Hey all— haven’t been able to keep up here as busy elsewhere but I did see some posts speculating on how much YTers earn.
personal experience as someone who has done YT (not active now as very busy with life but I have about 20k subs and a few videos with a few hundred K views).
all these YTers scramble for the Nordstrom anniversary sale bc it’s a huge money making opportunity. I have never done this for my channel as product promotion is not my core, but the videos I do have with affiliate links continue to generate me monthly income and I have very small viewership compared to someone like amie.
for one of their haul/ sale videos: Each item that a person clicks through on and buys earns 10% commission usually. A $500 bag? $50 to the YTer. If you happen to click on a link and not buy anything, that’s fine. The cookies are stored on your computer for at least a few days (sometimes up to a month) and then if you do buy anything—even if it’s not the $500 bag— that’s still 10% commission on whatever the final shopping cart is. So, click on a link and end up buying $1000 of other random stuff? $100 to the YT. Hence, if I were a business like amie runs, I too would be shopping the tit out of Nordstrom and Sephora and doing a big haul video in time with their big sales. I’m sure each one generates a ton of money (and they likely return a bunch of stuff that they’ve bought as well so the shopping “addiction” is actually a smart biz move). if I were purely money-focused, I would make similar videos.
amie, I am very sure, makes a comfortable 6 figures from YT even though she doesn’t have a huge audience vs other YTers. What she does have is an engaged, shopping obsessed audience who are likely clicking on a ton of her links. If I were her and making that on YT and enjoying it, I would probably quit my FT job as well.
this also doesn’t include ad revenue from YT. On this, you have to consider the fact that she has a huge library of videos all generating $ passively in addition to her new posts. The ad revs are for her category probably around $3-$10/ thousand views after YT’s cut. So a video with 100k views = at least $300 in her pocket on ad revenue. Again this is my personal experience targeting a similar audience as amie’s. Our rates may be different bc if diff geographies and not identical markets but that’s a safe estimate. Some times of year like Xmas, those rates can grow even higher. So, even though I don’t barely post videos, my small collection of past videos is still earning me 200-300$ monthly passively in ads (and then separate $$ for affiliate links) bc ppl keep watching old videos (and again, I’m very small comparatively).
personally, I find amie incredibly dull and have not watched a video of hers in years. But kudos to her biz savvy And work ethic. I remember being very impressed that she even bothers to keep her blog super updated and again, all linked up. It’s smart. She’s taking in a ton of $$$. It’s boring work IMO, but if she likes it— good on her. It’s making her wealthy.
So what does this mean for Elle. Well, as a lot of you have pointed out, unlike amie, Elle lacks work ethic especially in the Rick/ post-Rick era (I mean for YT, I do too. The difference is, I actually work otherwise). Her videos are tit on top of being incredibly boring (I also haven’t watched any Elle videos other than her house tours and to reference what you guys post on here haha). And then the lies!!! On top of lies!!!!
anyway, hard to say what Elle is making from YT. But if I take my channel (which again is like dead for all intents and purposes) and the fact that it’s still generating $300 passively every month thanks to ad rev + a few affiliate links, I can only assume that Elle (with her hugeeeee library of videos and aggressive linking designed to force ppl to click bc she doesn’t give any info away), is making at least $1-2k. Maybe upwards of 4-5k when she does post regularly a couple times a week.
no5 enough to sustain her lifestyle but add on her pearls and mommy’s $$, she can eke by without a job. But she needs to put in more work on her videos before her audience peters away.
I think her content curation is probably good judging by the Nordstrom video above but it's hard to watch people that annoy you when you look at them.
