 Hello, spinny chairs. First video of 2020 is gonna be a quick recap of my content creation 2019. What did I do? How much should I create? And of course people ask, how much I make? And because I like being very open about how I run my business and how I run my channel. And I like to disclose all that. Yes, I make money at YouTube videos. Yes, it also brings in leads and we booked almost 200 businesses that found us on YouTube and booked us for different varied projects. Some big, some small and everything in between. So that was a lot of fun. That is still probably where the majority of all my money comes from. Besides my regular business, but my online content. Yes, a legion that comes from YouTube is amazing. I won't lie. I'm not saying this is for everyone. I'm not saying for you two or not to do it. I'll let that completely be your own decision. Take a look at my channel. I have entire videos of how I make my videos, how we built our studio. Now I started in 2015 and I was doing public speaking before that. So I never had a problem being in front of people or being in front of a camera or coming up with content ideas. I love what I do. And this YouTube was a place to scale. The disappointing part about YouTube is in the very beginning, how much time and effort you put in and then see nobody watching the thing you created that is very difficult. That is the hardest part I probably say have to work through is going, I made all these videos and nobody watched them. That's like the first few years you're on YouTube. Not like the first video, the first couple years you're on YouTube is probably gonna be like that. I'm smiling, I'm excited. After five years of creating videos, and two years ago we got serious and built the studio that you see behind me. That's when things started to take off is when we really started putting a lot of videos out there. And of course focusing on the content. My content from four or five years ago was terrible. My content I think has gotten better. At least the views got better or maybe I'm lured into the false sense that it's better but I feel as though I've gotten better with the content and have a lot more focus. I have a lot of tutorials on there but some of my older tutorials, I can go back and watch them and not cringe too bad because they're well at least they're technically accurate and that's an important aspect of it. I do know that audio and video quality has gotten a little bit better but I still do a lot of recordings on a pretty basic setup in my office to do tutorials. It's not like you need to go spend some incredible fortune and I do have plenty of videos on all the gear I use for the studio and how my workflow is and all that's covered on there. But how much did you make Tom? Yes, let's talk about how much Tom made on there and how many views I got. So for 2019, we have eight million views just for 2019. That part blows me away. I did not realize the demand was as high as it is for technical content but then again, I'm really, really small in the bucket because some people have eight million views on each video they release when they're doing bigger video contents for four mainstream things. Was still eight million for a guy talking about firewalls? I'm pretty happy. 49,000 subscribers. That is how many gained subscribers I had just for 2019 and YouTube ad revenue paid out was $31,000 and $38. Yeah, $31,000 and $38. Now that is the YouTube ad split between the advertisers that want to buy ads on YouTube and then the content matching system, they go, hey, Tom has a technical audience. We have an ad that we feel as though it fit that audience and that's negotiated between YouTube and there's an ad buy rate and that buy rate is dependent on the demand for that particular content and that is why it's hard to put a number on how much you get per view. That varies greatly. They tried to do a content alignment all the time. So when people think YouTube is biased politically or any other way, a lot of times they aren't as much biased. They are biased towards making the advertisers happy in which content they want to promote because YouTube does take money to operate. Therefore ads are placed on these videos based on the alignment they have. So some brands don't want association with one thing or another. Therefore that content may be labeled controversial and then people start blaming YouTube for the bias when YouTube is like, we're biased to the green, the money that we make from ads. So I'm throwing it out there. A lot of people ask you, why don't you put your content somewhere else? Because I hate YouTube because they've blocked my favorite XYZ person and they hate free speech or whatever. But I'm like, no, it was probably just not able to put things on there. And I'm not saying YouTube is always in the right and YouTube is correct about the way they do it and they can always be cleaner. But I will, for those that always ask that question about my feelings on YouTube, I believe they're more beholden to ad revenue but they can always do a better job than the way they police the system. Now we make money a bunch of affiliate links through a lot of affiliate links. So that is the second way we make a lot of money on YouTube. I can summarize Amazon's because it has a nice dashboard. A lot of the other ones that we have signed up for just don't have dashboards. One of them, they just send me checks and generalized reports in an email that is not, I didn't feel like dumping all this into a series of spreadsheets. But to give you an idea like just the Amazon revenue in summary for 2019, we got $21,595 in ad revenue from Amazon based on $682,850 in orders. Now the way an affiliate links works on Amazon is I put an affiliate link for a product I reviewed and people are able to cook that link and right now tech pays roughly 2.5% but that being said, it doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't cost you 2.5% more to buy it through my affiliate link. It's just Amazon knowing who recommended that product and that recommendation paying back to us. So it's kind of cool. It's crazy to think that there was like $680,000 worth of stuff ordered off my affiliate links. It's kind of like, wow, but it's pretty cool that it was. So there's something you need to think about. And all the other affiliate links that we have, so that's $21,000 in Amazon revenue. There's probably another 20 or 30,000 roughly that came in in 2019. I have to look at a bunch of individual emails and some different affiliate links to even give you a summary on that. But that does at least give you an idea of the money we're making on there. And it's a much different number to quantify those over 200 companies that booked us to hire us for projects. We do have it, it's all in our system and I'm not gonna really go over every little detail of that piece of revenue. I wanna talk more directly about how the YouTube system works. And yeah, it's been a fun year. I'm looking a lot forward to 2020. Now some of the other side effects of YouTube. I went on a couple trips. I don't do any paid videos. First we'll stop that. Of all the videos I have on my channel, zero of them are or will be paid videos. No one pays me to create them. But after I create videos, frequently I get the attention of companies and they want to bring me to their events or send me their products. I do disclose if a product was given to me. I do review those products and I'm always as honest but from some people who think it made me biased because the product was given to me, that's fine and that's why I disclose it right at the beginning of the video. If that turns you off about my video, no problem, don't watch the rest of it. It's in the very beginning of the video. When I am flown out to places, I even mentioned it in a video, hey, this company brought me to this place and let's talk about their product. Like they want to give me behind the scenes on our product or just go hang out with them sometimes. That's happened a few times. Just to sit down and discuss products. They go, wow, you seem to have some insight on this and those connections are amazing. They are people I met and then turned into friendships and people I talk to on the regular which is pretty awesome to get this level of interaction via YouTube. Same thing, I built some forums. I wanted to build some community in 2019 and that goal went really well. So my forums have become a very active place for people to further discuss any of the topics that I have on the channel because there's one thing that YouTube is bad at. It's trying to sort out all the comments in a more intelligent way. The comments aren't negative really on my channel but they're not threaded very well so they're easy to read and it's harder to have more in-depth discussions so the forums was another piece of 2019 kind of directly related to my YouTube channel but it's that place we further discuss things. The last thing I'm gonna mention is I met so many awesome people that just had come up to me from hacking events to just tech events I went to that recognized me. Even someone at a paintball place so if you're watching, hi, I went to drop myself a paintball and they were like, hey, I'm in college and your technical video helped me a lot with this particular course. I was like, that's awesome. I love hearing that. I heard this from a number of people and it really makes me happy because I really think with these newer platforms it makes education on technical topics because the majority of the videos I do are tutorials so much more accessible and for watching a couple ads in trade for being able to watch some content which I always see people complain about the ads. I'm like, there's gotta be kind of a give and take on there compared to what a college course would cost or anything like that and I'm compensated for my time all you had to do to get access to this was watch a stupid ad that eventually you could probably skip that's not terrible. So I don't force a bunch of long ads on my system. You can force, I think 30 second ads, I think they have an option. I just let the ad algorithm work its magic however YouTube inserts them. I don't try to overdo it so I don't overburden people with ads just so I can make that couple extra dollars. I really like that a lot of my videos are accessible because a few people ask me if I do special paid tutorials. I'm like, I like when I hear from someone in another country I actually have a few people that in countries much less affluent than the US tell me that this really helped them because they were able to understand they were able to use some of the open source products I talk about and it really helped them in a local way that they just didn't have easy access to this particular knowledge or textbooks or really anything but YouTube for them they can watch it on their phone they can kind of get some concepts and start putting things together and those are really things that meant a lot to me that in 2019 all the people that sent me messages and talked to my forums about that you know things I don't even think about is they talked about wattage efficiency and I'm like yeah we don't think about that much in the US because electricity is relatively inexpensive but when you talk about some of the other countries they just have a higher price they pay for power therefore those fees mean a lot and a Microsoft licensing fees compared to an open source license is a dramatic difference because well what doesn't sound like much here in the US could be a substantial amount of money in other countries. So meeting those people online and chatting with them and working with them has been pretty awesome 2019 and quite a few people like that and I was just excited to hear that my video has helped them out because my tutorials are start to finish top to bottom I don't leave anything out or I don't have to do a tutorial and say hire me or donate to me or give me money for the rest and I'm not selling any books or anything on this topic I'm putting together all the video content YouTube is the medium of the system by which I post it on and then it can be delivered just with a few ads so I think that's a pretty cool way and it's a cool trade well I'm not before I sound like to some YouTube fanboy it's not the most perfect system I think someone could come up with something better but until they do it's the best system we have right now here and going into 2020. So I just want to leave this quick summary about content creation, what I did in 2019 and feel free to discuss this with me if you have questions like I said I have a lot of videos on my channel if you want to know how my workflow is or how my studio is set up and all that all the gear I use to film this but if you're interested in content creation I encourage people to think about that get into doing it it's awesome if you say Tom this seems like way more work than I want to do then don't do it, cool, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free. Also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time.