when youtube first began people were just happy to be able to post their videos online for free favorite sites online that lets you upload tag and share your video with the rest of the world or just family and friends if you prefer yes um the site's called youtube.com but then youtube started sharing ad revenue with creators and companies started paying creators to promote their products and suddenly being a youtuber was an actual job in fact it didn't just become a job it became the job countless studies have found that becoming a youtuber is the most
desired job in the world not astronaut doctor teacher nope 75 of kids want to become youtubers and when the mainstream media talks about this it's normally in a dismissive way you can sense them thinking these kids need to go get real jobs and that's because influencer has become a bit of a dirty word to many people an influencer represents talentless narcissists who film themselves for social media fake their lives to look better than reality and get paid ridiculously well to shill products for companies and in some cases there may be some truth in that but
an influencer can mean many things loads of influencers on social media are incredibly talented creative people because the simplest definition of an influencer is just a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service it's not really a new concept we've always had celebrities who do that the difference now is that anyone with a smartphone and a social media account has the potential to build an audience and influence people it's open to everyone which means more people than ever are making money from their passions and interests whether it's gaming music art
cooking sewing anything but here's where it gets really interesting the old way of monetizing a social media audience was you make money advertising other businesses if you're a creator then company x comes along and pays you to advertise their product in your content but now content creators are starting to realize well what if i create my own business and advertise that instead one of the most famous examples is mr beast launching a burger chain that currently has over 1 000 kitchens across multiple different countries mr beast could have just partnered with mcdonald's or burger king
and got paid a one-off sponsorship fee for promoting someone else's brand but instead he now keeps a hundred percent of all future profits for himself for life and simultaneously he's growing a company he's got equity in that he could potentially sell later if he wanted another example is that emma chamberlain and graham steffen both launched their own coffee brands now at first glance this may just seem like next level merchandise but it's not these are separate standalone businesses that are simply being kickstarted by leveraging their attention on social media think about it one of the
biggest problems of normal new businesses is they just don't have the recognition or brand power to compete if you started your own coffee brand right now but you didn't have an audience to promote it to you'd have to spend ridiculous amounts of money on marketing just to get anybody to even hear about it in the first place and why would they care about this random new brand anyway but if a youtuber starts a business they already have an established brand people love and they already have a loyal audience to promote their products and services to
so they can get an influx of customers right from day one of course this spans so much further than food and drink we're gonna see gaming youtubers build their own games companies we're gonna see tech youtubers building their own tech companies and for channels like me in the business niche with a lot of entrepreneurs watching i think a business to business software company would be an incredible fit the possibilities are genuinely endless but wait a minute i know what you might be thinking dude youtubers might be good at making videos but that doesn't mean they
can just build a business and you're right but they don't need to they just need strategic partnerships with people who can do you think mr beast knew how to set up a burger chain all by himself no he hired a business manager to make these kind of deals and they partnered with a company who helped set up and run mr b's burger so i'm not suggesting youtube has figured this all out themselves i'm suggesting they partner with someone or some company to create a product or service together someone else can handle a lot of the
logistics side and the youtuber can focus on the branding and marketing for example the youtuber could show behind the scenes of running this new business and incorporate the products into their content to get their audience even more connected to this new brand and because youtubers know their audience so well and have a relationship with them they can think about what products and services will fit best with their fans like with mr beast burger the products are named after people on the channel so it's much more fun for fans and actually makes you even more attached
to the mr beast brand in general and you probably don't just buy from there once you probably keep coming back for more and more as a repeat customer which means you're regularly interacting with the brand in the physical world not just the digital world so here's the simple truth here if you're making content yourself or you ever plan to don't just think of yourself as an influencer or a video maker start thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur and a whole new world of possibilities will open the crucial difference is that instead of doing a one-off
sponsorship to promote someone else's brand you can be building your own business that you have equity in thus it can be way more profitable for you and way better for your fans as well okay time for some calculations to prove this let's say you create a product that cost five dollar each when you produce them in bulk you sell it for twenty dollars each so fifteen dollars profit per item sold if you had a million subscribers and just two percent of the audience buys it that's 20 000 people which equals 300 000 of profits now
let's say the product is a recurring subscription that people pay for every month congratulations you've now got a multi-million dollar business on your hands of course this can work for much smaller channels too because the crazy part is it's not just the youtubers audience who can buy the product or service profits can be reinvested into other marketing to reach a whole new audience and if it's a good product or service people will tell their friends about it too so this new business can eventually be its own thing totally separate from the creator for example you
don't ever have to have watched the mr beast video to buy a mr beast burger if your friend was ordering one you'd probably order one too it's a standalone business in its own right now even if you do partner with a company to help launch your own products and services i'm obviously not saying this is easy but i am saying there will definitely be a lot more private label companies looking to do joint ventures with creators because attention is the currency that matters most if you have people watching you and your content you can make
a lot of money it's that simple but whereas before that attention led to brand deals and sponsorships for other companies now that attention is leading to new companies owned by the creators for example people love to hate on the kardashians the paul brothers but like it or not they're very rich because they're masters of attention and then directing that attention elsewhere whether it's selling expensive beauty products or pay-per-view boxing if you have the attention on you it's then just a case of where you direct it and if you can match the right product or service
to the right audience that's where the big money is i honestly think we're not even at the beginning stages of creators building businesses but there's one final piece to this puzzle you'll notice i've specifically mentioned youtubers a lot so what about tick tockers or instagram stars and yeah it's true these concepts apply to anyone with an audience and attention but i do feel strongly youtube has a lot more advantages firstly videos can be evergreen on youtube once you build your library of content the algorithm can continue promoting them indefinitely so if you promote your own
product or service within a youtube video you can be getting new sales from videos you made months or even years ago seriously i have a digital product i sell which is my youtube business blueprint for people who are looking to make more money with youtube and i've had sales of that product thanks to videos i made over a year ago it had no new promotion from me it's just the youtube algorithm doing its thing that just doesn't happen with tiktok facebook snapchat instagram posts are normally pretty dead within 48 hours and that's why evergreen content
on youtube is so crucial because it means you don't get stuck in the social media hamster wheel of constantly having to pump out new contents secondly with youtube you can build a much deeper connection with your audience since the videos are longer and if people know like and trust you more they're more likely to buy from you and your business and finally with youtube it's so much easier to promote things as you can direct people to the description below the video but you can have as many links as you want so if you do have
an audience on another platform that's great but consider bringing some of them over to youtube because trust me the creator economy is going to be a fascinating place over the next few years people are finally starting to realize the potential of it but this is really just the beginning it's definitely not too late to start and then once you have built an audience create your own products and services that way you don't just build a youtube channel you start building your empire now i know what you might be thinking before you focus on making money
how do you actually make great videos and build an audience and the answer to that is today's video sponsor skillshare an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators there's a variety of classes from famous youtubers teaching their own methods but if you want to do documentary style videos with motion graphics i recommend evan abrams's introduction to adobe after effects which will show you all the basics to get started and because skillshare is curated for learning there's no ads and lots of new premium classes added all the time the first 1000 of my
subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so click the link below now to get started for free and start exploring your creativity today i hope this video was useful for you and if you do become a youtube billionaire just don't forget who told you all this i'll see you in the next video cheers [Music]
