In the 42 Spanish first and second division teams there are 1,050 footballers if we count 25 players per squad. In Spain there are 1,186 YouTubers with more than 500,000 subscribers. That’s the approximate number they start earning enough to support themselves from just creating content. That half million is an estimate that depends on many factors (each YouTuber’s primary platform, off-network revenue, expenses, type of videos), but it only serves to illustrate the tremendous difficulty of finding a viable one on the networks and find a stable job.
“500,000 subscribers creates social capital on YouTube and is a good basis for video view accumulation,” says Òscar Coromina, a researcher at the University of Malmö and the Autònoma de Barcelona, who has been studying YouTube and its economy since 2016 . ” This number usually also corresponds to a significant number of followers on other platforms and therefore offers favorable conditions for additional monetization.”
In his latest scholarly article, Coromina analyzed where the links YouTubers place in the description below each of their videos lead to. They analyzed 137 million videos from 153,000 YouTubers who had more than 100,000 subscribers in 2019. The aim was to check what other networks and resources they use to generate enough income to live on: these are mainly links to other social networks, e-commerce platforms or crowdfunding. Their main finding is that it’s a widespread and growing practice: there are an average of 4.37 links for each of the 137 million videos.
More information
In this article, the authors also include a table estimating the revenue YouTube shares with its creators for advertising: For each ad, the platform keeps 45% and the creator keeps 55%. This estimate found that YouTubers with more than 10 million subscribers made about 1.55 million euros per year; between 1 and 10 million subscribers 152,000 euros and between 100,000 and 1 million subscribers 15,000 euros per year. “With this kind of research, for example, we saw that being a footballer is so difficult to be a YouTuber,” says Coromina.
At the bottom end of these subscriber counts, YouTubers’ options must have many input channels: “Surely they’ll have to find their living doing other things: events, product placement, selling tweets, etc.” It’s people who make it happen. For YouTube, these people are just different. They are present in other networks and maybe have a different job,” says Coromina. This digital side job is one of the reasons why, despite similar numbers, it’s probably even easier to become a professional footballer than a YouTuber.
The authors were surprised by the small number of their results, especially in a country like Spain, which has the third most spoken language in the world. They just wanted to look at one country to better understand how a global platform like YouTube works, whose global numbers make comparisons difficult: “We were surprised that the number of professional YouTubers is very small,” says Adrià Padilla, researcher at YouTube Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and collaborators of Coromina. “It’s attracting a lot of attention because the content in Spanish has greater visibility due to the large number of Spanish speakers around the world. Although we have not examined other countries in depth, all indications are that Spain has a more developed professional structure than other countries with a similar population but a language with fewer speakers,” he adds.
While the numbers aren’t exact, they give an idea of the challenge and effort involved in being a YouTuber. TheGrefg is one of the most important Spanish YouTubers. He founded his channel in January 2012 and in a podcast a few months ago he explained the difficulty of his beginnings, at a time when the competition was much less: “Until you can consider it a job, you devote many hours to it,” he said. “People can see you, but for it to be a job you need a lot of people to see you. It was maybe two years or more by then when I already had 200,000 or 300,000 subscribers,” he adds. There is a lot of previously unseen work: “There are a lot of videos on my channel with very few visits until I started taking advantage of the fact that a game came out and I was the first to upload it; and people liked the way he commented and played. And so, little by little, I built,” explains TheGrefg on this podcast.
[elRubius, que es aún el principal ‘youtuber’ en español, con más de 40 millones de suscriptores, no está en esta lista porque tiene localizado su canal como ‘global’ y, por eso, no sale al recoger los datos nacionales. Por ese mismo motivo, hay canales en inglés en esta lista que deben tener su localización puesta en España. Los autores no tienen una respuesta al motivo de la elección de localización, más allá de estrategias comerciales.]
Several things stand out in the list of the main Spanish Youtubers: in addition to the absence of the oldest, elRubius, and the appearance of some in English, there is a significant presence of content for children and the video game Minecraft, that is, domain of the Youtuber Mikecrack. In addition to Las Ratitas, a girls’ channel aimed at viewers of the same age, there are only three other women’s channels: the influencer Patry Jordán in gymvirtual, the artist Luli Pampín and the singer Rosalía. The only big institution that exists is Real Madrid. In addition to video games and children, there is other platform-typical content such as exaggerated experiments and challenges (Makiman131 or ExpCaseros).
“The gender issue is brutal,” says Coromina. “This alternative media system YouTube, when we measure it in views, there is a big imbalance. All clients are men. That doesn’t stop there being very interesting content creators doing impactful things for niches. As this is a global study, these differences are not only seen by gender but also by North-South, all social imbalances are more highlighted on the platform. Women have to work the same hours but, as these tables show, they earn much less.
For a YouTuber, it is most likely that it will take at least several years to reach sufficient numbers: “If we take the number of 500,000 subscribers as a reference, we see that it takes these channels on average about six years to reach this number to reach; and these numbers apply both to the whole world and to Spain,” says Padilla. Those six years are an average, so some come earlier: “Very few have staggering growth,” he adds.
The problem of these six years is not only time, but above all the production pace that must be maintained to get there: “In our research, we found that a content creator publishes an average of 25 13-minute videos per month. “In six years it would be 1,800 videos and 390 hours,” says Coromina.
Mom, I want to be a YouTuber
This data has many implications when it comes to assessing YouTube as an emerging profession. Young people who are thinking about this should know that they are in an extremely demanding environment. “YouTube has built a media system that competes with the traditional one,” says Coromina. “In the US there are more people who want to be influencers than astronauts. For a 16-year-old boy, being able to make a living by paying to play video games is a wish. That’s what the Youtuber myth is built on,” he adds.
Getting there like theGrefg has done takes many hours of ambitious work. It is a system similar to that of traditional communication: the so-called hope work, which consists of being precarious for years in the hope of achieving a position years later. This process takes place both on YouTube and in the media: “In the world of journalism, too, there are many people who want to be Jordi Évole. Many of them will spend their time in precarious jobs. “It’s Mom, I Want to Be an Artist” by Lina Morgan. There are sectors of the economy before the Internet that already functioned this way. It’s the same now,” explains Coromina.
But there is one key difference to the media industry: it’s easier to reach your goal and get a job there because there are more jobs. Although Spain has a global language, it can currently only support a limited number of YouTubers.
There are creators like Ibai Llanos who already bring together teams that are small producers, but the differences with Mediaset or Prisa are still unattainable. In fact, Évole also has its production company, starting from traditional television: “If we think of YouTube, we are very critical of journalism universities, but if we compare them, the faculties are a more efficient system because they have a higher load.” YouTube is similar this idea rather than Uber, the same kind of precarious economy. “If you want to be successful, it’s easier to study a career than try to be a YouTuber,” says Coromina. “The media have to justify themselves. If you compare the number of jobs that traditional media such as TV, press or radio generate with YouTube, the difference is huge,” he adds.
Relying on a platform like YouTube to make money isn’t the only problem. As many YouTubers know, you are in their hands, without any protection whatsoever. A shift in sentiment in Silicon Valley is driving new terms of service and falling revenue across multiple channels. Jordi Wild is one of the greatest channels in Spanish with 3.97 million subscribers to The Wild Project (his second project after El Rincón de Giorgio). A few weeks ago, he explained that YouTube “punished” his videos for insults and could hardly monetize them. For him, the problem was not just this change, but the difficulty of figuring out what was going on and solving it.
Despite her almost 4 million subscribers, it took days for anyone from YouTube to reply. The platform knows that if Jordi goes wild, others will come who are just as interesting or further behind. You don’t lose much, you don’t have to spoil anything: “There is very poor communication on YouTube. It doesn’t tell you, “You are an important channel, you move a lot of people and you give us a lot of money, we’ve seen a drop in your income and that’s what happens.” But nobody tells you anything and if you ask, because I do asked a lot, they didn’t give a plausible explanation,” explains Jordi Wild, who threatened to leave the podium.
“I’m a boy who’s been on this platform for ten years,” Jordi Wild continued in the video. “I have 70 to 100 million views every month, that’s a lot of money, I play good songs, I’ve brought scientists, writers, politicians, people who make YouTube great.” On Twitter, he said he was looking for alternatives. He asked for options and held talks with other platforms. “I can’t keep being abused by YouTube, I have a limit, there are other sites they want me on, even audio platforms. Although YouTube behaves well, that’s where I feel most comfortable,” he says.
After all, what he said was a t-shirt that said “Shit” and a book called “This is the damn life.” On the screen they put a piece of paper on the whore. Wild himself comments: “If there are these problems at the top, then what happens to the rest?”
In the case of Jordi Wild, there was no clear policy change. But that’s what happened with children’s channels that couldn’t continue their monetization, when YouTube unilaterally decided: “We didn’t look at specific cases, but we saw that among the channels that are theoretically well positioned on their professionalization path (more than 100,000 ), subscribers) there is a very high number who have stopped producing content or have unpublished it. These inactive channels respond to many cases, but they make us suspect that there are many YouTubers who leave the channel due to changes in advertising policy, unable to stabilize their professional careers, or even psychological reasons. Many well-known YouTubers (Pewdepie himself, without elaborating) have taken hiatus or left after burnout. We are talking about 9% of the channels with more than 100,000 subscribers that have responded to this case,” says Coromina.
you can follow THE COUNTRY Technology on Facebook and Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.