Does Being A YouTuber Count As A Job? – (How Much They Earn)

In the age of the internet, a lot of people are speculating what counts as a job and what does not. There is a lot of things that co do almost everybody with minimal effort, and that’s how the idea of being an influencer was born. Who is that mysterious influencer? Does being a YouTuber count as a job? How much money can I earn as a YouTuber? Those and many other questions we will answer in this article.

The short answer will be simple, but that topic can depend on many factors. YouTube should be treated as a real job for most people but it depends on

the type of YouTuber’s channel. What aspects make us count something as a real job? Not every YouTube channel is worth calling a real job, but why is that?

What makes YouTube a real job?

As we all know, a real job has some time period in a day where we need to do something to provide our employer some earnings. For example a popular 9 to 5 job, where we are providing service to the clients. After all of that, we can expect some earnings at the end of the week or the month.

Being a YouTuber should be compared to something called “self-employed” which lets us create our own small company. In that company, we don’t have a limited time period, but the job simply must be done. YouTubers need to think about what they are going to do next with their channels to generate some income and grow it as a real business.

YouTuber needs to be consistent, and think about ways to grow her channel. Even if the videos are looking like they were recorded in 20 minutes there is a lot of behind them that we don’t see. Youtuber’s work that we don’t see:

• The overall idea about the video – It’s not easy to think about something that is in your niche that can be fun to watch. It takes hours to get the idea and then reshape it in our minds into something that we can record.
• Recording – When a video on youtube is about 10 minutes long then the original raw video was about 3x times longer, due to the fact that some things need to be recorded twice, and we need to cut out boring parts. Sometimes even preparation for the recording are long. For example, gaming channels need to buy a game, install it and prepare for recording before the actual recording will happen.
• Editing – The editing process can take a lot of time if we are not skilled, that can be the most difficult part of being a Youtuber. Edit
  ing is hard because that’s what makes YouTuber’s videos funny, or informative. Editing is often way longer than the original process of recording was.
• Publishing – To publish a video we need to create a thumbnail in graphic software like photoshop. Adding keywords and descriptions can ta
  ke some time, also it would be good to publish that video on many social platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

And at the of all those things we can see a short video, that’s why most people are not seriously thinking about youtube being a job. Let’s think about a huge factory that hires thousands of people but all they are making is a small octopus plushie, the outcome can be laughable, but the whole process of creation is very complex, and it’s very similar to the process of creating YouTube videos.

Who is that mysterious influencer?

An influencer is a person who has gathered over time a group of people that wants to follow his creativity. Being an influencer isn’t only scoped to YouTube, so you can use almost any platform to gather an audience for your creativity, like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or twitch. There are many platforms out there for you to start your career.

Influencers can generate income by using their audience. If a company wants to promote something like a product for example then an influencer gives them a price for his activities related to promoting the company’s product.

Almost all social platforms in 2022 do have a system to follow a specific person, by clicking a single button. Like follow button on the Instagram platform, or subscribe button on the YouTuber’s channel.

By creating interesting content influencers are motivating random people from the internet to follow them. In the beginning, it can be very hard because not a lot of people will be able to see your creativity but after some time after you will gather a few people, you can expect the snowball effect.

Snowball effect will let you progress faster in your career because when you have 100 people (which is a very low number) then you can expect some views and maybe only one share per video, but when you will gather 10 000 people following you then you can expect a lot more shares to your content. As more people are following you the more new people will start to follow you.

How much money can I earn as a YouTuber?

YouTube is a great way to make a side income if you have a lot of spare free time. Unfortunately in your first months you won’t earn a lot of money but you will

need to work a lot anyway… you should treat it as an investment. In your first months, you won’t be able to generate a lot of views on your YouTube channel, but you have to keep publishing.

In the beginning, you will earn money only from the ads that YouTube is placing somewhere on your videos. The earnings are most often shown as an “RPM” and to not make it complicated let’s say that it is the average money you will earn per 1000 views on your videos.

RPM is based on the type of your audience, their age, their preferences, and their country. So if you are targeting a non-English speaking country it won’t generate as much money as it could if you would by targeting English speaking audience. Also, the younger audiences don’t have that much money as older people, so think about your content twice because that will have an impact on your earnings. The range of RPM is very big due to those facts above, and it is between 1$ to 60$ on average.

In Conclusion – Does being a YouTuber count as a job?

Everything that requires your time daily, and its goal is to bring you an income somewhere in the future should be called a real job. The results won’t appear as fast as in the 9 to 5 job, but it’s often worth trying to put effort into it.

Things like editing or publishing can be hard and if you also think this way then maybe you should try to live stream rather than create videos. Live streaming is very similar but it is a live show where you don’t edit anything, and the potential earning can be even higher, so if you want to check it out then read our new article about “How Much Do Small Twitch Streamers Make? – (It Is Worth It!)“.