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How Much Money I Make as a YouTuber (2021)💰

2021-12-16 (said on 2021-12-03 — implied: date said in the video; uploaded 13 days later) · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 37:19 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators, Medicine and his doctor years, Money and investing) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Family

Ali breaks down the 15 income streams he and his business had in 2021, about $4.79 million in all, led by the Part-Time YouTuber Academy ($2.59 million), Skillshare, sponsorships, AdSense and affiliates, and reflects that luck played a big part, that revenue is a vanity metric and that he wants to stop caring about the numbers.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Caveats: transparency, not a flex, not a get-rich-quick scheme

  • ★★ Ali breaks down the 15 streams of income he and his business made in 2021, saying the point is openness and transparency, not to flex, since others sharing their revenue numbers helped him. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Whenever Ali posts an income video, many people write that it inspired them to start a YouTube channel, a podcast or a business. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Ali says his income is no get-rich-quick scheme: he has been trying to make money online since he made websites as a freelancer at 13, had many failures, and his first business succeeded about seven years later, around 20. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali's business now has 17 full-time staff, four or five part-time staff and a number of contractors, so the income in his 2021 breakdown is not just his personal income. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali says he is not claiming that anyone can reach his level of success just by starting a YouTube channel or taking his course; he is only giving an honest look at his business finances. — 00:01:27 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:01:54 — Number 15: Twitch

  • ★★ Ali clocked about 180 days of play time on World of Warcraft, his favourite game growing up, between about 14 and 17, about three hours a day; in 2021 he decided to get back into it. — 00:01:56 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ After buying an Alienware gaming PC Ali streamed on Twitch for a few weeks in 2021, making $92.27 over 24 hours and two minutes, about $3 an hour; with a PC costing about 3,000, it was very ROI-negative but fun. — 00:02:26
  • ★ Ali gives his income figures in dollars because more people understand that currency, although he is based in the UK and the money is actually in pounds. — 00:02:26

00:02:54 — Number 14: working as a doctor

  • ★★ On his one-year sabbatical from medicine in 2021 Ali worked two part-time shifts of about eight hours in the emergency department at £30 an hour, £480 in total, about $640, before deciding not to go back. — 00:02:55

00:03:22 — Number 13: mentor for Building a Second Brain

  • ★★ Tiago Forte asked Ali to be a mentor on Building a Second Brain again in 2021, as in 2020; the mentor stipend is $1,000, but Ali says he did it for the fun and the community, not the money. — 00:03:24 · Tiago Forte
  • ★★ Ali calls Building a Second Brain a fantastic course that changed his life when he first took it in 2019. — 00:03:24

00:03:47 — Number 12: real estate

  • ★★ From January to August 2021 Ali's housemate Sheen lodged in the flat he and his brother own, paying £625 a month in rent, the tax-free threshold, about $835. — 00:03:53 · Sheen, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Ali has closed on two buy-to-let flats in Manchester, tenanted for a couple of months; with his lodger's rent he expects $3,068 in rental income for 2021. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Ali says he will make a video, coming out very soon, on how much money he spent in 2021, to show the expenses side of his income. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Ali has a vlog about his rental properties on his second channel, Ali's Appendix. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ Nebula is an independent streaming platform owned by Ali and a group of other creators and built by their agency, Standard. — 00:04:22 · Nebula

00:04:43 — Number 11: Nebula

  • ★★ Nebula pays creators a cut of subscriptions by their total watch time, like Spotify royalties; Ali made $6,478 from it in 2021, not counting November and December. — 00:04:52 · Nebula, Spotify
  • ★★ Not Overthinking, the weekly-ish podcast Ali does with his brother, made around $7,250 in sponsorship fees in 2021, though they have been a bit inconsistent with it. — 00:04:52 · Not Overthinking, Taimur Abdaal

00:05:11 — Number 10: podcast sponsorships

  • ★★ A few months before, Ali and his team launched a second podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, mostly in-person interviews with entrepreneurs, creators and inspiring people on how they live a good life in health, wealth, love and happiness. — 00:05:21 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal has brought in $19,500 in sponsorship fees in 2021 but still loses a lot of money, since Amber produces it full-time and the editors and social media team spend time on it. — 00:05:50 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Ali says Deep Dive need not make money, since the rest of the business funds it as a passion project: he enjoys interviewing and befriending guests, and listeners get the conversations free. — 00:06:19 · Deep Dive

00:06:40 — Number 9: stocks and shares

  • ★★ Ali has used Freetrade, a UK app for investing in individual stocks, since November 2020; his portfolio there is worth £34,860.65 and has gone up by $14,860.79. — 00:06:49
  • ★★ Ali's own stock picks include Tesla, MP Materials, Shopify, Netflix, the Nasdaq 100, Etsy, MongoDB and Fastly; £2,000 in Fastly is down 47%, £2,000 in Teladoc is down 55%, and Fiverr is not doing well. — 00:07:18 · Tesla, Netflix
  • ★★ Many of Ali's Freetrade gains come from free shares given when people sign up through his referral link; without those, he thinks he has lost money overall on individual stocks. (hedged) — 00:07:47
  • ★★★ Ali tells everyone not to bother investing in individual stocks unless they are very lucky, and to invest instead in broad stock-market index funds such as the S&P 500, which tracks the top 500 US companies. — 00:08:16 · S&P 500
  • ★★ Ali dabbles in individual stocks with a small share of his portfolio for fun, knowing that is not how he will make money, and puts the rest of his stock money into the S&P 500. — 00:08:16 · S&P 500
  • ★★ In his Vanguard ISA Ali put in £20,000, the UK yearly maximum, on top of £46,000; the investments returned £12,000 tax-free, and he ended the year with £78,274. — 00:08:45
  • ★★ A £500 monthly standing order buys the S&P 500 in Ali's Vanguard general investment account; he put in £6,000, already had £60,000, the investments returned £16,000, and the account ended at £82,909.50. — 00:09:15 · S&P 500
  • ★★ Ali's first ISA, at Charles Stanley Direct, filled from about 2015 to 2019 with £76,379, is now worth £133,000: about £57,000 made by putting money in and forgetting about it. — 00:09:44
  • ★★★ Ali has a deal with Penguin UK for his book and, more recently, one with a US publisher not yet announced; his agent lets him say only that both are six-figure deals. — 00:10:13

00:10:20 — Numbers 8 and 7: book deals

  • ★★ Ali's agent is selling the foreign translation rights to the book he says he is currently failing to write, in territories such as Germany, France, Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. — 00:10:55
  • ★★ Ali says he will be very open about his book deals at some point, but for now he does not know how publishing works and does not want to upset anyone with his first book. — 00:11:25
  • ★★ Ali started investing in crypto in August or September 2017 with £400 and by January 2018 had put in £66,237.41, while still a medical student, using money from his business helping people into medical school. — 00:11:58 · 6med

00:12:00 — Number 6: crypto

  • ★★ After the crypto crash Ali sold five or six Bitcoin for about $40,000 to pay the deposit on the Cambridge flat he and his brother bought; they would now be worth about $300,000. — 00:12:27 · Cambridge, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Through the crypto winter of 2018 to 2021 Ali was in the red, at one point £40,000 down and with a realised loss of about £45,000; he kept the 27 Ethereum he bought in 2017, which rose sharply in 2021. — 00:12:56
  • ★★★ Ali's crypto portfolio is worth £197,864, a lifetime gain of £75,000; in 2021 he put in $74,839, mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum, and gained $132,377. — 00:13:25
  • ★★ Ali's crypto is mostly Ethereum and Bitcoin; Litecoin from 2017 is down 25%, Cardano bought on Andrei Jikh's recommendation is up 3%, he holds some Solana, and he lost over £500 each on Shiba Inu and Dogecoin. — 00:13:54
  • ★★ These days Ali puts most of his investments into crypto rather than stocks and shares; in early 2022 he will talk about his asset allocation and why he is very bullish on crypto. — 00:14:24

00:15:15 — Number 5: affiliate income

  • ★★ Ali's ten main affiliate partners are TubeBuddy, Readwise, Ugmonk, Epidemic Sound, Ghost, Amazon Associates, Teachable (for courses such as Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage), Paperlike, IQUnix and Shortform. — 00:15:22 · Readwise, Ghost, Paperlike, Shortform
  • ★★ Ali calls Shortform a genuinely good service that summarises books in one-page and detailed summaries, and says he uses it almost every day when reading books. — 00:16:21 · Shortform
  • ★★★ Ali's affiliate revenue in 2021, not counting November and December, is $208,200. — 00:16:21
  • ★★ Ali enjoys affiliate income because he genuinely uses all these products daily or weekly; as a YouTuber he can talk about and review products, and people who buy them may use his link. — 00:16:50
  • ★★ Ali has YouTube Premium, calls it a genuinely life-changing subscription and says everyone should have it. — 00:17:20

00:17:37 — Number 4: YouTube AdSense

  • ★★★ From 1 January to 2 December 2021 Ali's main channel had 74 million views, 6.2 million hours of watch time, 1.1 million subscribers and $391,135.30 in AdSense revenue, about $5.47 per thousand views. — 00:17:49
  • ★★ Ali's top-earning video of 2021 by far, 9 Passive Income Ideas, made $103,529 in AdSense; next came How to Invest for Beginners ($22,000), How I Type Really Fast ($11,000), How to Build a Website ($11,000) and How I Manage My Time ($9,000). — 00:18:18
  • ★ Ali cites what he believes Graham Stephan calls the YouTube bullshit industrial complex: you make money from a video about money, then make a video about how much that video made. (hedged) — 00:18:18
  • ★★ Ad rates rise a lot towards Christmas: Ali's channel made $46,000 in AdSense in July 2021 and $60,000 in November. — 00:18:51
  • ★★ Ali's second channel, Ali's Appendix, made £1,709.15 in 2021; with the main channel, AdSense to date, excluding December, totals $372,900. — 00:19:20
  • ★★★ In 2021 Ali's main channel has made $523,000 from brand deals and sponsorships; his agency Standard takes the industry-standard 20% cut, leaving about $432,000. — 00:19:49

00:19:56 — Number 3: sponsorships, and why it is still a good time to start YouTube

  • ★★★ Living with the numbers takes away their emotional impact, Ali says: his channel made nothing in its first year and a few thousand in its second, then grew exponentially, as with nearly every YouTuber and internet business he knows. — 00:20:19
  • ★★ At the start of a channel you put lots of time, money and effort into videos to get the flywheel going; at some point it turns and the videos make absurd amounts of money. — 00:20:48
  • ★★★ Ali thinks there is still great opportunity in YouTube: even starting in 2022 there has been no better time, since niches are saturated but the algorithm is tuned and there is much money in AdSense, brand deals and selling your own products. — 00:21:17
  • ★★★ If you can make videos people want to click on and watch, consistently over a very long time, Ali says you will probably get some traction: it is fairly simple to understand what makes a good YouTube video. (hedged) — 00:21:46
  • ★★ Some Part-Time YouTuber Academy students have had financial success within a few months to a year, life-changing for them, by consistently putting out a video a week. — 00:21:46 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:22:46 — Number 2: Skillshare

  • ★★ Ali has eight to ten classes on Skillshare, a subscription of about $10 a month with unlimited access; like Spotify, it pays teachers about three to seven cents per minute of premium watch time, varying by month. — 00:22:48 · Skillshare, Skillshare classes, Netflix, Spotify
  • ★★ Skillshare's affiliate programme pays Ali $10 for each person he refers to a free trial even if they do not continue the trial. — 00:23:28 · Skillshare
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare royalties ran between $55,000 and $74,000 a month from January to October 2021; with affiliate income, Skillshare has made $716,691 this year (2021), not counting November and December. — 00:23:58 · Skillshare, Skillshare classes
  • ★★ Ali started on Skillshare after a friend showed him stats of about $2,000 a month, which seemed a life-changing amount that might let him hire someone, before he had a team. — 00:24:51 · Skillshare
  • ★★ Ali barely promotes his Skillshare classes, yet some people found his channel through them, such as his classes on Stoicism and productivity. — 00:25:19 · Skillshare, Skillshare classes
  • ★★ When Ali needs to learn something and cannot find a video on YouTube, he finds a course on Skillshare, which he says is generally very good. — 00:25:48 · Skillshare

00:26:08 — Number 1: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

  • ★★ Around October 2020 Ali had the idea of a self-paced YouTube course for a few hundred dollars, like a Skillshare class; Tiago Forte and David Perell, who ran cohort-based courses, strongly advised making the Part-Time YouTuber Academy one. — 00:26:16 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Tiago Forte, Skillshare classes
  • ★★ In November 2020 Ali, then full-time in the business after quitting as a doctor, had a team of about four: Christian, full-time editor in Romania, Angus, full-time writer, and Elizabeth, part-time assistant. — 00:26:16 · Christian, Angus, Elizabeth
  • ★★ Elizabeth came up with the name Part-Time YouTuber Academy; before that it was called the Infinite Content Engine, which Ali calls objectively a worse name. — 00:26:45 · Elizabeth, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Within a few weeks Ali and Angus made the slides and course material and announced the course on Twitter; Ali expected 10 to 20 people for a beta cohort, but about 350 signed up in late 2020. — 00:26:45 · Angus, Twitter
  • ★★★ In 2021 the Part-Time YouTuber Academy ran its second, third and fourth cohorts, teaching over a thousand students with very good reviews. — 00:27:14 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy refunds anyone who does the homework and gets no value; of about a thousand students only two have used this, while 30 to 50 got refunds for other reasons such as life getting in the way. — 00:27:14 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali was scared of running the course because he did not want to sell snake oil; offering such a liberal money-back guarantee made him feel better about selling it. — 00:27:44
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy has a community whose members meet in person; a London event a few weeks earlier brought together 50 students, one flying in from Chicago. — 00:28:13 · London, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy's second cohort, capped at 200 places, made $649,151; the third, with about 400 places, $902,070; the fourth, nearing its end, $1,044,085; more cohorts will run next year (2022). — 00:28:36 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy has four full-time team members plus paid student supporters and alumni mentors; Ali teaches six to eight hours a week while Angus, Elizabeth, Bath (as heard), Tommy and Alison run it. — 00:29:34 · Angus, Elizabeth, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy made about $2.59 million in 2021, over half the business's revenue: scary reliance on one golden goose, Ali says, but good because it is not intrinsically tied to his personal brand. — 00:30:03 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's 2021 total, business and personal income combined, is about $4.79 million, against about $1.339 million the year before, an increase of about $3.5 million, though costs have risen even more. — 00:30:33

00:30:54 — Grand total, the team, fears about the business and focusing on the mission

  • ★★★ Ali sees his business as very distinct from himself: with its large costs, the business's revenue is not his money, though a few years ago he would have thought $4 million meant he was rich. — 00:31:32
  • ★★★ Most YouTubers run lifestyle businesses as highly paid freelancers; few build a team of 20. Ali does not think it was more fun with fewer people: he worked late then, and now Angus runs the business while he focuses on content and enjoys the team. — 00:32:00 · lifestyle business, Marques Brownlee, Angus
  • ★★★ What keeps Ali up at night is that his business feels like a house of cards that could come crumbling down at any moment. — 00:33:14 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali says they very much lucked out: there was lots of work, especially by the Academy team, but much of it was being in the right place at the right time — going to Cambridge, being a medical student and trading on that brand. — 00:33:37 · Cambridge, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ One of Ali's coaches compared being a YouTuber to being an athlete, who has a few prime years to make a lot of money with no guarantee of earning the same afterwards. — 00:33:37
  • ★★ Ali does not think YouTube as a platform will die, but thinks it more likely that people will just stop caring about his content. — 00:34:01 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Going forward Ali tries not to think about the numbers or the money but to focus on his mission: trying to live a good life and documenting the journey in health, wealth, love and happiness. — 00:34:28
  • ★★ Ali sees himself as a lifelong student, not a guru: he reads a lot of other people's work and makes videos about it because it is fun. — 00:34:58
  • ★★★ Asked by a business coach for his 10-year vision, Ali says it is a profitable business that helps people while having fun, the only thing he cares about. — 00:35:34
  • ★★ SixMed, Ali's first business, was fun for its first three or four years of growth, but when it plateaued and dipped in year four or five the decline sucked the joy out of it; he fears the same for his channel. — 00:35:34 · 6med

  • ★★★ Ali calls revenue a vanity metric: what matters is profit, revenue minus spending, and his business spent very large amounts to make the channel and the Academy happen. — 00:36:16

    “revenue is a vanity metric”

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali's figures are pre-tax revenue paid into a company account that pays 21 team members, contractors, consultants, coaches and software before corporation tax; he withdraws little, at 37.5% dividend tax plus 9% student loan repayments. — video description · first in: 2020-12-28 (said on 2020-12-15, implied), How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: affiliate marketing · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · S&P 500 · Skillshare · Skillshare classes · YouTube AdSense

Also: People: Alison · Amber · Andrei Jikh · Angus · Christian · David Perell · Elizabeth · Gareth · Graham Stephan · Jakub · Marques Brownlee · Nat Eliason · Sheen · Taimur Abdaal · Tiago Forte · Tommy

Projects: Appendix · Deep Dive · Not Overthinking

Works: Building a Second Brain · Write of Passage

Organizations: 6med · Charles Stanley Direct · Etsy · Fastly · Fiverr · IQUnix · MongoDB · MP Materials · Nebula · Netflix · Penguin UK · Shopify · Standard · Teachable · Teladoc · Tesla · Twitch · Twitter · Ugmonk · Vanguard

Concepts: cohort-based course · Emergency medicine · flywheel · index fund · lifestyle business · money-back guarantee · personal brand · RPM · watch time

Places: Cambridge · China · France · Germany · Hong Kong · London · Manchester · South Korea · Taiwan

Products: Amazon Associates · Bitcoin · Blinkist · Cardano · Dogecoin · Epidemic Sound · Ethereum · Freetrade · Ghost · IQUnix F96 · Litecoin · Nasdaq-100 · Paperlike · Readwise · Shiba Inu · Shortform · Solana · Spotify · Stocks and shares ISA · TubeBuddy · World of Warcraft · YouTube Premium

Also centred on affiliate marketing: How Much Money I Earn in a Week as a Doctor & YouTuber · How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber · 9 Passive Income Ideas - How I Make $27k per Week · How Much Money I Made as a YouTuber & Entrepreneur (2022)

Also centred on YouTube AdSense: How Much Money I Earn in a Week as a Doctor & YouTuber · How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber · How Much YouTube Paid Me For 10M Views · How Much Money I Made as a YouTuber & Entrepreneur (2022)

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