The 1 million subscriber benchmark is generally used to denote that a YouTuber has “made it.” At that point, one could reasonably assume that they’re generating enough income to at least support themselves, if not a small team. What’s more, it’s very common for YouTubers to upload a video that celebrates when they hit 1 million subscribers. Not only does YouTube make subscriber counts public, but it also publicizes individual video view counts and the total number of views for a channel.
There is one platform that publishes enough public audience data to allow one to track a creator’s growth: YouTube. Was there some data set available that would make this possible?
In the rare cases that it took them less time, it was because they spent years creating content as part of their day job for instance, a journalist who spent 10+ years writing for The New York Times is going to carry over a sizable audience to their just-launched Substack.īut while it’s always great to hear anecdotes about how successful media personalities put in the work before striking gold, I wanted to find a way to quantify the amount of content a creator would need to produce before they could reasonably expect to generate a full time income. In most cases, it took them well over a year, if not much longer. I interview a lot of successful creators on my own podcast and newsletter, and I almost always ask them how long it took them before they started generating a full-time income from their content. That Marvel action star went on thousands of auditions and failed to land even small roles on long-forgotten TV pilots and commercials. Before that A-list comedian landed their Netflix special, they bombed their way through hundreds of open mic nights in front of tiny audiences. In fact, if you listen to any interview in which a successful creative talks about their career, you’ll often discover that they toiled away in obscurity for far longer than you realized. We didn’t see them produce content that barely anyone consumed. We weren’t there to observe them grinding it out, day after day. We compare ourselves to really successful creators and worry that the gulf between us and them is too wide.īut it only seems that way because we often become aware of a creator’s success after they’ve already hit it big. Spector was speaking to this nagging feeling many creators have at the back of their minds that they’re not growing quickly enough. “You're not failing - you're doing the work. Last week, the writer Josh Spector published a tweet that I think a lot of content creators should print out and tape above their desks: “It's so much harder to build an audience than most people realize,” he wrote.
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