I stumble on an interesting update from Yahoo! Finance regarding the independent YouTube stars making over $100,000 a year.
As a recap, here is the Top 10 list:
1. Shane Dawson – $315,000. Shane has three YouTube channels – a comedy/parody channel, a vlog and “Ask Shane” series channel, and a channel containing Shane’s videos taken from his iPhone.
2. The Annoying Orange – $288,000. The Annoying Orange (my personal favourite!) is a comedy series about talking-fruit-in-a-kitchen.
3. Philip DeFranco – $181,000. Philip hosts The Philip DeFranco Show, containing vlogs about various topics.
4. Ryan Higa – $151,000. Ryan’s highlights are the “How to be Ganster” and “How to be Ninja” comedy videos. He has over 2 million subscribers to his channel.
5. Fred – $146,000. Fred (“a lonely six year old named Fred”) is a character played by Lucas Cruikshank using his mom’s video camera and post the videos on YouTube in a channel. The character is so popular, there will be a Nickelodeon movie based on the Fred character.
6. Shay Carl – $140,000. Shay is a radio DJ posting his comedies on YouTube.
7. Mediocre Films – $116,000. Created by Greg Benson, it is initially for a comedy TV series “Skip TV,” now the channel contains low budget comedy videos.
8. Smosh – $113,000. Smosh is a comedy channel with over 1.7 million subscribers hosted by Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla.
9. The Young Turks – $112,000. It is a political talk show founded and hosted by Cenk Uygur that also airs on Sirius Satellite Radio.
10. Natalie Tran – $101,000. Natalie Tran (YouTube username: communitychannel) is a vlogger with occasional comedy gigs. Her channel is the most popular among all Australian.
Small business bloggers should learn to embrace video blogging and YouTube
The list, despite not that accurate reading the estimation methods and the visitors’ comments on the article, shows us how embracing YouTube can do you and your business good – in term of personal branding, business branding and business profits.
Now – about the money: How those YouTube stars are making money? They make money from the ads served on their video pages and channels. YouTube offers an attractive 50-50 split of its members’ ad revenue.
It’s probably safe to say that the number of views is one of the major detrimental factors of how much a YouTube member can make money; of course, a way much important factor is the ‘wow factor’ of your videos.
YouTube is the most popular Internet media site today. It is also proven as a fertile ground for Internet marketers to pitch their products and/or services to viewers and subscribers, and get great conversions in the process.
To a certain extent, small business bloggers – who blog for their companies or independently – must learn to do what the independent YouTube stars do: Using videos to spread the messages across to their channels’ subscribers.
It’s about time to embrace YouTube, don’t you think?
Ivan Widjaya
Small business blogger