- All right, so in this
video, I'm gonna break down all of the money that I've made in 2020, firstly from what used
to be my full-time job, working as a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service. But then I'll also talk about
the various different sources of active and passive income in my life, from being a YouTuber and the
businesses surrounding that. A few caveats before we
get started with this. So I am all about transparency and honesty when it comes to money. I think the fact that we
as a society treat money as a completely taboo topic
and you're not allowed to say how much money you're making and you're not allowed
to talk about money, I think that leads to a lot of problems. And actually for me
when I first got started with this whole journey of entrepreneurship and being a creator, it was seeing other
people being transparent about how much money they were making and crucially how they were making it, that helped me get started on this path. Now doing a video like this is always gonna have its drawbacks. There's kind of two sets of drawbacks. One drawback is for me,
because if I talk about how much money I make, I run the risk of looking like a thwart. The other drawback is that 2020, has been a difficult
year for a lot of people. And so my concern is that
if I post a video like this, which some people will interpret as, look at me, look how
much money I'm making, that when we're in the
middle of a global pandemic, when tons of people have lost their jobs and have been struggling financially, feels like it would be in poor taste. And I really wasn't sure whether
to post this video or not but I did a poll on Twitter
and Instagram and YouTube, and an all three of those polls, around about 85% of people said
that I should post the video and only about 15% said
I shouldn't post it. And to be honest, there was
one kind of category of comment that really summed it up. It was that this sort of
video helps and inspires and benefits and educates
some people in the world. There are gonna be some people
who watch a video like this and feel bad about it, but no one is forcing
you to watch this video. I trust that you have the self-awareness that if you've been struggling
through the pandemic, you probably don't wanna watch this video. If you know that looking
at someone else's salary and seeing how much money they make, is likely to cause you to feel bad, for whatever reason please
don't watch this video. Please consider this your
trigger warning upfront. The example I like to think of is that I personally don't
like watching horror films. I think they're boring
and I think no one cares. And I don't understand why
people watch horror films 'cause they're just not fun. But I have a choice about whether I want to watch a horror film or not. I would not complain that, oh, why is Netflix still making horror films? Just because I don't want
to want to watch them. Secondly, it's worth addressing why I'm making a video like this. Now there's two main reasons for it. Number one, is because this sort of stuff gets a lot of views. Now being a YouTuber whose YouTube career is built off of essentially getting views, which is the case for
every single YouTuber, we all are doing whatever
we can to get views and I'm open and transparent about money. And I know that this is a topic
that's likely to get views because other people are
intrigued by this thing. So, having owned up to that upfront, hopefully you as the audience,
won't hold it against me, that I'm making a video
like this to get views because that's literally
how the game works, hate the player, don't hate the game. That's not other way around, but whatever. The second reason for making
this video is more altruistic. I made a similar video in May of 2020, where I broke down how
much money I was making as a doctor and from different sources of passive income in a
random week in March. And off the back of that video, hey I got a lot of views, which was nice, but more importantly, lots
and lots of people messaged me on Instagram, Twitter,
email, YouTube, whatever, saying that that video
inspired them to start their own entrepreneurial
or creative journeys. And I personally know
at least a dozen people who have started YouTube channels and started making online courses
off the back of that video where I showed how much
money I was making passively through the stuff that I've
been doing over the years. So my hope in making a video like this is that it'll inspire some of you guys to start your own creative
slash entrepreneurial journeys, slash to take it more seriously because you can see
kind of what is possible if you seriously pursue trying to make a living on the internet. The final caveat that I'll say before diving into this video, it's gonna be a long series of
caveats, but it's important. The final caveat is that
this takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time to get right. I have been working on making money on the internet since the age of 12. I am now 26, so for the last 14 years I've been spending a large
amount of my free time trying to do various things on the internet to make money online. When I was in school, I
taught myself how to code and every year me and my
friends would try and come up with a new business idea and
build a website around it. And every single year, all
of those things failed. And on top of that, I started working as a freelance graphic
designer and web designer, I was making like a few tens
of dollars like here and there from hours and hours and
hours of my own time, helping other people build their websites. Now, for about seven years, none of this stuff really
made any real money but when I was 19 and I was in my second year of med school, I built a business. And that was the first
thing that I've done that ever succeeded did and
it succeeded really well. But I think a big part
of why it succeeded, firstly was luck. Secondly was lots of unfair
advantages that I had but thirdly, it was the
fact that I had been trying to do this business thing for a solid seven years before then. So, none of this is an overnight success. This business was
successful for several years and then in 2017, in my
fifth year of medical school I started my YouTube channel. And again, that was a long and hard slog. It took me 52 videos to hit
my first 1000 subscribers. I did not make any money and basically the first year of putting
out two YouTube videos every single week for a whole year. And on YouTube for the last
three and a half years, I've basically been publishing
two videos a week on average, every single week without
taking a break at all. I think there was one week, I
think that Christmas of 2018, where I took a break from
publishing for a week. So, why am I saying all this stuff? Normally I don't like
talking about this stuff because there are so
many different factors that go into something being successful, luck plays a big part of it
and I've been really lucky and lots and lots of unfair advantages and privileges are another part of it. But, I was talking to
these friends of mine and they said that sometimes, if you're just watching my videos, you don't see the behind the
scenes of what is going on. And I might give the impression that actually all of this
stuff is really easy. I don't like talking about this because actually it was just fun for me and it was a lot of work,
but I considered it fun. And when you consider it fun, it doesn't really feel like work. But I do not want anyone to walk away from this video thinking that
getting rich on the internet is like an overnight success thing. This has taken me literally 14 years, like this is 14 years of work, kind of getting home from
school, getting home from uni, getting home from work and
putting in hours and hours and hours into improving things like design, coding, editing,
filming all of this stuff that has led to this point. So please don't think this is
an overnight success story. There is no such thing
as an overnight success. It always takes work. And that is gonna be a
point that I'm gonna keep on returning to throughout this video, that if you seriously want to
get to this level or even more or even less of making money online, you have to put in large amounts of work over a very long period of time. But the good news is, that all
this is really, really fun. So it won't feel like work, hopefully. All right, with all of that caveating and virtue signaling out of the way, let's now break down
all the various sources of income in my life, starting with my salary
of being a junior doctor. So, I graduated from medical
school in July of 2018, and I was working full-time as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service from August of 2018,
through to August of 2020. And now as of December 2020, I've been unemployed for four months, in that I've taken a one year
break from full-time medicine so that I could do this internet stuff. I was intending to travel the world but then the pandemic happened. And so I'm stuck sitting
at home in Cambridge, making silly internet
videos like this one. Anyway, breaking the numbers down from how much I earned this year. I worked full-time as a doctor from January through to
the end of July, 2020. And so that was seven
months worth of work. And in those seven months I
earned roundabout 22,100 pounds. I was working as a senior house officer on obstetrics and gynecology. And my average working hours were 46 hours a week on average, some weeks was more,
some weeks was a bit less but it averaged out to about 46 hours. So if we take that 22,100 pounds and divided by the 1,288 hours that I spent at work this year, that comes up to an hourly
rate of 17 pounds an hour. But if we take commuting into account, I had to drive an hour and back to get to work every single day. And so overall, 10 hours
per week of commuting means that it was 280 hours of commuting over the seven months. And so my total hours kind of getting to work and working, were 1,568 hours. And if we calculate the real hourly rate, it ends up being around
about 14 pounds an hour. This is before tax. This is before like the petro cost of going to work back and forth. But roundabout 14 pounds
an hour, this is fine. This is reasonable. It's a very reasonable living
to make 14 pounds an hour, from working full-time as a junior doctor. And as in the UK as you
get more and more senior, your paying increases a little bit. And to be honest, working
as a doctor is quite fun. I enjoyed it and I enjoy the commute because I can listen to
audio books and podcasts. And none of this really felt
like any kind of hardship. Now, a few reflections on this point, in the UK it is very popular for doctors to complain that
they don't earn enough money. And yes, if you compare our salaries, if you compare my salary as a doctor to my friends who are at the same age, who went to the same university, who studied things like
maths or economics or law who are now working in
London, doing fancy jobs working for big law firms
or for big investment banks, they're making in the region of, I don't know, 150,000 pounds a year, sometimes even 200,000 pounds a year, sometimes 100,000 pounds a year. Those are the sorts of salaries
that you get to in the UK when you have been a
fully qualified consultant for many, many, many years. And if you're doing a little
bit of private practice, like the standard salary for a consultant and you're fully qualified
doctor who's about age 35 in the UK is about a 100,000 pounds and friends of mine
who have like two years out of university
studying law or economics are making that basically from day one. And so when we compare our
salaries to that of our friends, it seems like it's very
low, but objectively doctors are still in the top
20% of earners in the UK. And so it's nothing really to scoff at. I do not wanna give the impression in this video or any other time that working as a doctor is like really, really, really hard. And like, you know,
we're making a sacrifice because we actually do
get paid very reasonably for working as a doctor. Now, the reason I am not
personally a huge fan of kind of the full-time medicine thing, is usually it leads to reliance on a single source of income. And I think in general,
when you're reliant on one thing for like a
big chunk of your life or your lifestyle that is potentially a little bit problematic, at
least that's how I see it. And there's a question that
I always like to ask doctors when I would hang out
with them being like, hey, if you won the lottery, would you still continue to do medicine? And every time I've asked this question, about half of the people say they would leave medicine completely. In fact, one dude even said he would leave in the middle of the operation. And the other half of people say that, yeah I'd still do
medicine because it's fun but I would go part-time. And the next question, when I ask, why don't you go part-time now, it's always related to do with money. It's always something
like, I've got a mortgage, or I've got bills, or I've got to send the kids
to private school or whatever. And so I've been asking
this question to doctors since I was in my first
year of med school. And that response made me
realize that for me personally, I'm not saying this is true for everyone but for me personally, I
don't wanna be in a position where I am doing a job full-time and I feel like I have no other options because of the money situation. So ever since my first year of med school well and actually from
the age of 12 before then, I've been trying to make money online. But when I started asking this question that was when I really
started taking it seriously because I knew I wanted to get to this point of financial independence. That's not to say that I
don't wanna be a doctor because I do, I just
wanna work as a doctor part-time rather than full-time. I think working three
days a week as a doctor would be really fun, but
working five days or six days or seven days a week as a doctor, as fun as the job is, I
feel like doing anything for that long runs the
risk of burnout and stress and all these different things. And I kind of wanna have a
bit of a life outside of work. So, that was how much money
I earned as being a doctor in the UK in 2020, 22,100 pounds, which is roundabout $25,000,
something like that. And as you'll see this
makes up a very tiny slice of the overall pie of the
money that I've made this year. So now let's move on to the more creator, entrepreneurial internet
ways of making money. The next big source of income in my life and in the life of most YouTubers is Google AdSense, which is basically those five second ads that you see on YouTube
videos before the video. And sometimes even those little like auction banner ads that
you see underneath the video. If you wanna get started doing this, you need to have a 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on YouTube which takes a while to get, for example for me it took me 52 videos and six months to hit a 1,000 subscribers. So, if you're thinking of
getting started on YouTube, then it takes a lot of videos. Let's talk about the numbers now. So in 2017, I was doing
YouTube for six months, I made 59 videos and I had 1,600 subscribers
by the end of 2017. In total, I made a revenue
of one pound and 76p in 2017, basically made zero money on YouTube. Then in April of 2018, I turned
on the monetization button on my channel because I could, and because I knew it was
gonna make some kind of money. And that year I made 88 videos in 2018. So on average one and
a half videos a week, to make a total of 147 published videos and approximately around
120,000 subscribers. Now this was pretty rapid growth. It's about I think three times faster than the average person takes
to hit a 100,000 subscribers. And in 2018, the channel
made a total AdSense revenue, of 12,329 pounds and 67ps. So not quite enough to
sustain a full-time living but coming pretty close to it. And like with all things, these are on an exponential
compounding curve, in that the more effort
and time you put into it, the more likely you are to
succeed over the long-term. In 2019, I was a bit of a slacker. I only made 62 videos,
which was on average a one point something a week, bringing us to a total of 209 videos. And at the end of 2019, I had
around 450,000 subscribers. And that year I made an AdSense
revenue of 33,186 pounds and 14p, so almost
matching what I was earning as a junior doctor working in the UK, 33,000, definitely a full-time living if you're a YouTuber living
in the UK that was in 2019. In 2020, things have
been really taking off and things have become
particularly insane. So, so far this year
I've published 98 videos, giving us a total of 307 videos. And I've got just under
1.3 million subscribers. As of the time of this recording. This is the 15th of December. And so far my videos have
got 57 million views in 2020, and I've made a 100,695 pounds and 12p off of Google AdSense. I eat those five second
ads on YouTube so far and we've still got about
two weeks to December. So that might increase it a little bit. This is absolutely insane. This is like an absolute
ton of money to be making. And this is how much kind of
to compare it to a doctor, a consultant working
full-time who is anywhere between the age of like 35 and like 65 would be making working in
the National Health Service. Let's reflect a little bit on this. So, like every good thing in
life, the progress is slow but if you keep at it consistently over a very long period of time, then things will hopefully
start to compound. Like I said, it took me 52 videos to get my first a 1,000 subscribers. So if you have started
YouTube and you have not yet made 52 videos and you're complaining that you're not yet on
a 1,000 subscribers, then that's how long it took for me. And actually mine was twice as fast as the average number of
people who do YouTube. In fact, let me go grab the slide. Let's put this number
into context as well. So, I've recently finished my first cohort or they live online course
called Part-Time YouTube Academy. And this is a slide, a series of slides that we showed people asking the question, to how many videos do you need to make to succeed on YouTube? And this is data that
comes from Tube Buddy which is a YouTube Chrome extension thing. And they've analyzed data from millions of channels that they've got access to. So have a think about this. Like what do you think is
the average number of videos that it takes for a channel
to hit a million subscribers? Like genuinely, have a think about it and just come up with
a number in your head. The answer is 3,873 videos. What do you think is the
average number of videos it takes to hit a 100K
to a million subscribers? Well, Tube Buddy tells us the average number is 1,171 videos. The average channel which is 10K to 200K subscribers has 418 videos. And the average channel
with 1K to 10K subscribers has 152 videos, 152 videos
is the average channel that's between 1K and 10K subscribers. These are the numbers for my channel. So it took me 52 videos to
hit a 1,000 subscribers. And then 91 to hit 10,000. It took me 92 videos,
10,000 and then 143 videos to hit 100K, 287 videos to hit a million. And now we've got like 310,
315, something like that videos on the channel
and things are growing. So, if you compare these
numbers with the average, my channel grew twice as
fast initially as the average and is now at the point where it's growing 10 times faster than the average, because like everything
things compound over time. So hopefully this gives you an idea, about what it takes on average
to get started on YouTube and to achieve kind of this
level of numerical success. So, if you look at my numbers,
there are a lot above average but it's still quite a large number of videos to get to this point. Now, another thing that
we teach on the course, the Part-Time YouTube Academy, is the three factors that it takes to get success on YouTube although this applies
to everything in life, which is that success equals
work multiplied by luck multiplied by unfair advantages. Work in the context of YouTube means consistently putting
out tons and tons of content. I've been doing it on average twice a week for the last three and a half years. If I'd done it three times a week, we'd probably would have grown faster. If I'd done it once a week, we'd probably would've grown slower but it does take a
consistent level of work. And it's not just about
pumping out content. It's about pumping out content and trying to make it
as useful as possible. So that involves doing lots of research, figuring out what the audience wants, trying to teach myself
lots of different things, trying to present it in
like a way that makes sense. Trying to get the production value, spending tens of thousands of
pounds on camera equipment. Spending more than tens
of thousands of pounds on like growth coaching and analytics and other people to help
consult on the channel and figure out how to make it grow. It involves spending
hours and hours and hours, watching tons of tutorials
about how to edit videos 'cause I knew absolutely nothing about editing before I got started. And later this year it's
involved hiring a team. So now we have two full timers and me and a part-time assistant working to keep this channel running. This is quite a lot of work. It also involves getting
home from work each day, hard shift working as a doctor, #Savinglives, whatever you wanna call it. And sitting on this desk
in front of the computer for like six hours every
evening, making more videos, writing more videos, even
doing some editing now, filming videos, like all
of these different things. This is quite a lot of work. If we're asking, is it worth it? The answer is absolutely yes for me because I enjoy this stuff. It really doesn't feel like work. And there's a great quote
from Naval Ravikant, which is that "you wanna find something "that looks like work to others, "but it feels like play to you." And all of this stuff, most of the time, run about 80% of the time
feels more like play to me than it feels like work. And to be honest, if I
wasn't enjoying myself, this wouldn't have been worth it. Like I just wouldn't
have been able to keep up this level of consistency
and this level of output if I wasn't already
having fun along the way. And one thing that I
always like to keep in mind is this quote from
Brandon Sanderson's book, the "Stormlight Archive," which is a journey before destination. Like the journey is more
important than the destination. And if you can enjoy the
journey along the way then everything in life becomes fantastic because you're having loads
of fun doing the thing. And then if you're
doing it for long enough and consistently enough and stacking up all the different unfair advantages, then you might even succeed
on the numerical level if that is what you care about. Let's talk about luck now. So, luck is obviously important. You know, I got lucky, I
was in the right place, at the right time. And the way the YouTube algorithm works is sometimes your video is gonna take off and sometimes it's not, and you can never really control this. You just have to put your
best into every video. And you hope that the
algorithm gods will reward you by making a video go viral. But the way I think of it is that there are different types of luck. There is the sheer dumb luck that comes from buying
a single lottery ticket and winning it, that is just pure luck, no one could have control that. But then there's another sort of luck, which is the sort of luck you get when you put lots of work into something. Like for example, let's
say you watching this you were to make it your life's mission, that anytime you go out on the streets, when it's not a pandemic
or even before it is, anytime you go out on the streets you would make it a point to say hello and have a 30 second conversation with every single person that you meet. Then maybe after a few
weeks, a month of doing this, maybe you meet someone who
happens to be an investor and who wants to invest in your company or you meet someone who happens
to end up being your spouse or whatever, people might
look at that and say, well you got lucky cause you stumbled into the right person at the right time. But in a way you did make your own luck by just doing this thing a lot of it, a lot of times, and most of
those didn't lead to anything, but some of them would. And it's kind of the same when it comes to creating videos on YouTube
or building businesses or making content online or
writing or anything like this. Like the more stuff you
put out into the world, the more you increase your surface area for lucky events to happen to you. And there's a nice quote
from Gary Vaynerchuk, which is that, "it just
takes one piece of content "to change your life, you just never know "which one that's gonna be." And so the solution,
Gary says, and I agree is to just keep on pumping out
the content and not worrying about the numbers, just trying to make it as good as it can be while
having fun along the way. And eventually, you'll
hit your lucky break. Basically every YouTube
that I know including me, it's like, most of our videos get like a baseline level of views, which is on average 20%
of your subscriber count. But then very occasionally
you will have a video that goes viral somehow
for whatever reason, and then that will bring in loads more people to your channel. So for me earlier this
year it was the video where I just said, how I type really fast. That's got like three and a
half million views already. That has been a huge boost to the channel. But like you know, most of the others, sort of a hundred videos
we published this year, haven't done particularly
well in terms of the numbers but you just have to put out tons and tons and tons of videos, keep making
them as good as they can be. And eventually you'll get a lucky break. Thirdly, let's talk
about unfair advantages and that's the third component of what makes things successful. And this is pretty common in like the business and startup world. It's like, if you have
an idea for a startup, why you, like what are you,
why are the best place person to do that particular startup or reasonably well-placed enough to make that startup succeed? And it's the same with
YouTube, to be honest, it's like what are your unfair advantages? What do you bring to the table that others don't necessarily have? You don't really need unfair
advantages to start YouTube. And in fact it shouldn't be a barrier, but if you wanna stack
the deck in your favor, like I've tried to do for
myself and for the people that I help coach in my YouTube Academy, if you wanna stack the deck in your favor, you wanna work with
your unfair advantages. And so with me for example,
my unfair advantages other than the huge amounts of
privilege I've had in my life was that I was a medical student and I was a medical student
at Cambridge University. And I could trade off of the
brand name of those two things. And so the first videos I started to make were not random videos about productivity, they were videos aimed exclusively at people applying to
medical school at Cambridge because I knew I could help them. I knew I could add value to those people. Then I started making interview
tips for medical students. I knew a thing or two about interviews. I interviewed like 15 of my friends and we all gave lots of interview tips, which people seem to find useful to help them get into med school. Then I started making vlogs about life as a medical
student at Cambridge. And again, appealing to that
very specific tiny subset of people who were looking to apply to study medicine at Cambridge. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny niche audience but I was very well placed because I had the unfair advantage that I was in this position, so I could appeal to
that particular audience. If I had tried instead
to make guitar tutorials despite being really terrible at guitar, that wouldn't be an unfair advantage. It would be a little bit pointless. I've got friends who've been playing
piano for like 15 years, that's an unfair advantage. It's really hard for someone
else to compete with you, if you've been playing piano for 15 years then you're absolutely sick. So if they were to make piano tutorials, then that would be their unfair advantage. So firstly, I had the medical student and the Cambridge medical
student thing going for me. Secondly, my unfair advantage was that I'd been doing this graphic and web design stuff since the age of 12. And so when I started my YouTube channel at the age of like 23, I had 11 years worth of experience
making stuff look pretty. And so hopefully things
looked reasonably aesthetic straight off the bat. And I had that eye for design which had developed over the 11 years, which was a huge unfair advantage compared to other people who
might not have done that. And finally, at that point
I had a successful business that I'd been running for
four years at that point. And so I could use the money
that the business generated to buy fancy camera equipment and lights and microphones and stuff and get the production
value right from day one. So again, another
complete unfair advantage. And I'm being honest about this because I don't wanna pretend, that oh as long as you just work hard you will succeed because
that's a total myth. You do have to work hard. I hate the phrase work hard because it implies like, this
is not like coal mining. It's not like, something
that's actually hard, like working night shifts as a doctor which is actually hard. This is sitting in front of
a computer and making videos. So I don't, I really
hate the phrase hard work but you have to put in the
work and it's kind of fun, but also there's luck and also
there are unfair advantages. So those are the three factors that I think have contributed to my YouTube channel growing faster than similar sized channels
would normally grow. And so if you're thinking of
getting started on this journey and you wanna get started on YouTube, my advice would be follow
this three-step formula, make useful videos, publish them once or twice a week and do this for two years. If you can follow those three things, I guarantee 100% that your
life will completely change. I can't put any numbers on it, because there's a dozen different factors that go into the numerical
success on YouTube not the least being lucky
breaks in the algorithm, but I can a 100% guarantee that if you right now, you decide you wanna start a YouTube channel, you make useful videos, are your videos that at least one other
person finds useful. You publish them once or twice a week. And you do this for two years, I 100% guarantee that your
life will completely change. And two years from now
you're gonna send me a thank you email saying, I saw your video talking
about how much money you made. And it inspired me to
start a YouTube channel and I've kept at it
consistently every week for the last two years and now my life is completely different. Thank you so much. You're gonna send me that email. Most of you watching this, you're not gonna do it because, well hey, maybe you don't wanna
start a YouTube channel, which is fine. But if you do, most people don't stick with it for two years, you're just got to do it for a long time. It's just how it works. Now I've got a phone call, so I'm gonna see you
back in just a moment. All right, we're back. I've had dinner, I've done a live stream and here we are again at 10:20 pm. Anyway, let's now talk about
the other different sources of monetization for the
channel and the business. And to be honest, all of these ones that we're now gonna talk about are related directly to the fact that I've been pumping
out two videos a week on YouTube for the last
three and a half years. And the more you kind of do that, the more you then unlock
these other different avenues for monetization and the more
those to compound over time. So one of the perks of
putting out content regularly, that's hopefully useful, is that over time you build an audience of people, who know, like, and trust you. Now that means that if I
am promoting a product, like I don't know the
Paperlike screen protector for the iPad Pro or
the IQUnix F96 keyboard or like the analog to-do list from Ugmonk or like a speaker or a pen or whatever. Anytime I'm promoting something, people, the audience clay are more likely to listen to that recommendation because hopefully I've built
up this bank of goodwill and this bank of people who
like know, like, and trust me and therefore a recommendation from me seems and is more sincere than a random recommendation
from a random website. And so for my channel and my business, affiliate income makes up a
reasonably hefty chunk of it. Now affiliate income is when, for example if you want to buy the Paperlike screen protector you go to paperlike.com/Ali. And if you buy it using
that particular link then I will get a certain
percentage kickback on the sale of that product. If you check out my affiliate
link for this keyboard, I will get a certain kickback. And this all starts of very small. Like at the start, when you
don't have much of an audience and you use an Amazon affiliate link, you'll make maybe one penny or two pennies but when you have a larger audience and you start kind of
getting affiliate links for products that cost
more than just a few pounds and you know this cost a few hundred, this costs like 30 euros. This stuff really starts
to add up over time. So for me I've got affiliate partnerships with lots of different
companies, and there are five in particular that are
particularly successful. Number one is Paperlike. Number two is IQUnix. Number three is Epidemic Sound, the guys who I used to get my music for these YouTube videos. Number four is Amazon, because Amazon has the world's largest affiliate program. And number five is
actually an online course called Building a Second Brain, that's run by my friend Tiago Forte, which I promoted through an
affiliate link earlier this year when I was an alumni
mentor for the course. Now, I'm not gonna break down how much of this comes from each
of these different sources because that will probably be a bit unfair on these companies, but between these five different
affiliate partnerships, in total in 2020, I've
made 132,471 pounds. This is not bad at all. This is a hell of a lot of money. That's over 10,000 pounds a month. So over $13,000 a month, just
from occasionally plugging like this thing or this keyboard, I mean like I've made one
video about this keyboard. I have not even made a video about the screen protector this year. I've never made a video
about Epidemic Sound. I made two videos about
Building a Second Brain and I've never once made a video specifically plugging an Amazon product. But because I use these
things on a daily basis and people see that I use these things and I have links in my video description that have links to these things, it just means that over time as you have a very big audience, then these affiliate income
really starts to add up. And bear in mind that this
does take ages to get started. So for example, in my
first year on YouTube I made absolutely nothing from affiliates. In my second year of YouTube, I made a few thousand
pounds from affiliates and it's only in my third
year and beyond on YouTube that this affiliate income
has actually started to get to be an interesting large number. How do you get started if you want to build affiliate income? Well, it's the same thing,
the same three-step process as I discussed before,
create useful content, put it out once or twice a
week, do this for two years. If you do those three steps, I guarantee you will have
an audience of people that know, like, and trust you. And then you can start
plugging your affiliate wares and you'll start making reasonable amounts of money from those, hopefully. If you wanna get started
with affiliate programs, the easiest one to sign up
for is Amazon Associates. Basically anyone can sign up for this and then you get like two or 3% commission on every sale that someone makes on Amazon using your link, which is quite nice. Let's now talk sponsorships. Now, I got my very first
sponsorship or brand deal which is like, it feels like
the holy grail for YouTubers. I got my very first one in July 2018, which was a whole one year after I started producing
videos on YouTube. And at that point I had 120
videos and 50,000 subscribers. Again, this is a very long game. Occasionally I get emails
from YouTubers starting out, saying hey, how do I
get my first brand deal? And my answer is always
like, first make 120 videos and then worry about getting
your first brand deal because this is all a long game. This is a marathon, it's not a sprint. So for me in 2017, I made
absolutely nothing from sponsors. In fact overall in 2017, I
lost a few thousand pounds because it was buying
camera gear and stuff. In 2018, I made 5,700
pounds from sponsors. It was meant to be an extra 3000 pounds but I did three brand deals
for a 1,000 pounds each. And the influence of
marketing middleman company that gave me those three brand deals actually went out of business. And I got a letter in the post saying they were in liquidation. And so I never got any of that money. So 5,700 in 2018, 2019 was pretty good. In 2019, I made 31,000
pounds from sponsorships. 31,000 pounds is a
reasonable full-time salary, but as I'm gonna keep coming back to, it took two and a half years
of making two videos every week to get to the point where I
was making a full-time salary off of brand deals on YouTube. How do you get started
with doing the same thing? Well, again, as usual just
create valuable content or useful content, put it
out once or twice a week and do it for two years and then you'll get the
sponsorship deals rolling in. You don't even have to worry about it. 2020, has been a
particularly interesting year because I joined an agency called Standard towards the end of 2019. Now this agency Standard is amazing. It represents about a hundred different educationalish creators. And Thomas Frank actually
introduced me to the agency when we first had a chat and
other people part of the agency are my friends, Simon Clark
and Rowan, Medlife Crisis and Legal Eagle and Wendover Productions and all these, there's a lot
of cool people in this agency. And it's all it's been
really nice to be part of but the cool thing about
being part of an agency and when you're starting out on YouTube you really don't have to worry about this but like three and a half years in now, when you're part of an
agency, Standard is amazing because they just source
sponsorships and brand deals. And we work with basically the same brands but they've got enough of a budget and the videos and the advertising
spots perform well enough that at least for my channel,
they keep on coming back and want to sponsor more and more videos, which is fantastic. And so now I work with like
a very small number of brands but fairly regularly, like Notion and Skillshare, Brilliant
and CuriosityStream and there's probably a few
more that I'm forgetting, but yeah, there's like very few brands and it's just kind of week after week that we get the sponsorship
deals from them. Now, I can't tell you how much
money I've made specifically from sponsorships because
I'm still working with them and it's against the terms of my contract or something like that, it probably is, I haven't really read it that carefully. But I can give you some rough numbers based on public domain information. So, if we look at the other
website Grapevine Logic, they have a blog post where they explain that if you're a YouTuber,
if you're deciding how much to charge for a brand deal, usually you go between 20 and $30 CPM, CPM means cost per meal or
cost per thousand views. And so, at the lower end, a YouTuber will theoretically charged
$20 per 1,000 views and at the higher end,
you'd theoretically charge around $30 for a 1,000 views. How many views does the
average YouTuber get? Well, you know, if you look at a lot of different sources
online, they would say that the average YouTube
channel can expect to get about 20% of their subscriber count in views for each video on average. And so if you have a 100,000 subscribers, you can expect ish to get
20,000 views per video. 500,000 subscribers and you
get a 100,000 views per video. My average subscriber count this year has been around about 800,000 subscribers. So if we use this 20% calculation, that means theoretically on average, my videos are getting 160,000 views. And if we apply the 20 to $30 CPM range, that means for each sponsored video, I would make 3,200 to $4,800, again, if we're using
this broad general data. If you look back at my channel, I've been doing sponsored
videos most weeks this year. And so let's say 90% of
the 52 weeks in 2020, I was doing a sponsored video. That means I have 46
sponsored videos this year. And overall based on these numbers that means my channel
revenue from sponsored videos is somewhere between
$147,200 and $220,800. So somewhere in that ballpark
range, let's call it $180,000 as like a bang in the
middle of ballpark figure. My actual numbers are different
to that in certain ways, but again, I'm not gonna disclose those. I'm just giving you this
rough ballpark figure so we can use that moving forward based on this public domain data. What does this mean if
you're a beginner YouTuber? Well, what this means is that because this is a tend to sort of 20 to $30 CPM per 1,000 views, basically don't worry about brand deals until you've been making
content once or twice a week for two years, because
once you've done that then you'll have enough
views on your stuff. And you'll hopefully have
built an audience of people who know, like, and trust you, so that when you plug
Squarespace or Skillshare or Audible or CuriosityStream
or Nebula, Brilliant or whatever, those recommendations will be taken seriously by your audience. So if we use $180,000
as a ballpark estimate, convert that to pounds,
which is 136,000 pounds that means the cumulative
total is now 22K plus a 100K plus 132K from affiliates,
plus 136K from sponsors, which leads us to 390,000 pounds in overall revenue so far in 2020. Let's now talk about
the two biggest sources of revenue on the channel and yet again, these are both associated
with just the fact that I've been pumping
out two videos a week for the last three and a half years. And like we'd like all these things, they compound exponentially over time. And so if you're a beginner, then maybe this is a place
you can get to at some point but you can't get here
unless you put in the work of just pumping out video after video after video relentlessly for a
solid three and a half years. And let's start with Skillshare,
which is a fantastic way of making money when
you have a big audience. Because, what a Skillshare, Skillshare if you haven't
heard is an online platform that is sort of like
Netflix for online courses. And they sponsor some of my videos. They sponsored one like last week I think, so you as the user, you sign up for to pay $10 a month or something. And then depending on
how many videos you watch and how much watch time you
clock in on Skillshare classes, the people who created
those classes, the teachers, they get paid kind of like with
Spotify streaming royalties. So for example on Skillshare,
it kind of varies depending on kind of what the
different economics are. But each month you can expect to get a few cents per
minute of premium watch time. So if every minute there's
someone watches your thing, you'll make a few cents. Sometimes it's various,
like sometimes it's like one cent, two cents
sometimes like five, 6 cents. It kind of changes
depending on various factors I'll put a link to the blog post on the Skillshare teacher handbook which fully explains this. So that's one way of making money from Skillshare in terms of watch time. But the other way of making
money from Skillshare is to use the Skillshare affiliate program which is that any time someone
signs up for Skillshare using your special affiliate link then you make seven or
$10 depending on how early you signed up to this
particular affiliate program. So, these are my numbers for 2020. In January 2020, I had
one class on Skillshare, my video editing class
that month I made $2,800 from royalties and your watch time and $300 from affiliate links which was a total of $3,105 and 89 cents. In February it was pretty
similar to $2,643 in total of which 2,280 came from affiliate sales. Now, right at the end of
March was when I released well my second Skillshare class about how to study for exams. And that was on like
the final day of March. And so in March I made
$5,680 and 57 cents. But then because that class was active throughout all of April,
at the end of April, my earnings from Skillshare
were $29,746 and 84 cents, of which 9,340 was from the affiliate kind of people signing up to Skillshare using my link mostly to watch my class. Right at the end of May, I released my class on
how to use Anki flashcards again on Skillshare that was active for the final two days of May. So in May I made $40,926 and
99 cents off of Skillshare. This class was active through all of June. And then at the end of June, I released a productivity
Skillshare class. And so in June we climbed even further to $56,547 and 21 cents. And since then in July,
September, October, and December, I've released like a productivity class, a stoicism class and a cooking class. And so this is what the numbers have looked like up until October. July was 62,541, August was 60,582. September was 67,363, October was 66,194. And I would estimate November and December because the numbers haven't
quite been added up yet. I would estimate that that's gonna be about 60,000 each for
November and December, this is absolutely insane. If we add these numbers up, that means that from Skillshare,
watch time and affiliates, I eat just by virtue of the fact that I've got seven classes now
on Skillshare, in 2020, so far, I've made $515,000. Now, if you had told me
this, even a year ago that I'd be making like
half a million dollars from Skillshare by just releasing courses and teaching what I know online, I would have definitely had a stroke and I would have accused you of trying to kill me or something. 'Cause this is just absolutely mental. Let's look at the numbers
a little bit more. So if we look I've got a hundred, so far I've got a 100,000
to 124 students in my class. And those watched about 8
million minutes of watch time, and by the end of 2020, this will be about 9.5 million minutes of watch time. That means so it's a 100,000
students each watching on average 90 minutes worth of content. And if we run the numbers on this, that is only about $5 per
student in overall revenue. So I've got a 100,000 students who've taken my courses, overall this year I've made 515,000, therefore
round about $5.15 cents for every student who has taken a course on Skillshare, that's mine. Again, this is not actually how it works. How it actually works is as I've explained with the watch time and
with the affiliate revenue but like I'm kind of averaging
these numbers overall. And it kind of shows that
a platform like Skillshare, you can make a lot of money on Skillshare but only if you have a very large audience because you don't make that much money for every individual student. Why do I put my courses in Skillshare? Well, because basically they're
free for people to watch. Anyone can sign up to a free trial of Skillshare and can watch my courses. And because a lot of my
classes on Skillshare are aimed at students, I like the fact that I don't need to charge, like charge any real money to students because like my studying
class or my productivity class or my stoicism class, you cannot basically take those for free. So Skillshare is a very interesting model which seems to be profitable for them, even though a lot of
people can take the classes for free using the free trial. And if you continue beyond the free trial and it's just like $10 a month, it's actually completely worth it. Now the takeaway from these
numbers should not be, hey, Skillshare is really profitable, let me go and make a class on Skillshare, because as I've shown you like yes, you can make money on Skillshare. And as they say on the teacher handbook, some of that top teachers are making over a $100,000 a year off of Skillshare but you do need to have large numbers for this to work properly. And I got an email from someone, I talked about the power of
Skillshare in my video in May where I talked about
that in month I earned like $5,000 for Skillshare
at the end of March. And someone emailed me
saying, hey, I've put, you said Skillshare was great
and I've made a piano class but only two people have watched it. It's like, okay, there is a video up here called how to make money
online, the three levels. And yes, you can make money
online by selling courses but it's just so much easier
when you have an audience of people who know, like, and trust you, who will buy your stuff or will watch your Skillshare classes when you put something out. If you don't have an audience, it's so much harder to
get your work out there in front of people,
because why would anyone wanna buy from you if they don't already know, like, and trust you which is why again, coming back to this, if you actually care
about making money online, if you care about replicating the success or whatever you wanna call it, the only way to do it really in my book is make useful videos, do
it once or twice a week for free on YouTube and
do it for two years. And then after two years, you can start making Skillshare classes. I made my first Skillshare
class in September of 2019, which was two and a bit years, like nearly two and a half years after I started posting videos on YouTube. If I had started Skillshare
classes from day one, they would not have been
particularly profitable. I probably would have not
made very much money on them even if the classes were really good because so much of my
success on Skillshare and like all of these different platforms comes from the fact that I have this pre-existing
audience on YouTube, that again, I've spent the
last three and a half years, two videos every single
week, just like banging out and hopefully these
videos are somehow useful. So converting that $515,000
into pounds is 350,000 pounds and if we add all of the things up, that means the total so far
is 740,000 pounds for 2020. The final thing I wanna talk about, the final source of revenue in this coffin is my new live online course called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Now I had the idea for
this roundabout August, September time and it was a
very kind of loosely in my head. And initially I was going
to do this as like a, I was thinking about doing it as a Skillshare class or alternatively I was thinking about just selling it for like a $100 or $200 on my own website. And then I spoke to my mates, Tiago Forte and David Perell who run their own courses called Building a Second
Brain and Write of Passage. Now, both of these courses
are very expensive. Building a Second Brain starts at $1,500. Write of Passage starts at
$4,000 and I've taken both of these courses and they're
both really, really good. And one of the things that makes them really really good is the fact that they're live online courses where you're like learning on Zoom calls. Secondly there's like a
really engaged community of people who are serious about it. And thirdly, these courses are really good because they charge so
much money for them. Like we're no longer in
the age where content is the thing that's holding people back. There's like limitless
content on the internet now, the thing that stops people from learning on the
internet or learning anything is in fact the accountability and the community aspect of things. And so, when I spoke to Tiago and David, what they said to me was like look, you're making this YouTuber Academy thing, hypothetically, if you were
to charge a $1,000 for it, how would that change your approach to it? And I was like oh gosh, charging a $1,000 for a course, I've never done that before. And I said, okay, if I were to charge a $1,000, I would do it live. I would do it over for six weeks. I would make sure I'm very,
very actively involved in it. And I would do whatever
I can to get success for our students. And so thanks to Tiago and David's advice about how to actually make a
good online course these days, I decided you know what, let's try this out as a live cohort. And initially I thought
maybe five or 10 people would sign up to this course, but in the end we had
360 paying customers. And the overall revenue from
cohort one of the course was $294,000, which is 220,000 pounds. That is a lot of money. I had no idea it would be
the successful in cohort one. And actually we've just
wrapped up last week. And we had an after party like yesterday and we've got so many glowing testimonials of people saying that this
course has changed their life and really help them either
improve their YouTube channels or kickstart their YouTube channels. And it's just become a really
lovely, wholesome community. And this would not, and
could not have happened had we not done it as a live course, and I think had we not
charged the high prices that we did, we could have
had a lot less serious people taking this course. So we're gonna run the
second cohort in February, registration for it is now open, if you wanna check it out,
link in the video description. But really the strategy
here for this sort of stuff is that this course is the first thing that I've truly charged
money for in my entire like online YouTubing career thing. Classes on Skillshare in my book don't really count as charging real money because anyone can basically
sign up to the free trial. And it's like if you have
a documentary on Netflix and you say to people, hey, watch my Netflix documentary
like Matt D'Avella is doing, you're not really charging
the audience for it. They've already got a Netflix subscription and they just happened to be
watching your documentary, equally for affiliate deals, I don't feel like it's me
charging the user for the thing. Whereas this is the first time I've actually charged
real money for something. And I was really, really, really scared about it initially because it was like, oh my God, this is actually gonna be good. Are people actually gonna pay? Are they gonna have a good time? And for the most part like,
99% of people who have gone through our course have
had a fantastic time of it. We've given out like three refunds, thanks to our kind of no questions asked, money back guarantee, out
of the 400 students in total who have taken this course, which I think is a pretty
reasonable rate of doing things. Now again, obviously the lesson here it shouldn't be that, hey, why don't you as a you know, watching this video go and do your own live online course. Because if you've got the audacity to charge several hundreds
to several thousand dollars for a course, people
won't just sign up to that for a reason, like this
is again, just a case of if you build an audience
over a long period of time, an audience of people who
know, like, and trust you, then when you start charging
real money for a product which is actually good,
people will be happy to pay for that money and we'll be
happy to pay for access to you. Another reason why I was really scared of charging real money for this course is because I didn't quite realize how diverse my audience was. Yes I saw on the YouTube analytics that actually my videos are popular between like the 25 to 34 age demographic and mostly in the US and in the UK. But a 35 year old in the US
is not the sort of person who has money to spend
on this sort of thing and wants to take YouTube seriously and wants to use it as a business. That's what a person
is not the same person who's commenting on my videos. The people who comment on my videos are a very very different demographic to the people who I'm
aiming this course at. If you're watching at the end of this and you are for example
under the age of 18, this course is not aimed
at you, is not for you. Like you might be annoyed. Oh my God, how can he possibly
charge a $1,000 for a course? Like, it's actually not for you. It's for people who wanna
treat YouTube as a business and who want to invest in
it and to take it seriously. And actually like half of
the people on the course had preexisting profitable
businesses on the side and they wanna use YouTube
to grow their business. That is a very different
market to a 16 year old student from Pakistan watching
this channel and thinking, oh my God, I can't believe Ali has the audacity to charge
real money for something. And it took this experience
of running this course to help me really appreciate this. And now I'm totally okay with charging large amounts of money because I know that the more
money people pay for something, the more likely they are
to actually take action and actually do it. Like if a course is free,
basically no one is gonna go through it because it's like,
oh, it's just free content. It's a commodity at that point. Whereas if it's a premium experience, people are paying a hell
of a lot of money for it. And they have intimate access to me, my team and the community, that is what really gets people results. So overall revenue from the course so far has been 220,000 pounds. And so overall that brings us to a total revenue of
960,000 pounds for 2020. And I thought this was
gonna be where it ends. And I was like, oh, we're not
gonna hit that million mark. But in the final week of the course, we had tons and tons and tons of students who were part of the course saying that they just loved it so much. And they loved the community
and the accountability and they wanted a way to keep it going. And so, after doing lots of
discussions with the team, we decided to make like an alumni Inner
Circle membership program, where we charge students $50 a month to sign up to this membership program. And that is like a community, it's like monthly coaching calls with me. And it's like guest
workshops with the team. And it's like loaded content
and like weekly events. And in fact, we've got daily Zoom calls, coworking sessions and homework club, and we've got like a whole load of stuff and we're charging people
$50 a month for it, which is like a complete no-brainer, it's like so, so, so worth it in terms of the value that
people are getting from this. And actually in the last few days we have launched this Inner
Circle membership program. And actually we have 124 members. And overall we've made
$71,400 from the first cohort of people who have signed up to the annual membership
for this Inner Circle thing, as a way of continuing
their YouTube journey, which means that adding
up all of these numbers, my overall revenue for
2020, for the business has been 22,100 pounds
from my full-time salary as a doctor for seven months. A 100,000 pounds from Google AdSense. 132,000 pounds from affiliates. 136,000 pounds or
thereabouts from sponsors. 350,000 pounds from Skillshare. 220,000 from the first cohort of the Part-Time YouTube Academy and 53,000 pounds from the first cohort of the Inner Circle signing
up to annual memberships, which brings us to an overall grand total of 1,013,000 pounds, which
for the Americans among us is $1.362 million US. Yeah, like this is just, this
is just absolutely absurd. It's just absolutely mental,
never in a million years did I think a YouTube channel and like, the stuff of courses around it would make a million pounds a year or
a million dollars a year. It's just seemed completely insane. But over the last year,
as the channel has grown as the team has expanded. And as I've made lots of friends over the internet who are also making this level if not more than
this in terms of money online, it's just really, it's just, yeah, I don't really know what to say. Partly thank you to the
audience for doing the stuff. Thank you to all the students who've signed up for our stuff. And hopefully you've learned
something from this video. Like I don't really know what else to say. It's just this thing of like, if you care about making
money on the internet then it's just absolutely next level when you can build an audience of people who know, like, and trust you. And if you can just keep on doing this, plugging out useful content for free once or twice a week on YouTube for a period of several years,
YouTube will have an audience of people who know, like, and trust you. I can't promise you you'll
get the same numbers. These numbers are insane but I know people who've
been doing the same thing, who have numbers even higher than this. I've got a friend with 500,000 subscribers who makes two and a half
million pounds a year off of his coaching program,
that's pretty insane. There's this whole world of like online entrepreneurship
out there for creators. And the really cool thing about this is that there is no real
way of selling snake oil. Like the way to make large
amounts of money on the internet is to provide value at scale because ultimately money is
just an exchange of value. And if we think of making
money as being an evil thing, then we're never gonna make money. But if we think of me sort of making money as a fair exchange of
value or perceived value, which is actually just value, then actually making a
million pounds a year off of educating people online, I think that's actually pretty reasonable because it shows value creation at scale. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video, it's really, really, really long video. I'd love it if you can leave a comment with like a clover emoji just 'cause I wanna see how
many people go to the end. If you liked this video
and you're still here you should definitely
check out this video, which talks about the
three different levels of making money online which is kind of a more how to guide or how to get started doing this stuff. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video, bye-bye.
