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You seem to be thinking that I'm bringing this up because I dislike PDP. I've never watched him, I'm sure he's a great guy. Absolutely none of this is coming from an opinion on him, and all of it is coming from my opinion of YouTube itself:
You should find behind the scenes interviews with Ben Croshaw or Matt Farah or the like. They drive Paganis and play video games for a living. Doing what they love, right?
No, doing what they loved. I've heard tons of automotive journalists and video game critics say that they can't even enjoy a video game recreationaly or a simple drive anymore. Once you get into this game the crush to create content dominates every waking hour-that's what it's all about. Your favorite thing, the thing that was most effortless and free and fun, becomes an agonizing circle of stopping and starting as you take notes, reset shots, check light, check tone, restart, stop, restart, repeat, then edit every 10 minute clip for 6-8 hours until the sound of your own voice makes you almost homicidal, every joke is so worn by the time you've shot it 4 times and cut it six times to get that last frame exactly right that. Then you've got the launch, you have to make sure it goes out at the right time of day, plug the right people, your sponsor wanted the can in the shot for 20 seconds and it was only in for 12, etc. etc.
Youtube is a side-show. It is to fastlaners what the NBA is to kids in the ghetto-A platform where tens get rich and tens of thousands waste time living hand to mouth to provide content basically for free. Literally having six customers at $20 profit each will net you the same return as 175,000 YouTube views. Consider that PDP is the *richest* YouTuber ever, and he made $6M last year after taxes. Read up on MJ's stuff on the forums here; when he was trucking during the height of his business he was sometimes making a million dollars profit *a month.* And MJ is, very respectfully, a minor success story in the annals of business.
Consider that to be the literal Guinness World Record holder for most popular YouTuber:
Nets you probably a smaller return per year as having a "successful and moderately popular website" did a decade ago.
In contrast, the world record holder for CEO pay last year was the CEO of the Discovery Channel, who took home $156,077,912, double PDP's lifetime net worth in a single year. CEO-Founders are often worth even more, tens of billions, with the value of their stock ballooning every year.
No hate on PDP-He's extremely successful, extremely driven, and extremely rich for someone his age. No doubt he has a better shot than most at being a billionaire if he's worth 50 million now at age 24, the leverage of his fame alone will net him millions in the years to come.
But while he smiled making tens millions, Google laughed, making hundreds of millions off of him. And don't get me started on the companies that paid google those hundreds of millions to advertise through his channel. They made tens of billions.
PDP's labor produced a bigger windfall for someone else than it did for him. He lacked control, so someone else reaped greater rewards from his efforts than he did. That's why, if you're just starting this journey, you shouldn't get enticed by those numbers. Look at what really is going on, and do the logical thing. Do what MJ said:
Play the odds.
Still, for someone who was never interested in making money and doesn't have an entreprenurial mindset.You seem to be thinking that I'm bringing this up because I dislike PDP. I've never watched him, I'm sure he's a great guy. Absolutely none of this is coming from an opinion on him, and all of it is coming from my opinion of YouTube itself:
You should find behind the scenes interviews with Ben Croshaw or Matt Farah or the like. They drive Paganis and play video games for a living. Doing what they love, right?
No, doing what they loved. I've heard tons of automotive journalists and video game critics say that they can't even enjoy a video game recreationaly or a simple drive anymore. Once you get into this game the crush to create content dominates every waking hour-that's what it's all about. Your favorite thing, the thing that was most effortless and free and fun, becomes an agonizing circle of stopping and starting as you take notes, reset shots, check light, check tone, restart, stop, restart, repeat, then edit every 10 minute clip for 6-8 hours until the sound of your own voice makes you almost homicidal, every joke is so worn by the time you've shot it 4 times and cut it six times to get that last frame exactly right that. Then you've got the launch, you have to make sure it goes out at the right time of day, plug the right people, your sponsor wanted the can in the shot for 20 seconds and it was only in for 12, etc. etc.
Youtube is a side-show. It is to fastlaners what the NBA is to kids in the ghetto-A platform where tens get rich and tens of thousands waste time living hand to mouth to provide content basically for free. Literally having six customers at $20 profit each will net you the same return as 175,000 YouTube views. Consider that PDP is the *richest* YouTuber ever, and he made $6M last year after taxes. Read up on MJ's stuff on the forums here; when he was trucking during the height of his business he was sometimes making a million dollars profit *a month.* And MJ is, very respectfully, a minor success story in the annals of business.
Consider that to be the literal Guinness World Record holder for most popular YouTuber:
Nets you probably a smaller return per year as having a "successful and moderately popular website" did a decade ago.
In contrast, the world record holder for CEO pay last year was the CEO of the Discovery Channel, who took home $156,077,912, double PDP's lifetime net worth in a single year. CEO-Founders are often worth even more, tens of billions, with the value of their stock ballooning every year.
No hate on PDP-He's extremely successful, extremely driven, and extremely rich for someone his age. No doubt he has a better shot than most at being a billionaire if he's worth 50 million now at age 24, the leverage of his fame alone will net him millions in the years to come.
But while he smiled making tens millions, Google laughed, making hundreds of millions off of him. And don't get me started on the companies that paid google those hundreds of millions to advertise through his channel. They made tens of billions.
PDP's labor produced a bigger windfall for someone else than it did for him. He lacked control, so someone else reaped greater rewards from his efforts than he did. That's why, if you're just starting this journey, you shouldn't get enticed by those numbers. Look at what really is going on, and do the logical thing. Do what MJ said:
Play the odds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm by no means saying it's an accident. He even mentioned that he chose the game-playing niche because no one was doing what he wanted to do so he already had a plan to be different. It's only after that took off that he decided to expand with creating other products/services. My point is I don't doubt he would still do it even if he wasn't making as much as he currently is.
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