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How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber

2020-12-28 (said on 2020-12-15 — implied: date said in the video; uploaded 13 days later) · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 49:32 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Money and investing) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past

Ali breaks down his 2020 revenue by source (£22,100 as a junior doctor, about £100,000 AdSense, £132,000 affiliates, an estimated £136,000 sponsorships, £350,000 Skillshare, £220,000 Part-Time YouTuber Academy, £53,000 Inner Circle: about £1,013,000) and argues success takes work, luck and unfair advantages over many years.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why he shares his income: transparency, the poll, a trigger warning and his two reasons

  • ★★ Ali thinks treating money as a taboo topic leads to a lot of problems; seeing others share how much they made, and how, helped him start as an entrepreneur and creator. — 00:00:29
  • ★ Unsure whether an income video was in poor taste during the pandemic, Ali polled Twitter, Instagram and YouTube; in all three about 85% said he should post it. — 00:00:58 · Twitter, Instagram, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali admits his first reason for making an income video is that such videos get a lot of views, which every YouTuber's career is built on. — 00:02:00 · YouTube
  • ★★ After Ali's May 2020 income video, he personally knows at least a dozen people who started YouTube channels and online courses because of it. — 00:02:58 · YouTube

00:03:27 — Fourteen years of trying to make money online; no overnight success

  • ★★ Ali has spent much of his free time trying to make money online since the age of 12; at 26, that is 14 years. — 00:03:27
  • ★★ At school Ali taught himself to code, and every year he and his friends came up with a new business idea and built a website for it; every one failed. — 00:03:27
  • ★ As a teenager Ali also worked as a freelance graphic and web designer, making a few tens of dollars here and there. — 00:03:27
  • ★★★ At 19, in his second year of medical school, Ali built the first business of his that succeeded; he credits luck, unfair advantages and seven years of trying before it. — 00:04:06 · 6med
  • ★★★ Ali started his YouTube channel in 2017, in his fifth year of medical school; it took 52 videos to reach 1,000 subscribers, and two videos a week for a year made basically no money. — 00:04:35 · YouTube
  • ★★ For three and a half years Ali has published about two videos a week without a break, except one week off, around Christmas 2018 he thinks. (hedged) — 00:04:35

  • ★★★ Ali says his online income took 14 years of work after school, university and work, and that there is no such thing as an overnight success: it always takes work. — 00:05:38

    “There is no such thing as an overnight success. It always takes work.”

00:06:29 — His 2020 junior doctor salary and hourly rate; doctors' pay and the lottery question

  • ★★ As of December 2020 Ali has been out of work for four months on a one-year break from full-time medicine; he meant to travel the world, but the pandemic keeps him at home in Cambridge. — 00:06:37 · Cambridge
  • ★★★ Working full-time as a junior doctor from January to the end of July 2020, Ali earned about £22,100 as a senior house officer in obstetrics and gynaecology, averaging 46 hours a week. — 00:07:06 · NHS, Obstetrics and gynaecology
  • ★★ Over 1,288 hours at work Ali's pay came to £17 an hour; adding 280 hours of commuting, an hour each way daily, made 1,568 hours in total. — 00:07:06 · NHS
  • ★★ Counting his commute, Ali's real hourly rate as a junior doctor was about £14 an hour, before tax and petrol costs. — 00:07:44
  • ★★ Ali calls £14 an hour a very reasonable living for a full-time junior doctor, with pay rising with seniority; he found the job fun and enjoyed the commute with audiobooks and podcasts. — 00:07:44
  • ★★ Ali's friends of the same age from his university who studied maths, economics or law and work in London law firms or investment banks earn somewhere around £100,000 to £200,000 a year. (hedged) — 00:08:26 · London
  • ★★ A UK consultant, a fully qualified doctor of about 35, earns a standard salary of about £100,000, which Ali's friends two years out of law or economics degrees make basically from day one. — 00:08:55 · NHS
  • ★★ Ali says doctors are objectively still in the top 20% of UK earners, so they are paid very reasonably and working as a doctor is no great sacrifice. — 00:08:55
  • ★★ Ali is not a fan of full-time medicine because it usually means relying on a single source of income, which he sees as potentially problematic. — 00:09:31
  • ★★ Ali asks doctors whether they would keep practising if they won the lottery: about half say they would leave medicine completely, one even mid-operation, and the other half would go part-time. — 00:09:31
  • ★★★ The doctors' answers made Ali realise he does not want to work a job full-time with no other option because of money, which is when he started taking online income seriously. — 00:10:01 · work optional
  • ★★★ Ali still wants to be a doctor, but part-time: three days a week would be really fun, while doing anything five to seven days a week risks burnout and stress. — 00:10:31

00:11:15 — Google AdSense revenue year by year, 2017 to 2020

  • ★★ To earn Google AdSense a YouTube channel needs 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time; it took Ali 52 videos and six months to reach 1,000 subscribers. — 00:11:29 · YouTube
  • ★★★ In 2017, six months of YouTube, Ali made 59 videos, had 1,600 subscribers by the end of the year and made £1.76 in revenue. — 00:11:29 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali turned on monetisation in April 2018; he made 88 videos that year, about one and a half a week, reaching 147 videos and roughly 120,000 subscribers. — 00:11:58
  • ★★★ In 2018 Ali's channel made £12,329.67 in AdSense revenue, not quite a full-time living but close. — 00:12:20
  • ★★★ By the end of 2019 Ali had 209 videos and around 450,000 subscribers, and made £33,186.14 in AdSense that year, almost his junior doctor pay and a full-time living for a UK YouTuber. — 00:12:50 · YouTube
  • ★★★ As of 15 December 2020 Ali has published 98 videos that year (307 in all), has just under 1.3 million subscribers and 57 million views in 2020, and has made £100,695.12 from AdSense. — 00:13:12
  • ★★ Ali tells beginners that progress on YouTube is slow but compounds: anyone complaining about not reaching 1,000 subscribers before making 52 videos should know that is how long it took him. — 00:13:41 · YouTube

00:14:24 — How many videos channels need: TubeBuddy averages against his channel

  • ★★ Citing TubeBuddy data from millions of channels, Ali says the average channel takes 3,873 videos to reach a million subscribers, and channels with 100,000 to a million subscribers have on average 1,171 videos. — 00:14:47
  • ★★ By the same TubeBuddy data, channels with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers have on average 418 videos, and channels with 1,000 to 10,000 have 152. — 00:15:09
  • ★★★ Ali's channel reached 1,000 subscribers at 52 videos, 10,000 at 92, 100,000 at 143 and a million at 287. — 00:15:09
  • ★★ Compared with the averages, Ali's channel grew twice as fast at first and now grows ten times faster, because growth compounds over time. — 00:15:43

00:16:13 — Success equals work times luck times unfair advantages; the three-step formula

  • ★★★ Ali teaches on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy that success, on YouTube and in everything in life, equals work multiplied by luck multiplied by unfair advantages. — 00:16:13 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Work on YouTube, Ali says, means consistently putting out lots of content and making it as useful as possible: research, finding what the audience wants, teaching yourself, presenting it clearly. — 00:16:13 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali has spent tens of thousands of pounds on camera equipment and more than that on growth coaching, analytics and consultants for the channel. — 00:16:48
  • ★★ Later in 2020 Ali hired a team: two full-timers and a part-time assistant now work with him to keep the channel running. — 00:16:48
  • ★★ After hospital shifts Ali would sit at his desk for about six hours every evening writing, filming and editing videos. — 00:17:17
  • ★★★ The work has been absolutely worth it for Ali because he enjoys it and it does not feel like work; he cites Naval Ravikant: find something that looks like work to others but feels like play to you. — 00:17:17
  • ★★ Ali keeps in mind "journey before destination" from Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive: if you enjoy the journey, everything becomes fantastic because you are having fun doing the thing. — 00:17:45 · Brandon Sanderson
  • ★★ About 80% of the time his work feels more like play than work to Ali; without enjoying it, he says, he could not have kept up his consistency and output. — 00:17:45
  • ★★★ Ali says that in YouTube videos, businesses, online content or writing, the more you put out into the world, the more you increase your surface area for lucky events. — 00:19:24 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Agreeing with Gary Vaynerchuk that one piece of content can change your life, Ali advises to keep putting out content, not worry about the numbers and make it as good as you can while having fun. — 00:19:24 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★ Most videos of the YouTubers Ali knows get a baseline of about 20% of the subscriber count in views, with an occasional viral one; his 2020 video on how he types fast has about 3.5 million views. — 00:19:59
  • ★★★ You do not need unfair advantages to start YouTube, Ali says, and they should not be a barrier, but to stack the deck in your favour, work with your unfair advantages. — 00:20:57 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Using his advantage as a Cambridge medical student, Ali's first videos targeted Cambridge medicine applicants: interview tips with about 15 friends, then vlogs of life as a Cambridge medical student. — 00:21:24 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali's other unfair advantages were an eye for design built over 11 years, and money from a business he had run for four years, which bought camera gear, lights and microphones from day one. — 00:22:36 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali calls "as long as you work hard you will succeed" a total myth, and hates the phrase hard work: making videos at a computer is not coal mining or doctors' night shifts. — 00:23:05

  • ★★★ Ali's three-step formula for anyone starting on YouTube: make useful videos, publish them once or twice a week and keep going for two years; he guarantees it will change your life, though not the numbers. — 00:23:41 · YouTube

    “Make useful videos, publish them once or twice a week and do this for two years.”

00:24:27 — Affiliate income

  • ★ Most people who start a YouTube channel, Ali says, do not stick with it for two years. — 00:24:27 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Putting out useful content regularly builds an audience that knows, likes and trusts you, Ali says, so your product recommendations seem and are more sincere than a random website's. — 00:24:56
  • ★★ With affiliate income, Ali gets a percentage of each sale made through his link, such as paperlike.com/Ali for the Paperlike screen protector. — 00:25:28 · Paperlike
  • ★★ Ali's five most successful affiliate partnerships are Paperlike, IQUnix, Epidemic Sound, Amazon, which has the world's largest affiliate programme, and Tiago Forte's course Building a Second Brain. — 00:26:11 · Paperlike, Amazon, Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte
  • ★★★ In 2020 Ali's five affiliate partnerships made him £132,471, over £10,000 (over $13,000) a month. — 00:26:45
  • ★★ Ali has made one video about his keyboard, none in 2020 about the screen protector, none about Epidemic Sound, two about Building a Second Brain and none plugging an Amazon product; the links in his descriptions add up. — 00:27:15 · Paperlike, Building a Second Brain, Amazon
  • ★★ Affiliate income took ages: Ali made nothing from affiliates in his first year on YouTube and a few thousand pounds in his second, and only from the third year did it become a large number. — 00:27:44 · YouTube
  • ★★ To start with affiliate programmes, Ali says the easiest is Amazon Associates: almost anyone can join, earning about 2 or 3% commission on each sale through their link. — 00:27:44 · Amazon

00:28:28 — Sponsorships, the agency Standard and an estimate from public CPM data

  • ★★★ Ali got his first sponsorship in July 2018, a year after he started on YouTube, when he had 120 videos and 50,000 subscribers. — 00:28:28 · YouTube
  • ★★ To beginner YouTubers who email asking how to get a first brand deal, Ali always answers: first make 120 videos, because this is a long game. — 00:28:28
  • ★★★ Ali made nothing from sponsors in 2017, losing a few thousand pounds on camera gear, and £5,700 in 2018; another £3,000 from three brand deals was lost when the middleman agency went out of business. — 00:28:55
  • ★★★ In 2019 Ali made £31,000 from sponsorships, a reasonable full-time salary reached after two and a half years of two videos a week. — 00:29:24
  • ★★ Towards the end of 2019 Ali joined Standard, an agency of about 100 educational creators including Simon Clark, MedLife Crisis, LegalEagle and Wendover Productions; Thomas Frank introduced him. — 00:29:53 · Thomas Frank
  • ★★ Standard sources Ali's sponsorships; he now works regularly with a small number of brands, such as Notion, Skillshare, Brilliant and CuriosityStream, who keep coming back. — 00:30:23 · Notion, Brilliant, CuriosityStream
  • ★★ Ali will not disclose his sponsorship income; citing Grapevine Logic, he says YouTubers usually charge $20 to $30 CPM, per thousand views, for a brand deal. — 00:30:52
  • ★★★ From public figures Ali estimates his 2020 sponsorship revenue: about 800,000 average subscribers, 160,000 views and $3,200 to $4,800 per sponsored video, 46 videos, $147,200 to $220,800, call it $180,000. (speculative) — 00:31:51
  • ★★★ Ali tells beginner YouTubers not to worry about brand deals until they have made content once or twice a week for two years, when they will have the views and a trusting audience. — 00:32:39

00:33:33 — Skillshare royalties and affiliate income, month by month

  • ★★ Skillshare, like Netflix for online courses at about $10 a month, pays teachers like Spotify streaming royalties: a few cents per minute of premium watch time. — 00:34:16 · Spotify, Netflix
  • ★★ Through Skillshare's affiliate programme a teacher makes $7 or $10 for each sign-up through their link, depending on how early they joined the programme. — 00:34:41
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare earnings were $3,105.89 in January 2020, $300 of it from affiliate links, and $2,643 in February; his class on how to study for exams came out on the last day of March, which brought $5,680.57. — 00:35:17 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare earnings were $29,746.84 in April 2020, $9,340 of it from affiliate sign-ups; after his Anki class came out at the end of May, May brought $40,926.99, and with a productivity class at the end of June, June $56,547.21. — 00:35:44 · Skillshare classes, Anki
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare earnings were $62,541 in July 2020, $60,582 in August, $67,363 in September and $66,194 in October; he estimates about $60,000 each for November and December. (hedged) — 00:36:21 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ With seven classes on Skillshare, Ali has made about $515,000 from watch time and affiliate sign-ups in 2020, which a year earlier he would not have believed. — 00:36:50 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ About 100,000 students have watched about 8 million minutes of Ali's Skillshare classes, 9.5 million expected by the end of 2020, about 90 minutes each, only about $5 per student. — 00:37:19 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ You can make a lot of money on Skillshare, Ali says, but only with a very large audience, because each student brings in little. — 00:37:49
  • ★★ Ali puts his courses on Skillshare because anyone can watch them free on a trial, and as many are aimed at students he likes not charging them real money. — 00:37:49
  • ★★ After Ali praised Skillshare in May, someone emailed that they had made a piano class only two people watched; Ali points to his three-levels video: selling courses is much easier with an audience. — 00:38:44
  • ★★★ Ali's way to make money online: useful free videos on YouTube once or twice a week for two years, then Skillshare classes; his first came in September 2019, nearly two and a half years in. — 00:39:31 · Skillshare classes, YouTube

00:40:20 — Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort one and charging real money

  • ★★ Ali had the idea for the Part-Time YouTuber Academy around August or September 2020 and first thought of a Skillshare class or selling it for $100 or $200 on his website. — 00:40:27 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain starts at $1,500 and David Perell's Write of Passage at $4,000; Ali has taken both and calls them really good. — 00:40:27 · Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain
  • ★★★ Live Zoom calls, an engaged community and high prices make these courses good, Ali says: content no longer holds people back, but accountability and community do. — 00:41:11 · Zoom
  • ★★ Asked by Tiago Forte and David Perell how charging $1,000 would change his approach, Ali said he would run it live over four or six weeks and be very involved, so he made it a live cohort. — 00:41:40 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★★ Expecting five or ten sign-ups, Ali got 360 paying customers for the first cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, which ended the week before, with revenue of $294,000, about £220,000. — 00:42:02
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy community could only have happened as a live course, Ali says, and without its high prices far fewer serious people would have taken it. — 00:42:24
  • ★★ The second cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy runs in February 2021, and registration is open. — 00:42:24
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy is the first time Ali has charged real money: Skillshare classes, free on a trial like a Netflix documentary, and affiliate deals do not count; at first he was really scared. — 00:42:54 · Netflix, Matt D'Avella, Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Under its no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy gave about three refunds out of 400 students, which Ali calls a pretty reasonable rate. — 00:43:23
  • ★★ The lesson is not to launch your own live course, Ali says: people pay real money for a good product only once you have built, over a long time, an audience that knows, likes and trusts you. — 00:43:48
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy is for people who treat YouTube as a business; about half its students had profitable businesses on the side, a very different market from the people who comment on his videos, such as a 16-year-old student in Pakistan. — 00:44:52 · Pakistan, YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali is now fine with charging large amounts, because the more people pay for something the more likely they are to act on it; a free course is a commodity almost nobody finishes. — 00:44:52

00:45:46 — The Inner Circle membership and the grand total

  • ★★ At students' request Ali's team created the Inner Circle, a $50-a-month alumni membership of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy with monthly coaching calls, guest workshops, daily Zoom co-working and Homework Club. — 00:45:46 · Zoom
  • ★★★ The Inner Circle launched in the last days before recording and has 124 members; its first cohort's annual memberships have brought in $71,400. — 00:46:25
  • ★★★ Ali's 2020 revenue: £22,100 as a doctor, £100,000 AdSense, £132,000 affiliates, about £136,000 sponsors, £350,000 Skillshare, £220,000 Part-Time YouTuber Academy and £53,000 Inner Circle, about £1,013,000 ($1.362 million). — 00:46:57 · NHS

00:47:21 — Reflections: an audience that knows, likes and trusts you; money as an exchange of value

  • ★★ Ali knows creators with even higher numbers: a friend with 500,000 subscribers makes £2.5 million a year from his coaching programme. — 00:48:10

  • ★★★ The way to make large amounts of money online, Ali says, is to provide value at scale, since money is just an exchange of value; seeing making money as evil means never making it. — 00:48:38

    “ultimately money is just an exchange of value.”

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali's 2020 figures are pre-tax business revenue paid into a company account, which pays 2.5 full-time employees, contractors, coaches and software; he withdraws little, paying 37.5% dividend tax and 9% student loan. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: affiliate marketing · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Skillshare classes · unfair advantage · YouTube · YouTube AdSense

Also: People: Brandon Sanderson · Gary Vaynerchuk · Matt D'Avella · MedLife Crisis · Naval Ravikant · Simon Clark · Thomas Frank · Tiago Forte

Projects: Homework Club · Inner Circle

Works: Building a Second Brain · The Stormlight Archive · Write of Passage

Organizations: 6med · Amazon · Brilliant · CuriosityStream · Grapevine Logic · Instagram · IQUnix · LegalEagle · Nebula · Netflix · NHS · Standard · Twitter · University of Cambridge · Wendover Productions

Concepts: CPM · journey before destination · Obstetrics and gynaecology · passive income · three levels of making money online · virtue signalling · watch time · work optional

Places: Cambridge · London · Pakistan

Products: Anki · Audible · Epidemic Sound · IQUnix F96 · Notion · Paperlike · Spotify · Squarespace · TubeBuddy · Zoom

Also centred on affiliate marketing: How Much Money I Earn in a Week as a Doctor & YouTuber

Also centred on Part-Time YouTuber Academy: A Productive Day on Vacation in the Canary Islands · How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers · A "Productive" Day in my Life (Lockdown) · PRODUCTIVE Day in the Life of an Aspiring Gymshark Athlete · A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses

Also centred on unfair advantage: What Makes People Successful? · My BIGGEST Rejections in Life

Also centred on YouTube AdSense: How Much Money I Earn in a Week as a Doctor & YouTuber

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