 So look, everyone wants to know if you can actually make a living from YouTube and since I've opened up my channel a little bit to more personal development topics, I feel comfortable talking about this and I want to share with you my approach. I'm real talk. I'm the blunt truth. And for me, becoming self-employed, owning my own business was the hardest personal development challenge and goal I've ever achieved so far and therefore it's something that I think we should talk about. So I'm going to show not only exactly how much YouTube pays me, I'm going to show you where it falls into the grand scheme of my business and what you should do if you want to make a living one day as a YouTuber. What's up guys? Alex Hine here, author of the book Master of the Day. Now look, I'm sure you've seen these videos of YouTubers earning millions of dollars and buying their Ferraris. I can tell you for a fact, I have a lot of friends in the 500,000 subscriber range and none of them drive sports cars, okay? So I want to set the expectation first and then I'll show you exactly how much I make from YouTube and then where it all the pieces are in my business. Alright guys, so I'm going to log into my YouTube AdSense account or my channel so you can see exactly how much AdSense actually pays me, alright? So if you're thinking about like when you follow the average YouTuber and they're like, oh, I just bought a Ferrari. I'm going to just do whatever the hell I want now. This is not really how it works. So like look for example, you can see the variation day to day, but also I want to show you like, yeah, this is the last month and that's a lot. This is like four times higher than it normally is. And so if you're trying to support yourself or support a family with this, it's not going to work on AdSense. So I'll show you historically. So let's go back. Let's look at last quarter. So January, February, March, it's going to probably be the first quarter. Look at this. Alright, so this is realistic. This is what it was actually. And this is what it's been just for the last, you know, two months since a couple of videos went viral. So you look at like this is per day. So like let's say let's pick a middle number, six to seven $8 per day times 10 days, that's only 80 bucks, right? So that's like maybe $300 per month. That's really what it tends to average for 150,000 subscribers almost, which is insane. So what happens is usually one video for me, I've only been doing YouTube for two years, an average of one video will take off per year. And then it really bumps your subscriber count and your revenue like mad. But then look, in about another month, it's going to go back to like 300 a month, which is like garbage. I mean, it's like coffee money or my whole foods slash whole paycheck. My food grocery bill basically. But I want to see if I can find you some of the, let's look up the last year. Okay, 2017. All last year, $4,463 from YouTube ad revenue. So remember, this is only like this is under 10% of my business revenue because you can't really survive off this. But you can see, like even last year, it was much higher on average, $13 per day, $20 per day, $10 per day. This year, even though my channel is much bigger, on average, it's been even, even lower, which is crazy. And so, and then let's see what we type in this year, 2018 so far, January, February, March, April, May. So now in the first five months of this year, I've basically done what I did all last year. But again, it looks pretty and it looks pretty gangster right now. But you can't rely on this stuff because it's not going to stay stable. Whereas the other parts of my business that bring in money are actually stable book royalties, product sales, coaching, things like that are much more stable. I would never be able to have quit my job relying on this. And so it says a couple of things. One, AdSense is not a business. It's like your extra bonus coffee money. And two, like just gradually work your way out of your full time job if you want to quit your job because you can't rely on this alone. All right, so you might be thinking like, okay, that's pretty decent. I could really use an extra 1000 us a month because to me, that still is a lot of extra money. This is the actual breakdown of my business. YouTube only makes up about 10% of my income or less 50% of my income is made up of product sales that are my own online courses 30% are royalties from my book sales and 10% are from affiliates and the miscellaneous coaching client and other random sources. So keep in mind the fact that 90% of my income is not from YouTube. And I have a lot of friends in the 200,000 300,000 500,000 YouTube subscriber count. And I make a lot more money than them because number one I focus on building an actual business. And I focus on driving people off YouTube to my website where they can actually learn about my online courses, my books, things like that. And these are really big key lessons if you want to make this actually work, where you can make substantial side income or eventually quit your job. Now here's the thing and this is a problem. Look, YouTube makes 10% of my income, but it takes up 50% of my workday. And that's stupid from a business perspective like why the hell would I spend almost half my day on the thing that only makes this much my money? The answer is I love it. Like I love shooting these videos even though they take energy. I love the responses I get from you. I love the emails and the DMs. I love that stuff. I live for it. It's the impact meter. Like my impact meter is full every day. I feel like my life has so much purpose and meaning because it helps you. And so sometimes you just do those things that are irrational. But if you want to have a real business, you have to focus on what pays you first. So let's talk about the three things you need to do if you really want to have an actual business that you can make a living from. I don't want you to be the 300,000 subscriber person that can't even pay their rent. That's stupid. Build a real business, okay? Don't be ashamed. The first thing is build a business and don't think about YouTube as your business. YouTube is just one marketing channel for your business. So let's say you're a fashion consultant and you want to have fashion coaching clients or you want to have a fashion online course. Well, YouTube is just one way you have people find out about you. You look at the brand like Luxie Hair. YouTube is just one way they drive traffic to their product, the Luxie Hair extensions that makes millions of dollars per year, right? YouTube is not the business. It's one thing that drives business. That's very key to think about because you need to have a product or a service. The second thing is have a website or a product or a service. So for example, in my business, I have online courses on fitness, weight loss, habits and living a better life. People come from YouTube, they sign up to my email newsletter and they get a series of emails that educate them and also introduce them to my courses. That's how I make a living, not really from YouTube. I was making a full time living before I even started YouTube because of the traffic coming to my website. That's how you have to think, not as like the only the YouTuber. And the third thing is of course, AdSense is like bonus money. All my successful YouTube friends all say the same thing. AdSense is extra income. You cannot count on it because it varies so much. It could go from 300 one month to 1000 the next month. And when it's making 1000 a month, you might be like, I'm rich, I got all this extra money. But the next month it could be back to 400 and then 200. It varies way too much for you to live or support a family on. So it's very important not to focus on that as a revenue source. And the last thing I want to leave you with is that if you want to do YouTube, you have to love it. Like the big reason I made this pivot in my brand where I'm talking about more personal development stuff that interests me not even related to my brand is because I love this stuff and I want to be doing it for the next 50 years in some form. I don't know what that's going to look like. But if you don't love it, you're going to quit long before you reach whatever goal you want to achieve. And the thing with YouTube is that it's the same way like I basically do this for free. Like now my AdSense is doing well and it drives people to my website. But effectively for the time I dedicate, I don't get that much financially back. And it's not all financial, but I could use a lot more money than I have right now. And I think you really need to love it. You need to love interacting with people. You need to love the content you create. And you need to constantly love reinventing yourself. And that's what I'm doing here. So I hope that helps give you some real two cents on what it takes to build a full-time YouTuber. And again, I make a pretty decent full-time income from YouTube two to three hours per day. I make about two times as much as at my last full-time job. And this is my second year doing YouTube, like actually uploading at least one video per week. So it can happen and it's real, but that's a real talk. Hi guys, I hope that helps. Best way to stay in touch, of course, is to grab the free personal development and weight loss challenge on my website at modernhealthmonk.com. And you can also check out the last two videos that came out here and here that are related on designing your life and reaching those life goals.