How six YouTubers turned their side hustles into lucrative careers
They have millions of followers, lucrative brand endorsements and enough income to buy homes in Toronto. How a new generation of YouTube stars turned their everyday online musings into bona fide careers
IN2020, everyone has a side hustle. Your deskmate stitches My Favorite Murder needlepoint samplers. Your cousin makes soap from ingredients he foraged in Trinity Bellwoods. Your dog-walker designs corgi-sized rain ponchos. And on YouTube, these dedicated hobbyists have a platform on which their side hustle can grow into a main hustle. In the past few years, a respectable YouTube middle class has emerged: a brigade of entrepreneurial creators who’ve carved out quirky brands, amassed robust followings and figured out how to turn YouTubing into a nine-to-five career. They demonstrate how to paint van Gogh’s Starry Night on their fingernails, how to make designer Barbie accessories, how to create Wakanda-worthy Black Panther armour for Comic-Con. Theirs is a happy medium between celebrity and obscurity, emphasizing niche edutainment over global virality.
This new phenomenon owes everything to the sudden maturity and marketability of Generation Z, that cohort of teens and tweens and early20-somethings who prize video above all other content. A recent Pew study reported that 85 per cent of teens watch YouTube regularly; another study found that 80 per cent use it to learn new skills. They like that the YouTubers they follow film in their own homes and speak directly to them. They like that they can comment on the videos, vote on which topics they’d like to see covered and send questions to their favourite personalities. YouTubers convey the kind of intimacy and accessibility that stars like Beyoncé work so carefully to erase.
Once a creator hits a million followers, their earning potential soars. Traditional pre-roll advertising (the spots that play before a video starts) and the even more annoying mid-roll ads (self-explanatory) can earn, on average, $3 to $5 per 1,000 views, so a video that racks up three million views might make as much as $15,000 for its creator. The real money, however, is in the burgeoning field of influencer marketing, which is projected to generate as much as $15 billion (U.S.) in the next two years. Brands are tapping into the cozy relationships between creator and consumer: Nyx Cosmetics might pay a YouTuber to use its mascara in a makeup tutorial, and Microsoft might pay a tech reviewer to extol the virtues of its latest tablet. It’s a wildly lucrative arrangement on both sides. Where YouTube ad rates are more or less fixed, creators can negotiate their own sponsorship deals. The bigger names might charge up to eight cents per view, which would generate as much as $80,000 for a million clicks on a single video. Brands, meanwhile, see a much higher conversion rate with influencers than they would from purchasing a traditional ad: on average, three per cent of viewers will take some action after watching the sponsored content, whether that’s visiting the brand’s website or actually buying the product. (For traditional ads, that number is closer to 0.5 per cent.)
Thus YouTubers have found themselves in a sweet spot, leveraging their high-octane personalities and a suite of specialized hobbies into respectable day jobs. And the Gen Zers who watch them are desperate to follow their paths. A role-playing game called Youtubers Life, available on Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Apple and Android, allows aspiring video stars to simulate their own (faux) channels, measuring their success by number of likes and comments. Jake Paul, a loudmouth YouTuber with 20 million subscribers, recently announced a new platform called the Financial Freedom Movement, which charges $19.99 per month and purports to teach aspiring content creators how to build their own online presence.
The following pages feature six Torontonians who’ve transformed their YouTube hobbies into full-time jobs. One dropped out of business school to vlog full time; another was able to buy her own house with the money she made from cake-decorating videos. Yet another funnelled the earnings from his fitness videos into a $1.2-million new bricks-and-mortar gym in Brampton. And there are more where they came from: a recent study conducted by Lego reports that a third of respondents between the ages of eight and 12 listed “YouTuber” as their top career aspiration. Here, a portrait of YouTube’s new middle class.
—Emily Landau