point where someone would have to you know pick up the phone or hop on a zoom call with someone to actually have a conversation with a real life person before spending this kind of money and we just sort of kept increasing the point increasing the prices beyond that point and that was probably a bad idea but also we also then did a really bad job with sales and marketing overall and in 2021 we had a bunch more videos teaching people how to be creators that plugged the course and in 2022 I think also because we made fewer videos overall and I was mostly focused on my book and I was kind of like ah don't really care about making YouTube videos aimed at YouTubers because that's not really my content but that was the sort of videos that sold the course that ended up meaning that we've got we got fewer people onto our waiting list and even though our conversion rates kind of stayed exactly the same I.E if someone looked at the page they were just as likely to buy this year as compared to last year we just had fewer people coming into the top of the page because I made less videos about how to be a YouTuber but also I suspect you know in 2022 the world came back to life people stopped caring so much about online courses and live cohorts and everyone else I know who runs live cohort courses also had a little bit of a dip but in 2022 all of that aside we made 1 759 238 from our part-time YouTuber Academy so a little bit of a decrease in Revenue compared to last year um but I think makes sense given that we didn't really focus on sales and marketing at all and given that we have a recession and that we made the mistake of increasing prices and but yeah loads of lessons taken forward for 2023 to see what we can do next when it comes to the part-time YouTuber Academy it's super fun our students love it we have a very low refund rate like we basically offer refunds to anyone if they don't like the course no questions asked broadly um and very very few people take us to take us up on that so I think it's really solid course but I think kind of we sort of failed a little bit in sales and marketing but even though we failed a bit in sales and marketing we still managed to do 1.76 million dollars worth of Revenue which I think is reasonable since people have seen what these numbers are like a lot of people have always asked me like would I recommend doing a cohort based course like would I recommend running one the answer is probably not it is so much work it's so much effort and actually a lot of the time and effort that went into this course could have gone into maybe better things but depending on how you define better like I could have made more YouTube videos I could have focused more on my book or you're spending so much time and effort me and the team overall on this course and trying to serve our students as best as we could it kind of took took my eye off the ball which is like the thing I actually care about the thing that I personally want to do that makes me fulfilled is Reading Writing learning teaching sharing stuff on the internet and doing it for free if we didn't need to make money I probably wouldn't run any paid courses because I think it's nice that everything is freely available on the internet but like we ended up in this weird situation where you know the course did Super well in 2020 and then did really ridiculously well in 2021 and we hired a load of people and then our fixed costs went up and then we kind of needed to sustain a certain amount of Revenue to be able to actually keep the business profitable so we had to run various cohorts of this course again in 2022 and we ended up on this kind of weird hamster wheel where even though the course was it was it was just intended to be a bit of a side Hustle but it just ended up completely taking over the business that I don't really want to be in the business of teaching people how to start YouTube channels live in person on Zoom uh for very for for a particularly long time that that's not what makes my heart sing what makes my heart sing is like sharing stuff and making videos about it and then moving on to the next thing so you know lots of questions to figure out like do we want to continue with this do we not like what format does it look like it makes a lot of sense to continue doing it because people love it and it's still fun to do but it's just not quite the core focus of the business and so that's one of the things that I've been talking a lot to my CEO coach about to figure out hey when you have this kind of side hustle that's somehow been doing really well but it's not the main thing that you want to do as a business what'd you do about that I don't know I'll let you guys know when once we figure it out but now let's add up all the different revenues for what's been going on so far at the end of this very long and rambly video by the way if you like this I'd love it if you can leave a comment about what was your favorite part of the video what was most useful um not sure honestly if we want to continue doing these videos for next year and onwards um these numbers are starting to get to a point where they're just unattainable for most people or unrealistic for most people and I'm just a bit concerned that certainly like at the start of the journey it's kind of cute sharing real real numbers like oh my God it's so transparent and nice when the numbers just become absurd it almost feels too much like a flex and not enough like an educational thing I don't know but anyway I would love to hear in the comments what you thought of uh this particular video whether you think it's useful to continue doing this sort of stuff every year or not would have to hear any any thoughts on this because I'm actually I'm genuinely not sure I'm not sure if it is worth continuing doing videos like this but anyway we're doing it for this year so anyway if we add up overall revenue from all these 12 income streams what do we get for each year Well in 2017 it basically made absolutely nothing and we're going to talk about costs as well but basically zero in 2017. let's call it 2.27 because that's what YouTube says we made in AdSense in 2018 our total revenue was 24 615 in 2019 it went up to 130 000 and 91 in 2020 it actually shot up to 1.213 million dollars in 2021 it showed up even more to four million 51 to 116 and so far for this year our cumulative total is four million six hundred thousand five hundred and ninety three dollars so 4.6 million dollars which again is subject to a little bit of change depending on like what our accounts look like and what the dollar exchange rate and all this kind of stuff looks like but we've tried our very best to double check all these numbers and just make sure they are as accurate as we can possibly make them in the absence of actually having verified management accounts from our accountants who we pay lots of money to make sure this stuff is right um but that'll come out in the next few months so we'll see but actually revenue is only part of the equation and if we talk about costs then things paint a little bit of a different picture so in 2017 our total costs were around about 5156 this was mostly on gear and just actually getting started with YouTube and that meant the profit that year was negative five thousand one hundred fifty four dollars in 2018 we mentioned how our Revenue was 24 615 but we actually had thirteen thousand three hundred forty nine dollars in costs again mostly camera equipment and that kind of stuff and that meant that we had a profit for the first time of 11 266 in 2019 our Revenue was 129 691 and the costs were around twenty five thousand five hundred forty four again gear and getting a new Mac and actually Outsourcing editing for the first time so we had a profit of around about 104 147. in 2020 the costs really started to rise so we had a revenue of 1.21 million but we had costs of 256 740 leading to a profit of 956 267 and then in 2021 yes our Revenue was 4.05 million dollars but we actually had costs of 1.5 million dollars one million five hundred twenty five thousand four hundred and two which resulted in a profit of 2.5 million so two million 525 714 now the interesting thing is here that even though in 2022 our Revenue went up by a little bit to 4.6 million rather than 4.05 million our costs actually went up by an absolute Mile and our total costs this year were 2 two million five hundred and twenty seven thousand three hundred fifty six dollars we spent a whole million dollars extra this year compared to last year yes there was a bit of like currency exchange rate but it's just an absurd amount of money that we spent this year on various things and that meant that the profit this year was actually lower than what it was last year and this year our overall profit for the business was 2 million and seventy three thousand to thirty seven dollars give or take a few percentage points whenever the accounts get reconciled now this is super interesting it's the first time in my life where we've had a dip in profitability a massive spike in costs and I've made a video over there where I talk about like all of these failures in entrepreneurship like all the ways that I failed this year to get to a point where we're actually less profitable this year than we were last year so if you're interested you can check out that video over there but yeah thank you so much for getting to the end of this video please do click there if you'd like to see kind of my response to the fact that our profit is lower than it was last year have a great day and I'll see in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 1,174,302

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, how much money youtubers make, how much do youtubers make per view, money on youtube, how much do youtubers make, how much I make as a youtuber, ali abdaal money, ali abdaal business, how much does Ali Abdaal make, how do youtubers make money online, how do youtube businesses work, how does youtube pay you, how does youtube pay, money youtubers make, sponsorships, online business, online money, make money online, passive income, passive income ideas

Id: KvDHMeJJ_cY

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023