[bluevolt]

I follow few YouTubers and it often amazes to cease me how much money they make. A related thread on team-bhp on flying beast also discusses his lifestyle (owning a BMW X5, buying properties, international vacations, latest iPhones) despite being out of his regular job.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/comme...t-airasia.html (Pilot suspended for raising safety concerns against AirAsia)

One youtuber recently (Explore unseen) left his high paying banking job to pursue youtube as career! College degrees, professional experience be damned!

Few more youtubers are just 18-19 years old and are celebrity earning crores by creating roasting channels(carryminati) or simply posting daily vlogs(sauravjoshi vlogs) which in general adds 0 value to people’s lives. While I am not questioning their talent or capability of anyone, but I am amazed to see if education (especially college degrees) matter anymore?

People are becoming YouTubers, Instagram influencers etc and are earning lakhs per month while a regular guy who studied PCM in 12th, cracked A-grade engineering exam, doing hard work for next 4-6 years for Engineering/Management degrees and then earning mere 3-4 lakhs per annum starting salary on an average?

Where we are heading, I am not sure. Are these dynamics good for our young generation’s future? Shouldn't someone who just passed 12th invest in a camera and start a YouTube channel, upload their daily vlogs, and become millionaires instead of preparing for JEE/Medicals/UPSC and other stuffs?

[vishy76]

Becoming one of these youtubers (or trying to become one) is like buying a 6-7L rupee German luxury car. If it works, it's the deal of a lifetime, if it doesn't, it will be a nightmare for life.

For every one YouTube channel that succeeds (there's no benchmark to success or a fixed definition but let's say the 1M+ guys like Flying Beast and Mumbiker Nikhil), there's 1000s of others who have failed to even breach the 4 or 5 digit figure. It's like saying Steve Jobs was a college dropout and became a millionaire, so even I will drop out of college and become one.

I am not discouraging anyone. I have seen some great channels coming up of late and the amount of user interaction and hits these get simply amazes me, but I don't think this is a better career option than anything else.

YouTube channels are demanding. Content needs to be uploaded regularly else it won't take time for people to forget you (assuming the algorithm doesn't do that before). And then of course, you lose money, momentum and probably the channel too. What would you do then? Will the corporate sector you quit absorb you again? Will the college degree you completed long back, but have no work experience be of any value? I might not be old enough to know the ways of the world very well, but I think the answer to both questions would be a no.

[Eddy]

Better career option than "Anything Else"?

Of course not!

There are YouTubers who have a special skill and hence will be successful. Others like explorers, food critics exist dime a dozen and not really a stable career option. Some other questions:

- How long will YouTube be there for?
- Even if it is there, how long will today's business model last?
- What is the backup career / earning option?

In my opinion: Highly Highly risky, and under no circumstances this should be your only means of earning especially as a fresher.

And it is certainly not where the "future of Indian youth lies". Well, I definitely hope so.

[Rachit.K.Dogra]

Well this subject is very complex, yet in my view very simple.

When you monetize your channel on Youtube, Youtube itself recommends watching the video made by pewdipie on how to make money from Youtube.

In that video, he simply says, if you like doing something and then share it with people, there is better chance of you being successful on Youtube, but if you are trying to create a channel specifically to earn money, it is harder. Now I am not referring to professionally managed channels, this is more for an average single person channel.

By the way, in my opinion, even if I ignore the quality of content, reaching a stage where youtube starts paying decently in India needs a lot of time and effort. This amount of effort and time is nothing short of doing an actual degree and getting a job somewhere.

So in my view, one should only do it, if he/she ends up enjoying doing it. If not, it becomes much harder.


Rachit!!

[porsche_guy]

Originally Posted by bluevolt

I follow few YouTubers and it often amazes to cease me how much money they make. A related thread on team-bhp on flying beast also discusses his lifestyle (owning a BMW X5, buying properties, international vacations, latest iPhones) despite being out of his regular job.

I might have a different opinion on this one. I absolutely don't think this is a poor career choice. Infact, if you're good at it and understand the market well one should very much pursue it. That said, it isn't just as easy as picking up a camera and making a video. A whole lot of things go on behind the scenes to roll out the kind of content that is seen. It is definitely not everyone's cup of tea and "money" shouldn't be the sole motivator(in the ideal world which doesn't exist) but then there are plenty people in other fields as well who are only lured by money. Not something you should aim for solely IMO.

One Youtuber recently (Explore unseen) left his high paying banking job to pursue Youtube as career! College degrees, professional experience be damned!

That is a rather pessimistic way of looking at it. Times are changing today, you no longer need to remain in an unhappy job just because you're minting money. If he/she enjoys making content and earns a good amount of money as well, then why should he/she care about the college degree or professional experience?

Few more Youtubers are just 18-19 years old and are celebrity earning crores by creating roasting channels(carryminati) or simply posting daily vlogs(sauravjoshi vlogs) which in general adds 0 value to people’s lives. While I am not questioning their talent or capability of anyone, but I am amazed to see if education (especially college degrees) matter anymore?

Again, it's just a form of entertainment for people. It might not add any sort of perceivable value but its not always meant to be educational either. It's the same reason why one sees all kinds of web series and movies when it really might not add any value to your life.

People are becoming YouTubers, Instagram influencers etc and are earning lakhs per month while a regular guy who studied PCM in 12th, cracked A-grade engineering exam, doing hard work for next 4-6 years for Engineering/Management degrees and then earning mere 3-4 lakhs per annum starting salary on an average?

You think building a following and creating content isn't hard work?

Where we are heading, I am not sure. Are these dynamics good for our young generation’s future? Shouldn't someone who just passed 12th invest in a camera and start a YouTube channel, upload their daily vlogs, and become millionaires instead of preparing for JEE/Medicals/UPSC and other stuffs?

Everyone is simply not suited for conventional career profiles. There are various offbeat careers that provide a lot more in terms of satisfaction, passion and the monetary part is often secondary. Each and every person is different in terms of thought process, background, priorities and a lot of other parameters. We are already seeing what happens when all sorts of people are tried to fit into one mould(engineering) and the results aren't pretty.

As I see it, YouTube and Instagram and other mediums of content creation isn't too different from the film industry. It is a field governed by ones talent and passion for the art rather than your qualifications, however glamourous the industry might seem from outside. It looks like a disaster doesn't it? No stable income, no stability in work, often times a brutal work environment etc. For every Irfan Khan, there are a million people who failed but that doesn't and shouldn't deter the next million to try it out. Who knows we would find another brilliant artist?

YouTube has instead given opportunities to such creators to express their work to the public and I appreciate that. It is the same for OTT platforms and Instagram. You no longer need to have a fancy setup to become popular in doing what you do. You can do it sitting at home, with the bare minimum production required and showcase it to the world

[Akshay6988]

There's a reason why reality shows like big brother, big boss are popular. People (we Indians specially) love to poke nose in other's lives. I know I'm generalizing here a lot but you get the gist. I don't know how people are comfortable v-logging every damn thing in their lives - birthdays, friends, trips. Heck I've seen some youtubers just vlogging about their usual daily chores too and these videos gets views in lakhs ! This will work well for say 7-8 yrs, what after that ? How can they sustain the income when nunber views start to dwindle ? My cousin in 8th std has a youtube channel ! It's already affecting his studies. For me this is not a "better" (it's a subjective term IMO) career choice.

[Shreyas Agarwal]

Originally Posted by bluevolt

I follow few YouTubers and it often amazes to cease me how much money they make. A related thread on team-bhp on flying beast also discusses his lifestyle (owning a BMW X5, buying properties, international vacations, latest iPhones) despite being out of his regular job.

You only get to see half of the picture always. It's not like everybody is making huge amounts of money there.
When you look at any field in a shallow manner, you are bound to see only the good there. The grass is always greener on the other side.
Not every businessman moves around in a Rolls Royce like Mukesh Ambani, not every sportsman gets crores like Virat Kohli, not every musician lives lavishly and not every actor gets to star in movies collecting 100s of crores in the box office.
Similarly, very few YouTubers are this successful and get to live such extravagant lifestyles.

One Youtuber recently (Explore unseen) left his high paying banking job to pursue Youtube as career! College degrees, professional experience be damned!

When you slogged off and invested in making an endeavour work while bearing the burden of pursuing a full-time job alongside and it becomes successful, you definitely should have the option of making money there. Jobs and degrees shouldn't be the only way to make money.
Talking about college degrees being damned because you can make money some other way; if the only reason you have to pursue a degree is to make money then you definitely aren't doing justice to the field.

Few more Youtubers are just 18-19 years old and are celebrity earning crores by creating roasting channels(carryminati) or simply posting daily vlogs(sauravjoshi vlogs) which in general adds 0 value to people’s lives.

What value does a movie, or a song add to your life? Its entertainment. These creators work in the entertainment genre.
There are educational creators too, people reviewing stuff and helping you buy, teaching you how to edit videos, teaching you how to make that cake. Everyone offers a different proposition and makes money if the audience likes their proposition. Just like what happens in traditional business. Nothing new there.

While I am not questioning their talent or capability of anyone, but I am amazed to see if education (especially college degrees) matter anymore?

They never did!! a degree is just a piece of paper, certifying that you maybe know some stuff about a field. You can have the knowledge without a degree too.
A self-learned coder with deep knowledge without a college degree will end up making more money in the long than someone who just studied a night before the exams for that CS degree from an engineering college.
You make money, progress or success based on what lies inside the brain. Not for what degree you have stuck on your living room wall. You have business acumen and a good idea you can make billions without having a business degree from IIMs.
Steve Jobs was a dropout, so is Michael Dell (the founder of Dell) and so is Elon Musk. All making huge money without a degree. I think we should all boycott laptops from Dell, cars from Tesla and phones from Apple because their founders/CEOs don't have a formal college degree. Let's make college degrees matter.

People are becoming YouTubers, Instagram influencers etc and are earning lakhs per month while a regular guy who studied PCM in 12th, cracked A-grade engineering exam, doing hard work for next 4-6 years for Engineering/Management degrees and then earning mere 3-4 lakhs per annum starting salary on an average?

If you comparing the average of one dynamic with the best of the other, the outcome will always be skewed. Top graduates from the top IIMs and IITs make well north of a crore a year. Many times more than an average Youtuber.
Also, you make it seem like the YouTubers don't work at all. I must tell you that creating good content requires a lot of effort. As much as any engineering aspirant. Editing videos for hours, getting the right lighting setup and most importantly finding content. Try making a roast yourself and entertaining someone through it and you would know what I mean.

Where we are heading, I am not sure. Are these dynamics good for our young generation’s future? Shouldn't someone who just passed 12th invest in a camera and start a YouTube channel, upload their daily vlogs, and become millionaires instead of preparing for JEE/Medicals/UPSC and other stuffs?

Like it was always the case and will be, people who excel in any field would be successful. Not everyone can be a good doctor, not everyone has the ability to be a good engineer and not everyone can be a good administrator. Similarly, not everyone can be good Youtuber.

Your argument is like Sachin Tendulkar made a lot of money. Everyone should give up what they are doing and join sports. Can everyone be as good a cricketer?

This obsession with degrees and competitive examinations as if they are the only worthwhile things out there is taking a huge toll on the same youth you are talking about.
Why do you think we have so many students ending up their lives due to these competitive exams? Because it has been ingrained in them by idiots with sick mentality that if you don't crack it, your life is worthless, you are dumb and you have no right to be here or simply because the child never wanted to be an engineer or a doctor in the first place, engineering was shoved down his throat because that is the only respectable recourse and only an engineer can be successful in life.
Now, when such students who pursued such a respectable field like engineering see someone being successful in such a pointless, downtrodden field like YouTube they are bound to feel that those people don't have the right to be there. They chose such idiotic endeavours because they could excel there and enjoyed doing it and now make a lot of money while I made sacrifices and gave such respectable engineering entrances and became a sub average engineer with no interest whatsoever in the field, and I make less money. Why should that be?
I think we need to progress as a society and understand that the world is not only about IAS, B.Tech and MBBS and only people with those degrees should be successful.

Everyone has a role and is equally important and if a person has a strong skillset in any field, they have a right to make lots of money in that, they shouldn't be questioned.

Sorry for the long rant

[GutsyGibbon]

We need to remind people that Google is a publicly traded company that is always under the pressure of shareholders to maximize profits. Just like Uber and such that were liberal in initial payouts - started to tighten the screws. I see people reviewing cars and bikes, they cant even speak a sentence without non words (ummm, aaah, like or redundant repetitive words). I don't think they have had any training in language fluency, public speaking, or cinematography. Just too crude. (they haven't even clipped their fingernails). The earnings will eventually die out for such people. Even worse for people who are grabbing copyrighted video clips and creating top 10 videos, or highlights videos, they can expect some crackdown eventually.

Genuine creativity will always be rewarded on some popular platform or the other. I think it is not realistic to expect the masses to all be creative to the extent of making a living out of it.

[SoumenD]

Its amazing to see the following these guys have(flying beast, mumbiker nikhil, JS films etc). Specially in lockdown with nowhere to go viewership has gone over the roof. But what we see is tip of the iceberg, only the success stories. I can’t imagine the amount of preparations and effort it took to reach there. Infact at times I feel these travel bloggers even during these scary times do so because they have to keep themselves relevant and in the process quite a lot of them contracted covid. If one stops posting content for even a week or two people would move on and it puts a brake in their YT journey. Its as good or bad as entertainment industry. The value they add is simply ‘entertainment’ for ‘relevant crowd’.

I follow a few travel blog channels like ‘The Untravel show’ and finance guys like ‘freefincal’ as their content seems entertaining to me. Both have barely 50k followers, so nowhere close to these million club superstars but then I enjoy their content more, so spend few minutes a day with them

Personally don’t follow the usual superstars as I never understood the point of all these vlogs. I mean people start a blog showing a cup of coffee travelling from kitchen to balcony and then mama earth advertising runs in the washroom followed by gyaan on investment using kuvera(for stocks/MFs) or Coinswitch(for crypto ). And in between all that a couple more YT sponsored ADs which you can’t skip But then there’s a huge set of people who love watching this stuff and hence they have millions of followers.

[iamahunter]

I am not sure as to anyone taking up youtube as a career.

Its all good initially when you get the views and gain subscribers. Brands come in, Sponsorships come in etc. Issue and frustration will come in when the subscribers and views would need to be maintained. There will be a time when people might not prefer to watch your daily vlogs/lifestyle. And youtube does not require any qualifications, so the competition is going to be immense. And not just that, an unqualified creator will not just face competition from another unqualified creator, but a qualified/professional creator as well. And a qualified creator will always have an edge over an unqualified creator, may be not in matter of video creation, but content.

What we see on youtube are the reel lives portrayed as real lives. The real lives might be quite different. Have seen many youtubers with million subscribers and what they do is just make daily vlogs as to "aaj hum doggy ko ghumayenge", "birthday ke liye gift" etc.

Youtube, if needs to be considered as a career, is best to be a secondary one and not the primary one.

[TrackDay]

Somewhat similar to those who set out to be actors in the film field. Thousands, if not more try their luck every year and only a handful come up in the movie industry. In that pool, only a select few hit the big leagues and can afford a luxury lifestyle. Being a youtuber is a similar gig I feel. If you are very successful, you rake in the big money. It is a huge risk to get into it just after your school life.

For someone who wishes to try it out as a career full time after school, I would suggest them to get a degree in some visual / film making/ editing course. That way, even if the channel doesn't take off, you can try your luck in other arenas. For others I would suggest them to start a channel and put videos about something they have good knowledge about. It can be an IT professional putting videos of DIY on cars to teachers doing cooking videos. It can also be something from your own field, such as a Doctor putting videos on medical advices.

[procrastinator]

During lockdown, I was in home but away from home.

YouTube was sometimes used a time-pass tool.
I realised vlogging folks spend 2+ hours in editing and at least half a hour for final work of exporting, uploading, and presenting it as catchy!

A daily vlogger spends ~3hours on laptop and rest of the day filming.

From my recent experience, YouTube stops recommending a popular channel if creator stops posting content.

YouTuber has no option but to engage with audience continuously.
Sometimes, I have seen content with low quality from popular Youtubers. But the sheer number of viewers of such creator keeps YouTube in business, and thus creator in business.

[aargee]

Originally Posted by bluevolt

I follow few YouTubers and it often amazes to cease me how much money they make

Nassim Taleb says in Fooled by Randomness...

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

I hope you're getting me on your point above

[GTO]

You can start a car website in <1 day, you can become an Instagram influencer in a day, and you can become a YouTuber in the same time frame too. Problem is, the barrier to entry is so low & the earnings so high for top performers that competition is brutal. Your chances of becoming a top YouTuber are comparable to getting into an IIM. It's incredibly tough to become a YouTuber earning lakhs per month. And remember, wherever there is money, there is always hard work + intelligence + commitment + challenges + problems. Earning big money is never, ever easy.

Your odds of making it in a traditional career are perhaps 100X higher. I value education & a stable career path when starting off. Do that, and keep YouTubing as a part-time career option. If you click in the latter, awesome. If not, the traditional path will take care of you. In the early years of my career, my conventional business (education) paid all the bills, while Team-BHP was simply a part-time passion. Moved to Team-BHP full-time only after it grew to considerable size.

[DigitalOne]

I can take sick days off from work without any questions. I can take 3 months off in case of hospitalization. I can take a longer loss-of-pay break in case of other genuine issues.

Can a YouTuber do that?