ticker symol U turns 4 years old this month and it's been a wild ride so far as we approach 400,000 subscribers I thought it would be cool to give everyone a behindthescenes look at how we make our videos how ticker symol you runs as a business how much money we make and a sneak peek at some exciting projects that we're working on right now your time is valuable so let's get right into it over the last few years I've gotten all kinds of questions about this channel from why we only make one video a week
to how ticker symol you makes money and what our long-term goals are so I thought I'd celebrate four years of content and almost 400,000 subscribers by answering your most burning questions in four parts I'll walk you through our entire content creation process I'll show you all the ways the channels made money so far I'll share our long-term goals for the next four years and some of the big changes and exciting projects that we're working on to hit them let's start with how we make content the heart and soul of ticker symbol U is our research
besides me there are four other researchers on the team and if you've seen our podcast funding awesome then you've met a few of them already all five of us come from very different areas of finance and technology and everyone on the team actually started out as a fan of the channel that's something I'm particularly proud of we all do our research inside a tool called Kota if you've ever heard of notion Kota is like that but with a bigger focus on data tables instead of text over the years we've compiled a massive library of market
reports earnings calls and performance benchmarks for AI models and the chips that power them we also follow a wide range of sources from huge Finance channels like CNBC to Tiny blogs that focus on single parts of the tech stack that way when there's breaking news or a company announces surprising earnings we're already set up to work through a ton of information from reliable sources on that specific topic and when the news is slow we have a rolling content calendar filled with topics that we think would be valuable to investors either way after we've done our
homework on a specific story I start writing the script if you didn't know I script every single one of these videos including this one if you've ever wondered why my delivery is so smooth it's because I'm reading I do that for a few reasons first there are a lot of numbers statistics facts and figures in every video and there's no way I'm keeping it all straight in my head writing everything out and double-checking it gives me the confidence I need to publish something that goes out to hundreds of thousands of investors and believe it or
not I still get nervous on every upload another reason to write scripts is to stay organized there's a really nice flow when we can explain one concept up front and then build on it for the rest of the video without bouncing back and forth between topics that really lets us pack in as much information as we can into every single video but the biggest reason that I script everything is I just don't trust reaction videos especially when it comes to finance and Technology reactions make for great entertainment because they're emotional and unrehearsed but they're also
filled with mistakes and anyone who makes two two or three videos a day obviously isn't doing any real research they're just throwing content at the wall and seeing what sticks and I think this community deserves better that's why we only make one or two videos a week and they're all inside our circle of competence the script is also where I add in the video sponsor which I'll talk about more when I walk you through how we make money see organized after I finish the script I pop it into my teleprompter turn on the camera and
record myself reading it then I take the video files throw them into a OB Premiere Pro Cut out all the bad takes and clean up the remaining audio after that I place all the right footage for everything I'm talking about and overlay the most important parts of all our research it's a lot of work but my thinking is if you can see what I'm talking about you're more likely to remember it especially when it's a chip inside a data center you'd never see or a graphic from a document you'll never read by the way you
might be wondering if I'm really the one writing and editing these videos the truth is I've tried to hire writers and editors in the past trust me writing and editing a 2500w video essay every week will burn you out quick but I still haven't found a video editor that can pull the right footage for asml extreme ultraviolet lithography machines or the super chips that go into nvidia's gb200 nvl 72 systems and it's pretty hard to find a writer that can take all of our research and quickly explain it to a 100,000 busy investors without breaking
our bank so yeah I really am the one to blame when we get something wrong anyway with the audio all cleaned up and all the right footage in place I render the video upload it to YouTube and fill out the description then I think of a very original title and make three incredibly unique thumbnails by the way if you've ever wondered why some videos seem to randomly change their thumbnails it's because YouTube lets us test all three thumbnails and pick the one that gets the most watch time for that video pretty cool right now that
you understand how a video gets from my script to your screen let's talk about how it makes money most people assume that the biggest chunk of a channel Revenue actually comes from ads but ad Revenue has two major problems when you're trying to run a business first YouTube takes a 45% cut of all ad Revenue right off the top ticker symol U has made $424,500 in ad Revenue over our four years on YouTube that works out to about $8,800 a month before taxes and after YouTube's 45% cut the remaining 55% is very volatile and unpredictable
that makes it really tough to consistently pay my researchers my software and Hardware costs and myself before going full-time on YouTube I held a six-figure research position at MIT quadin can be used as a test range for much more than The Radars today we're working on a lasercom buoy tested and the goal there is to support future lasercom initiatives and then I was the chief data analyst for a high-tech e-commerce company I don't have a book I don't sell any courses and my only fans is at Max Capacity so if I want a talented team
for ticker symbol U I need to find another way to close this Revenue Gap that's where sponsors come in another part of YouTube's video upload form is this checkbox for paid promotions it says if you accepted anything of value from a third party to make your video you must let us know we'll show viewers a message that tells them your video contains paid promotion that's that little popup in the top left corner you see whenever there's a sponsor in my videos let me give you a few examples of sponsorships I just think it's cool for
you to see how all this stuff actually works behind the scenes remember all those times that I ran giveaways to get signups for nvidia's GTC conference Nvidia supplied the GeForce gpus and their DLI credits that's a sponsorship or how about when one of nvidia's directors came on our funding awesome podcast to talk about mixed reality and generative AI that was sponsored too since we promoted nvidia's conference how about when Nvidia flew me out to Silicon Valley to attend GTC in person I'm at Nvidia GTC and I'm pretty sure that Jensen is Taylor Swift but for
dudes watch Jensen's keynote presentation interview nvidia's Executives and talk about everything that I learned Nvidia paid for my plane ticket my hotel room my transportation and my press pass that's a sponsorship it's worth calling out that sponsorships like these don't influence what goes into our content they make exclusive content possible in the first place I can't get you early looks at Nvidia self-driving technology or their billion- dooll Blackwell systems if they don't fly me out and let me in and I can't get interviews with nvidia's Executives if I never let them promote their work which
most serious investors actually want to hear about anyway almost all of my Nvidia videos are either completely unsponsored or they fall into this category and it's not just Invidia if AMD or tsmc or any other company I cover wants to offer me access I will always take the deal because I really believe that this kind of exclusive content adds value that investors can't get anywhere else the challenge with exclusive access deals is they pay the least by far since most of the compensation are the prizes to give away the transportation the accommodations the Press passes
and so on over the 3 years we've worked with Nvidia we've made $10,500 in actual revenue or not even 1% of our total that means we usually lose money when we take the time to make exclusive content but we don't care because it brings the most value to our audience and it's by far the most fulfilling content to make as as a Creator but as a business owner that means I need to balance this with other types of sponsorships like product placements I don't like seeing ads that aren't relevant to me so I only promote
products and services that I think are relevant to you for my audience that usually means big discounts on finance products or services or access to things like Venture funds or placements in private companies like open aai and SpaceX I don't always nail these but I really do try there are a few things you may not realize about product placements first first this is a very Niche investing channel that only makes around five videos a month so there's way more demand from sponsors than videos to put them in and as an investor you already know what
happens when low Supply meets high demand that also means we can be really picky about sponsors instead of rushing out more videos we just up our prices and we still reject around 40 product placements for everyone you see I also have a personal problem with affiliate deals so I almost never take them affiliate deals are where somebody makes money every time there's a sign up using their link which incentivizes content creators to push specific products and services even if it doesn't fit their content or provide the best solution for Their audience my only exceptions are
investing services that I've personally been using for years and even then I almost never actually mention them in a video The Links just live in my descriptions since I make so few videos and I don't take money for signups I can charge four or even five figures per placement and we're pretty much booked through the rest of the Year this is where most of our stable income comes from since the 20% cut our agent takes is still much better than YouTube's 45% cut on ads and actually one of the biggest changes we made last year
was how we integrate these product placements I used to match the product to the content so it would all flow together for example if the video was on the stock market crashing the sponsor would be an alternative asset that was great for business but I got enough feedback asking if I was just making videos for the sponsor so Now product placements get assigned to videos Almost randomly instead I personally think that makes the content worse but I've gotten way fewer complaints since I made that change so it's a compromise that I'm happy to keep making
besides exclusive access and product placements I've also made a few dedicated videos my first dedicated video ever was actually sponsored by Nvidia over 2 years ago it was part of an awareness campaign around Earth 2 a digital twin of Earth that Nvidia was building to simulate global weather patterns and predict catastrophic climate events we probably could have used that for Hurricane Helen which just hit the Tampa area pretty hard the goal of that video was to let people know that this program exists and that they could sign up for the Earth 2 session at Nvidia
GTC if they wanted to learn more here's a fun fact that video was one of the worst performing videos I've ever made and I'm pretty sure that I lost money making it since we only got a whopping $5,000 for the video but it was also one of the best videos that I'll ever make because it led to me co-hosting a session at Nvidia GTC with two other awesome content creators that I'm still close friends with today they're even coming to my wedding it also led to all the other exclusive Nvidia content that I've made since
which has done really well for my audience over the last few years and that's something I'm really proud of too anyway my most recent dedicated video was actually only a few weeks ago covering the patents and Partnerships of a company called poet Technologies most people have never dealt with sponsors like this so let me show show you how all the stuff works behind the scenes I'll go slow so you can get the gist this document is the notes from all our meetings covering the core technology their customers and their vendors here's another document that ended
up guiding most of the video which talks about their wave guides the manufacturing process those wave guides enable and their competitive advantages here's the press release they wanted me to mention which also determined when the video could be released I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to read it before it got published and since it wasn't public information I couldn't buy the stock until the announcement went live and my video came out bummer and here's the feedback that they gave me on my script they asked me to use the words AI networks instead of data
centers since that's what was in the press release they clarified a few words about the benefits of their device to Data Centers and they made me take out a joke where I said that we could buy the whole company if all 400,000 of us chipped in 500 bucks each but since this video isn't sponsored I can make that joke right now guys we have a chance to do the funniest thing so all in all they asked me to change exactly seven words out of the 2580 words in that script well besides that joke we charged
$50,000 to make that video but we would never make a dedicated video that we don't believe in the point of a dedicated video is always to cover something super specific like nvidia's Earth 2 program or poets patents and Partnerships that means I always lose my massive research Advantage I have to start from scratch and do everything on my own from hours of extra upfront meetings to the final upload and because dedicated videos usually have tight deadlines around conferences or press releases they always stop me from running the rest of my business not to mention that
$50,000 is gross revenue not net after our agent's 20% cut and Uncle Sam gets his cut the channel Nets less than half of that and we still had to give up a product placement slot to do it which is the revenue that we rely on that's why we make so few dedicated videos despite the high price tag but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter whether we're getting exclusive access to something doing a product placement or making a dedicated video no company even tries to tell us what to say and I think
most content creators wouldn't work with any company that did they try to give us the resources we need they jump out of meetings as quickly as they can and they hurry on to the next thing after all expenses I personally take home a little under 40% of what the channel makes which is actually still less than what I was making at MIT a few years ago so when I say most of my money actually comes from investing I really really mean it all right so far I've shown you our entire content creation process the different
kinds of sponsorships we take and how we make money as a result now let's talk about our goals for the next four years and some of the exciting projects and changes that we're making to hit them I spent a lot of time on sponsorships because that's the biggest part of the business that I want to change like I said earlier we're pretty much booked through the rest of the year so starting in 2 I'm going to focus a lot more on exclusive access deals that get me into conferences technology Expos and trade shows as well
as getting more great guests on the podcast I also really enjoy meeting fans of the channel and this is a great way to do that the second big change that I want to make is for transparency I've been getting feedback saying that I need to do better when it comes to calling out sponsors I hear you and I'll do better I formalized our ethics policy for taking sponsors which I'll link to below so you can see exactly how we choose them and I'll also make the call outs much clearer inside the videos themselves the third
and final change is that I'm going to start sponsoring myself remember when I promised that I'd share all my stock picks and price targets with everyone well I didn't forget we've been burning money building a system to organize and share everything way faster and cover way more companies than we can in videos the reason it's taking so long is we decided to integrate stock market data directly into the system that way we always know exactly how well we're doing and we can refine our investing process over time Based on data not emotional reactions we're calling
it tech stocks today and as it grows will do less thirdparty product placements so we can focus on the things that matter most stocks the science behind those stocks and becoming better and more informed investors I think that's how this channel gets to a million subscribers over the next 4 years but either way creating content for you is the best job I'll ever have and I'm really proud of what we've built so far are hopefully you enjoyed seeing how I run this channel if you did consider hitting the like button and subscribing to it that
really helps me out and it lets me know that I can create more behind the-scenes content like this and if you want to know anything else about the business just leave me a comment below and I'll do my best to answer it either way thanks for watching and until next time this is ticker simple U my name is Alex reminding you that the best investment you can make is in you
