806: put something up on youtube

Paul wrote

806:  put something up on youtube (my examples:  my youtube channel) - youtube used to pay more.

Sounds fun.

I started a youtube channel and learned so much.  Starting from "oh, I like watching TV" finally getting money from making videos it's been an adventure.  I have a long way to go, but if it wasn't for the encouragement of the community here, I would never have started.  

you can find my youtube channel here

It takes a long time to get to level one.  If you are going to try youtube, then I highly recommend you borrow The Youtube Formula by Derral Eves from the library.  And from that book,

It's not YouTube, it's you.

...I have learned from many YouTube "failures" over the years in order to change the things that were not working.  I use quotation marks because I do not actually consider them failures; I consider them an important part of the process.  It's like Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."  "failure" is a harsh teacher, but it is a teacher, nonetheless, and when you begin to accept what you might be doing wrong, you are ready to move forward.

So yah, learning youtube is about failing a lot.  But it also has a close relationship to permaculture.

We try a thing, we observe, we change a thing, we try again.

Eventually, we run out of ways that won't work.

This is my third month being monetized on youtube.  This means that youtube shares a bit of the income they get from those ads you watch.  Even if I only make one video a year, I still get the ad money from all the old videos (although they tend to be less if you upload less).  I'm not sure how passive an income this is, but it not too bad.

There are other ways to earn income from youtube, most of them involve merchandise, affiliate links, and sponsor deals.  I haven't done anything like that yet.

For me, I've found I have a passion for making videos.  It's a way of telling stories and sharing the fun things I do in my life.  I'm still not as good as I want to be, but I'm getting better with every video I make.  This path to residual income requires a lot more time and energy to set up, but I think it's far more rewarding than others I've tried.  I especially like that the customer (viewer) doesn't pay money and yet I get money.  

So how much am I making at this?  Well, it's only the third month since I reached the threshold, but I'm already getting about a dollar a day.  It goes up an additional one to four dollars the day I publish a new video - depending on views and rates and stuff but usually, the baseline stays at a dollar.  But still, that's a whole dollar more a day just for doing something I love and if I didn't make any more videos, it would stay at this level.  If I keep going with this and improving my videos, I think this could easily become my main income.  There is a lot more work than I would need to do at a wage job, but the hours are my own.  I can work as little or as much on this as I like each day.  This freedom has more value to me than dollars at this stage in my life.  But the dollars help too.  

A big part of doing well on youtube is knowing your motivation and your goals.  

The motivation - or Why - must be strong enough to drive you so you cannot, not do youtube.   Once this motivation is powerful enough to fuel you, the passion shows in the videos.  

Goals, landmarks, milestones... whatever we want to call them.  These are waypoints to say "I got here." and also good places to pause and assess and see if we are going in the desired direction.  The thing with goals, is they need to be real things.  They need to have limits and they need to be achievable.  Without this, they are like playing hockey without a net - frustrating.  


If you start youtube, or are thinking of starting, or have already start, or... please take a moment and answer the following:

What is your Why?

What are the goals in concrete terms?


What is my why?
I have a few different motivations.

to inspire and show others that these things are acheivable

to dispel myths that hold people back

to share the story of things I make

to motivate myself to make the things I want to make

I'm sure there's more I could put here.

What are my goals in concrete terms?

To make a video I want to watch

To improve my skills with every video

to get my youtube income to be equal to my other income for at least 13 months in a row.

Keep going until the Summer next year, then assess where I am and where I am going

make 144 videos then see if I want to keep going

Some past goals

make one video

make a second video

make 12 videos

get to the monitizeation threshold

I'm working on a YouTube channel right now: the Quest_On Channel. I've just begun to more seriously edit the videos I create to have mix-media, like images of things I'm referring to. its mostly me talking about esoteric concepts related to reading at the moment but permaculture will be included as I feel I've something cool to share.

Anyway, I've started my YouTube channel primarily as a visual journal/lesson plan I can use as a remind of who I am today and to present my ideas to future generations (like my kids). I look at it as a form of art and I will be discussing art frequently on the channel.

For instance, one day, I'll discuss my theory of ecothetics which is about how nature became the main theme of art. If you look around, it is very difficult to find art from prior to the 1960s in which nature was depicted for its own sake. For example, almost no stand-alone portraits of animals could be found unless they were pets, servants, or symbols. Movements like the American Sublime looked at the land as a commodity or reflection of the American spirit. Nowadays, however, art, nature, and man have become one. Here is the art   of Hannah Faith Yata, a pop surrealist artist you've probably never heard of. I plan to elaborate how nature became a part of art (I believe LSD played a role) and what its implications are for society.


So, bringing you all to the fore front of consciousness and art is the goal of my Youtube channel:
Quest On

Feel free to subscribe if you want to learn more!

I'm wondering, how much of the success can be attributed to your presence and activity on permies.com ?

In your opinion, what percentage of your YT audience are nice permies from this forums?

What if you do not have that huge user base that can be a source of potential support ?

Richard Gorny wrote:I'm wondering, how much of the success can be attributed to your presence and activity on permies.com ?

In your opinion, what percentage of your YT audience are nice permies from this forums?

What if you do not have that huge user base that can be a source of potential support ?

Looking at the stats, it's somewhere between 10-30% from permies in the first week then dwindles to less than 1% after that.  That's a really nice bump and makes a huge difference to how youtube views the video going forwared.

But also, I've spent a lot of time here over the years contributing to permies.  It didn't just happen that I woke up one day with a huge user base.

What can someone do if they don't have that potential support?  

What I suggest is to find 2 or 3 communities that are closest to your niche.  Best if they are on different platforms, maybe one from FB, one from Reddit, or for best results, somewhere privately owned like permies.  Put a bookmark on those communities in a folder.  On chome, I can centre click on that folder and it opens the websites in different tabs.  Just don't let the list of sites get more than you can read during a cup of coffee.

Then I spent half an hour to an hour each day going through the conversations seeing what I can contribute.  Can I answer a question?  Do I have a question I can ask?  Can I say "wow, that looks amazing!  I really like what you did with the specific detail."  Basically spend time becoming a valuable member of the community.  

This is good to do even if you never plan to make a youtube video or share things because community is important to our mental health as humans.  And if the time comes that we want to venture out on our own enterprise then the community supports us.  Even if that time never comes, we still get huge benefits from these virtual communities with people who share our values.  

But without putting the work in for months or years prior, then we just look like some crappy spambot that is taking advantage of a ready-made audience.  

Or, we could look like a valued member of the community that has something fun to share.  

That's why we encourage respectful self-promotion on permies.  And is one of the foundations of why Paul made this site.  So community members could have a cool place to share their thing.