How to Make Money with Blender

how do you make money with blender and how much money can you make and what kinds of things can you do to make money with blender that's what we're going to be talking about in this video but before we begin i get that this subject is kind of clickbaity i know that there are lots of videos that talk about this kind of thing especially the ones where people say how much money do i make on youtube will they skirt around the subject and they never tell you the actual amount i get it but this is something i wanted to talk about because my entire life kind of revolves around blender at this point pretty much all the money i make now is related to blender in some way so it's keeping me alive it's basically become my profession so if all the if there's anyone out there that wanted to kind of jump into this community and maybe build a business around it then i want to break down all the different elements tell you what is or is not possible what will be more difficult than other things and just maybe give you an insight into some of the behind the scenes four processes that go on behind asset creation video creation and all sorts now if you haven't watched it already daniel craft did do a nice video about this called 12 great ways to make dollars with blender 3d on the blender cult channel he makes some nice points in there there are some things that i want to add but there's going to be a bit of overlap between these two videos but i still highly recommend you watch it not just because of what the video is about but also because daniel's just a really lovely person so let's get into it so i imagine that 2020 has made a lot of people reevaluate what they want to do in life or maybe given them the perspective that maybe working from home is a viable option with that in mind i can imagine a lot of people are going to want to do freelance now and that their eyes have turned to blender because when the lockdown started this year a lot of us content creators saw a relatively good spike in viewership and i'm sure blender also experienced a rise in downloads as well and as well as this i'm sure a lot of people were laid off from their jobs a lot of people in creative technical fields that may or may not have been able to sustain survival with the global situation so i think there's a lot of people that want to go to freelance now but how viable is it with blender well freelance can be lucrative but it requires that you have a good collection of contacts to make it sustainable contacts that will give you reliable work if you're starting from scratch with absolutely no contacts whatsoever then it's very difficult to fan the flames and get it started now i can't speak for everyone because everyone will have a different experience but it's definitely much easier if you already have an audience behind you before trying to jump into doing freelance work but of course it's a kind of situation where you need to do some work to raise an audience and raise the right kind of contacts i mean you can have an audience of a million people and no good viable freelance contacts likewise you could have an audience of say a few thousand people and have some really good ones that are gonna carry you forward so it's not just about the number of people you're in communication with it's about the kinds of people you're in communication with and that's a common theme that's gonna translate into the other elements of making money with blender that we'll talk about so in terms of making money with freelance the amount of money you're actually gonna make depends on several factors primarily negotiation first of all if you don't understand your own value of your skill level then how do you expect to make money off of your clients you need to know how to be able to value your skill level and your time investment so that you can appropriately charge for the work negotiation is a very difficult aspect of the job especially if you're introverted like me and you don't like making people go out their way to benefit you but negotiation is definitely an important thing to get your head around if you want to do freelance in the long term negotiating a rate also requires a lot of confidence on your part and confidence is not something you will have at the very beginning when starting freelance because if you know that you don't have other jobs to back you up then you don't have the confidence that you'll be able to survive without doing the work therefore you will feel less confident in charging a higher amount for your work but at the end of the day it is important not to undersell yourself when charging for your time so what should you charge for your time well it depends on the skill that you're using now i don't make any comparisons on the skill level requirement between different skills but it kind of needs to be made 3d artwork will generally be cheaper than technical design and programming for example because there's an understanding that there's a larger knowledge requirement that goes behind programming than there does between making art now of course there are so many caveats to that because it depends on the type of r the technical elements required for the yard where it's going to be used how much preparation is required whether it's a very hyper specific type of artwork like facial construction and rigging that requires a very specific understanding that not many people are gonna have all those factors come into play when charging likewise with programming if you're just testing or coding something that's already been written out pseudo code already pre-designed then that's going to be a lower wage whereas if you're going to be doing the design elements and problem solving basically coming up with new techniques and algorithms to solve problems then that's likewise going to raise the wage now what you charge may also be dependent on where you are in the world and the cost of living in your country it's very difficult to define a flat fee for everyone around the world for a specific skill so i think if you're looking to get into freelance one thing i definitely recommend is getting in contact with other freelancers for several reasons one of them is that they can give you advice especially on how to value your work what's more than this is that freelancers will tend to have their own bubbles of contacts some of these will overlap especially in common communities like blender different freelancers in the blender space will be in contact with similar people but they will also be in contact with unique collections of individuals and it's quite often the case that if you have close communication with someone and you're overloaded with work they may come to you with a work request and you won't be able to do it in some cases a freelancer may be able to recommend someone else they know to do the work instead or even outsource it to other people so in situations like these it's good to be in contact with as many freelancers as possible because you may be able to share work between each other in relation to blender blender is fantastic for most elements of the 3d creation process and it's growing all the time and it's very extensible and it has a massive add-on community so i would consider blender to be the 3d creation suite of choice for freelancers also keeping in mind there's no license requirements for commercial usage and especially keeping in mind that if you're doing freelance you may not have a lot of money to spend unless of course you've come in from a different line of work we've already built up some savings but most people who want to get into freelance may have trouble affording the license fees of other softwares so this puts blender in a nice position to acquire as much new blood as possible when it comes to people that use it on a professional basis even if it is just an independent professional basis so we can take that off on the list that freelance is one of the ways you can make money with blender now for my personal experience i used to do freelance before doing this whole youtube business and the place that i got the most freelance requests was from art station so i definitely recommend using outstation as a social portfolio site one of the things i found really interesting about it is that it acts as a kind of social media site as well as a professional site because you will have your social view of the portfolio but if you have an account it will also auto generate a website for you that you can send to other people so for example my social space on the site might be artstation.com forward slash curtis james hulk but my professional version would be curtis james holdartstation.com which has a completely different layout and you're able to customize this if you have art station pro it gives you more features but this is of course paid i think it's something around 100 a year but it may be more or less than this depending so just double check for yourself looking it up now it seems there is also a alternative called art station plus which is cheaper gives you access to customization for the portfolio websites and the ability to write blogs as well making content so one of the more obvious ways to make money with blender in the blender community is to make content for people in the form of anything 3d assets tools render presets course content whatever this is a very lucrative side of the community but it depends exactly on what kind of content you're producing for example if you want to make 3d assets and sell them i'm not going to lie to you and say that it's easy because it's not realistically no one is going to buy your poorly re-topologized generic alien sculpt you did some afternoon if you want to make assets that people are actually going to buy you've got to think about the usage behind them are people actually going to find them useful now when considering this we need to take a look at modern companies that have popped up that are making a lot of money across the community not just in blender but with the 3d community in general companies like quixot and polygon are kind of in a competitive space i'm sure you've seen that there's so much photogrammetry 3d asset content coming out now where companies are taking highly detailed scans of realistic models like rocks and flora all kinds of vegetation and structures that they can sell online and these are things that are photorealistic so once you have one copy of it you don't need to make it ever again you can just keep reusing it these things sell really well because they're applicable in so many different projects so if you want to make money making 3d assets using blender then make sure you're actually making things that are useful for people rather than just things that you thought were fun to make as a personal tip you're also more likely to make money from packs rather than individual assets branding is also quite important if you present your pack in a very nice way then people are more likely to feel like it's got more value and finish to it if the marketing material has finished then they'll make the assumption that the pack also has finish present your assets and renders in a very clean bright environment people tend to associate bright marketing material with professionalism and cleanliness it's also a good idea to present your assets in a demonstration environment in the marketing material but also to provide these demonstration packages inside of the actual package that's being sold by adding demonstration scenes to the package it increases the value and means that you can charge it for a higher price if you wanted to good places to sell your assets for this community are gumroad and blender market gumroad is good because it lets you distribute both free and paid versions of the packages so you can entice people in with free versions and then convert them over to the paid version it's also very good encouraging people to tip on the free versions of products if you put a plus symbol after the price when setting up a gun mode product this tells gumroad that you want to allow people to set the price to a higher value so like i said one of the main alternatives to gumroad in the blender community is blender market blender market is more limited in features but it makes up for this by being highly targeted towards the blender community it's my understanding that they don't allow free products yet as of the making of this video but they are hoping to add more features in the future another thing to keep in mind is that the commission rate is worse on blender market than it is on gumroad so you will make more money by selling things on gumroad but as i said if your content is targeted specifically for blender users then you should also be definitely considering putting it on blender market because you'll likely be making sales there that you would not have made otherwise now i can tell you from my personal experience that it is definitely possible to make a full-time living just making assets and tools and content and selling it online for the community but it does come with its own unique set of challenges if i was to give you tips for what kinds of content to make i would say don't make individual assets that's just my personal take the 3d software space is changing things are increasing in the layers of abstraction people want tools and proceduralism rather than individual assets they want to be able to tweak sliders and have lots of variations so rather than buying individual things they want to buy a tool that lets them generate millions of things so if you're looking to sell content for the community i recommend investing some time in proceduralism okay so we've talked about assets and tools but what about course content i will say straight up with pure confidence there is a massive market for paid course content with blender i personally haven't made any paid courses yet but i can tell you from extensive conversations with other creators in the community and after partnering up with some of them for affiliate agreements that there is a huge demand for paid course content but okay what kinds of things are people looking for with the paid course content one of the consistent themes i've seen between all of these successful paid courses is that they promise results by the end they have demonstration scenes are very visually pleasing they're shown all over the trailers they provide these scenes for people to render and play with and they also guarantee people that they will break down and show you how they produce those scenes so just like marketing the 3d assets and tools you've got to make sure that there's a nice finish to it a nice polish you've got to make sure it's visually satisfying it will excite people into wanting to play around with the resources and actually want to engage with the course content because they'll feel like wow if i can make that i'm going to be an amazing artist and i can show my friends all of this incredible stuff i can make it's also got to be substantial people who are more likely to buy something if there's quite a lot of content in there even if they don't watch it all because let's face it i think most people that buy courses don't watch all the content people like to think they will watch it but let's be realistic people run out of time they get bored they move on to other things but they like knowing that the content is there if and when they need it because i know there's a collection of people in the community that like collecting all of these paid courses because they like knowing that they have valuable material to them at a moment's notice so how do you price paid courses well one thing i recommend is definitely having a look at other people's paid courses and doing some research on the average prices courses take a lot of time to put together there's a lot of preparation recording editing admin and marketing and advertisement and support and all kinds of other things so courses can range wildly anywhere between fifteen and a hundred dollars it really depends on the amount of content inside of it the amount of time it takes to put together and creators that already have substantial audiences can get away with heavier pricing as well but why don't we take a look at some examples i'm sure that a lot of you already know about glebe alexandrov and eddie burrows of creative shrimp they've released a collection of very successful courses so they have the space vfx elements the hard surface modeling 50 modelling issues from hell and you can kind of see what's going on here i think the space vfx one is the oldest one that's forty five dollars and the newer ones are sixty dollars i think these are priced appropriately for the amount of effort that's gone into them and taking a look at the blended launch pad course with cg boost i'm kind of partnered with via affiliates but we'll get into that later they're also pricing it for about 59 plus v80 now remember these are very substantial courses and in the case of cg boost it's even hosted on a bespoke website where you can track your progress log in and communicate with the author if you're just getting started with making course content i recommend first of all trying to make free tutorials because that will get you more involved with the creation process of making videos and editing them and getting feedback on your process then i recommend taking a step into making small and moderate sized paid courses you don't overwhelm yourself too much because there's the risk involved with time investment you can spend months making your course but if it's about something that people just won't find interesting then it's not going to sell and you've wasted months of time so don't make a huge leap immediately please take your time think about what you want to make experiment beforehand at the moment things are definitely in demand are beginner courses because there's lots of new people coming to blender but this is kind of saturated at the moment because there's already some amazing courses and you'll be going in competition with them kind of i say kind of because as i've said in previous videos you can never have too many teachers for blender because everyone teaches in a slightly different way and people will resonate with different creators in different ways so you never know your interpretation of teaching blender from a beginner's perspective may be just what someone needs another type of content that tends to do quite well with paid courses is technique focused courses so techniques are quite esoteric and only known by a few people an example of this would be the real-time motion graphics course by mitch this has done very well it exceeded his expectations it's all about making real-time motion graphics in blender he really breaks down his own personal workflows in there there's a lot of detail and i think that's why people enjoy it and you can just see from looking in the marketing material it's got a consistent theme it just feels stylistically consistent so it's really paid attention to branding as well affiliates okay so i've alluded to affiliates a few times in this video and for those of you that don't know an affiliate is someone that shares your product if they cause a sale to happen they will receive a percentage of the income made on that sale so it encourages people to share your course because they can have financial incentives affiliates are a win-win situation because the person selling the content say it's you will likely not have made that sale otherwise and the person who recommends your content is also earning some money so it's mutually beneficial for both parties affiliation is a very common practice in this community the common commission rate for affiliates in this community from what i've seen is about 20 percent but you can vary this however you like people will have unique agreements between each other now for people like me prosumer creatives who produce and consume content i have managed to make a substantial amount of money by sharing other people's content on this youtube channel and other sources so i have unique agreements with other creators where i have my own commission rates for their products and likewise the other way around i have agreements with other affiliates who want to recommend my products so this means that when someone makes something successful other people can share in that success so it is technically possible if you have a large enough audience to be entirely self-sufficient just talking about other people's content now this does entirely fall under the description of an influencer because the whole point of it is being able to influence people into wanting to purchase things and then taking a cut of the affiliate income now this is a very common practice on youtube if you've watched any tech reviewers whatsoever you'll probably notice that a lot of their income comes from affiliate links when someone watches their review of a tech product they go through a link in the description they purchase the product and then that reviewer will make a cut of the profit it's especially very common to have an amazon affiliate link for any of these products but in the case of the blender community gumroad blender market and any bespoke sites like teachable also support setting up affiliate agreements and it's very easy to do this but every website manages it in a different way because of course they need to be able to keep track of whether a user has come from a reviewer or a referral so this is typically done by leaving a cookie like a little piece of information on the browser that reminds the website where that user came from and this is of course common practice with analytics and advertisement tracking and all sorts of stuff like that now whether or not that cookie exists or how long it exists for tends to define whether or not the sale made should be connected to the reviewer or the referral in some way so for example a website might be set up in a way where if i recommended a product and a user went down into the description clicked a link and went to buy it it would only count and i would only get a card if they purchased it there and then alternatively it may place a cookie that says if that user purchases it within 30 days then i will get the cut so really depends on how the website's set up and in some situations it also depends on the creator's choice they will be able to choose how long to consider a purchase to be connected to a referral but i think on gumroad and on blender market they're set times okay so in regards to how much i've managed to make for affiliates well i'm not going to tell you exactly how much i have taken away but i can tell you that in the last two years i've managed to raise about 50 to 60 000 between all of the affiliate partnerships now keep in mind that's not what i get to take away that's just a total raised for all of the different products and all of the different creators keep in mind that i have different agreements with each of these creators for each of the products for a different commission rate so for some creators i have a commission rate of about 15 and for other creators are much more friendly with it can go all the way up to like 40 so if you feel like you want to become a personality in the community and just talk about things and share products because there is a demand for that kind of content on youtube then that's definitely a viable path but speaking about that what about tutorials making tutorials for youtube can you make much money off of it the answer is no well kind of so youtube adsense if so if you have if you're partnered with youtube and you have adverts on your videos it's shocking it's terrible for the amount of time investment it's awful but youtube's value is not in the advertisement income that you receive youtube's major value comes from the audience building there is no website better than youtube for bringing you an audience now okay caveats caveats caveats whatever instagram and twitter are great websites as social media platforms for giving you a audience through tags and sharing very basic types of content images tweets etc but youtube is fundamentally the best because it can give you a very dedicated audience in a relatively short amount of time but if you're starting from scratch you do need to kick start it by connecting your content with the wider community because if you just put content on youtube from a fresh new account and don't do anything else you're not really going to grow you may get a slight trickle of people coming in through recommendations or related videos but it's not going to be easy so what you need to do is know where people in the community are going to look reddit twitter blender nation is a good news website to share your content on other types of forums in the community blender artists you maybe you can share your artwork on there and do a time lapse and a breakdown and then share a link to the youtube video so just think about where people like to absorb the content from in the community and share your content on there this will definitely help you if you're lucky other people will pick it up and share it with their friends maybe even take a look on discord servers as well if you want to make tutorials for youtube you need to give yourself a kickstart once your audience gets big enough you can start to relax that you probably don't need to share it all over the place you will then likely be picked up in recommendations more often so you can just ride the wave and your youtube will slowly grow if you keep producing content people will come and your channel will grow but even with a huge audience you're not going to be making a sustainable amount of income for a regular life unless you're making hundreds of thousands millions of views in you know in a consistent time frame within each upload so to make producing tutorials for blender sustainable financially on youtube you need to be able to link the audience attention with other sources of income so what i do is of course i make the youtube videos i then say that people can get the resources they'll go and download them they can donate sometimes they're paid resources so the audience from youtube goes and buys the content a certain proportion of this audience also signs up for mailing lists as well so i can contact them through there and then of course we have the affiliate agreements so when i mention affiliates and videos i'll say here's a product i've left an affiliate link in the description sometimes people go and purchase the content through there and then i get a cut alternatively there's sponsorships as well so if you're receiving enough attention you may find yourself in contact with some people that will ask you to talk about their product or service for a set amount of time in a video and in return they will give you some money sponsorships are interesting because different types of companies will have different requirements they will require to speak for a different amount of time or to say certain things sometimes whether or not you want to accept these is entirely up to you now as you may have gathered from me talking in this video i do a little bit of everything i produce tutorials i sell 3d assets i sell tools i do affiliates i do all sorts of stuff and that's because if you're really serious about turning this into something sustainable you need to be able to link all these things together and a good place to bring all of these things together is with a professional website and this is where a squarespace sponsorship would begin if i was sponsored but i'm not so insert your website provider of choice here but i personally use squarespace because i think they've got a better service it's also a flat fee so it's better than using a cloud computing service so you like google cloud amazon web services or microsoft azure of course there are hosting services like bluehost hostgator one on one but i found that their actual uptime is worse and their speed is worse and they're really full of bloat services to try and jack up the price so i don't recommend them with cloud frameworks they require more technical skill to put up and they also price by the compute time so say for example you suddenly blew up and became super popular and tons of people were going to the website the price that it cost to maintain the site will also increase so i don't think that's worth it if you're just doing simple products and services so that's why i use squarespace because it's just a flat fee per month for what i think is quite a lot of functionality and a very fast website and a lot of uptime and if there was ever a extremely huge amount of volume i think squarespace will be able to handle it perfectly fine but that's just my personal take patreon patreon is interesting i haven't done it the entire time i've been making content on youtube and the reason for that is because of weighing up anxieties one thing to keep in mind is if you want to produce content you are a human being and you have human resources and by human resources i literally mean all you're capable of doing and this does breach into mindfulness you only have a limited amount of sanity that you can use up before you go completely mad or break down or just completely drowning in creative block you also only have a certain amount of time you can stay awake before you start losing your sanity and causing brain damage so keep all of these things in mind you can only do so much within a certain amount of time when i started producing content for youtube i knew that i was only capable of managing so much at once different people will be able to do different amounts of work within a certain amount of time that's fine you shouldn't compare yourself to other people in the beginning i was not ready to deal with the anxieties of having people pay every month and expecting something in return now i'm in a better position to do that because i feel like i'm more established as a business when you're selling 3d content on like gumroad or blender market you will find that you have spikes and then things go down so when you have releases it goes up and if you talk about it it goes up but then it always comes back down so there's the sustainability anxiety that comes with it what patreon does is it offsets that anxiety by having consistency every month so what i recommend to people is not to focus too much in one particular aspect say don't focus entirely in on youtube advertisement or affiliates or just individual sales or patreon but try and bring all of these to a roughly stable level something sustainable in each field so if one of these drops off and suddenly does really bad you still have the confidence that other aspects of the business are doing well and this will carry you through to the future essentially it gives you a buffer zone to adapt and try new techniques or new types of products or anything else so i guess this was a longer video hopefully you found it interesting but if you are interested in making money with blender or if you feel like maybe you've come out of a different job due to the pandemic and you're looking for something new there's definitely potential you can definitely make a job out of it but please try and keep the things i've said in mind try and make things that are useful for the community don't try and just do the same thing over and over and over again that other people have really done before try and find yourself a spot there's definitely a demand for it keep an eye on marketing branding make things interesting for people an audience is very helpful for whatever you do so try and give yourself a kickstart by looking at where the community likes to absorb its content and try and show your stuff there so in the spirit of this video i'm going to share with you an affiliate link a new one that comes from our partners at cgboost they have a new course called cg career booster this is a very unique course now i need to preface this by saying i don't expect you to buy this or sign up for it unless you actually genuinely think that you will get some good value out of it and it's entirely relevant to this video the whole point of this course is teaching you how to become a professional well-paid cg artist it covers things like having the right mindset finding the right goals uncovering your skills how to show proof in your work how to build a good portfolio how to negotiate with people where to find clients how to manage projects and things like that the course is designed in a way where it unlocks over weeks so you don't have access to everything right away you focus on week one there's activities for you to complete then you move on to the next week there's also live sessions where you can talk to the creator ellen plains there's a really lovely guy i met him at the blender conference in 2019 he's really dedicated with this has been working on it for a long time you can also talk with other group members on there as well so you can share ideas with people there's a lot to go through and it's hosted on the cg boost website the teachable platform so you can track all of your progress but this is a big investment it's 249 plus v80 and that's why i'm saying i don't think you should buy unless you are absolutely dedicated with the idea of becoming a cg artist whether freelance or not and you feel like you're lost and can actually use to help in finding a direction this would be very useful for you if you think you could get some value out of it and if you do have the resources to spend on this course then there is a link in the description of course you don't have to you never have to nothing's required but the resource is there if you need it so hopefully you found this video interesting if you did feel free to share it consider signing up to my patreon to help me or even take a look at my website curtis holder online or dot io i've got products on gumroad and blender market free and paid add-ons everything galore just take a look and have fun so thanks for watching everyone stay safe and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 43,179

Keywords: discussion, making, money, blender, income, successful, affiliates, selling, courses, gumroad, how much, curtis holt

Id: sbq2Gw5bwaU

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020