Two creators put numbers in public this year, at opposite ends of the scale, and reached the same conclusion by different routes.
I’m grateful to both of them, because the creator economy runs on people hiding what they earn, and writers get hurt by the hiding. Someone sees a big subscriber count, assumes there’s a living behind it, and plans a career around a number that was never real. I think the platforms like it that way, and I’d much prefer writers saw the dashboard before they bet years on a feed.
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist. Six books, a Payne Award for ethics, formerly a contributing editor at Wired. He’s around 275,000 YouTube subscribers and he showed his revenue dashboard on camera. Viva La Dirt League is a sketch comedy troupe in Auckland with 7.85 million subscribers and 5.79 billion views. They’ve never published a revenue figure, and they’ve said something more useful than one.
What does a good year on YouTube pay?
Carney earned $58,697.71 from YouTube over twelve months. That came from 5,085,347 monetized playbacks at a blended CPM of $14.37.
Watch page advertising was $40,184, about 69 percent. YouTube Premium added $12,877, around 22 percent. That’s money from subscribers who never see an ad. Transactions made up the rest.
YouTube Premium added $12,877, around 22 percent. That’s money from subscribers who never see an ad.Share on X
Five million monetized playbacks produced fifty-nine thousand dollars. That’s roughly $11.54 for every thousand plays, all in, and it’s the number to keep in mind whenever someone treats a view count as evidence of an income.
The variance is the story
His best month paid $9,310. His worst full month paid $2,149. Same channel, same person, same production standard, a factor of four and a third between them. The top four months carried 54 percent of the year. The bottom six carried under a quarter.
Some of that is his catalog, because a few breakouts carry everything.
Some of it isn’t his at all. His CPM ranged from $11.45 in September to $17.00 in March, and that swing is the advertising calendar. Brands spend in the first half and go quiet in the autumn, so identical work paid 48 percent more per thousand views in spring than in early autumn.
An income that moves like that is a commission structure set by somebody else, with no floor and no notice. I wouldn’t want to pay a mortgage on it, and I don’t think anyone should call it a career until they’ve lived through a year like his.
Why doesn’t a creator’s impact match their pay?
The figures Carney gave alongside the dashboard are worse than the dashboard.
A three-month investigation into a supplement company, which he says cost that company an estimated fifty million dollars in subscription revenue, paid him just over seven thousand dollars. A piece on drone warfare he worked on for roughly eighteen months earned $153.
That number is an insult. Eighteen months of reporting on drone warfare, the kind of work that carries real risk, and the platform paid him less than a nice dinner for two. The fault sits with a system that pays for attention and doesn’t care what it cost to earn it.
His combined YouTube and Substack income for the year came to about $84,000, which he compares to a beat reporter’s salary at a major newspaper. No health insurance, no legal department, no editor, and a standing risk that companies he investigates will sue him.
His response was to start taking sponsors. He’d turned down at least $150,000 in offers on principle. He now charges $5,500 for a read and says the slots fill without difficulty. That’s two to three times his entire year of subscription income. That’s a rational answer to an irrational income, and it’s worth noticing what it costs. He’s selling access to his audience’s attention to smooth out a number he can’t control.
What does Viva La Dirt League do differently?
They’re twenty-eight times his size and they said the quiet part first. While platforms like YouTube and Facebook provided visibility, the ad revenue wasn’t enough to cover costs. That’s their own framing, from a troupe with nearly eight million subscribers and billions of views. Read that against Carney’s dashboard and the picture stops being about him. If a channel that size can’t fund its own production from advertising, the flaw is in how the model was designed, and I don’t believe more subscribers would fix it. Their answer went in the opposite direction from his.
In 2022 they crowdfunded four million New Zealand dollars from their audience and bought a studio in Henderson, with an eleven-metre cyclorama, a pre-set lighting rig, and stunt rigging. Adam King has said they expected to raise enough for a co-working space with a garage they could call a studio and didn’t anticipate what they ended up with. They now rent the space to other filmmakers and offer production services.
Then in July 2024 they launched vivaplus.tv and moved their content, memberships, and merchandise onto a site they own. Patreon had been the membership layer since the beginning, growing from a few hundred dollars a month in 2017 to twelve thousand a month by 2019. They left anyway.
I’ve written before about what their storytelling gets right across hundreds of episodes, and the discipline in the writing turns out to have a business twin. The people who build durable creative processes also build durable businesses, and for the same reason. Both are about not depending on a thing arriving.
Two answers to the same problem
Carney converted audience attention into sponsor revenue. Viva La Dirt League converted audience money into a building. The first is faster and it works. The second adds up.
A sponsor slot pays once. It has to be sold again next month, at a rate the market sets, to a buyer who can walk. A studio produces value every day it exists, produces it for other people’s projects too, and doesn’t care what any algorithm did this week.
Neither of them is wrong. Carney is a one-man operation who can’t raise four million dollars for a building and would have no use for one. His asset is his name and his method, and sponsorship is the right monetization for that. What separates them is what each had that could be converted into something that keeps working, and intelligence has nothing to do with it.
What can a writer convert into an asset?
Most of us are closer to Carney than to a production company, so the useful question is what a writer has that behaves like a building instead of like a sponsor slot.
Four things, and none of them live on a platform.
A book. A title with an ISBN sits in library catalogs, distributor databases, and library holdings for decades. There’s no algorithm change that removes it and no feed that deprioritizes it. It also does work no post can do, most of it indirect. The book is infrastructure, and treating it as a product with a royalty statement is why so many authors conclude that books don’t pay.
A site you own. Not a profile, a domain. Your work on it, structured so machines can read it, because a growing share of readers never see a link at all. They ask a question and get an answer built from sources. Being one of those sources is the current form of being findable, and it’s decided by what sits on a page you control.
An exportable list. Subscribers you can take with you as a file. Substack still allows this and it’s to their credit. Use it while it remains true.
The constant is that a business with one input it doesn’t control has a single point of failure, and that point is the whole business.
A body of work with your name on it. Carney’s Payne Award and six books are why a stranger trusts his investigation in the first place. That credibility isn’t on YouTube. YouTube is just where he currently spends it.
The platform is a road, not an address
Every writer who has done this for more than a decade has lived some version of the same story. Google changed. Facebook throttled pages. Medium moved the paywall. Amazon changed the terms. Substack added a feed and the follower graph went vertical while the paid graph went flat.
The constant is that a business with one input it doesn’t control has a single point of failure, and that point is the whole business. Use the platforms for the thing they’re good at. That’s reach. Nothing here argues for leaving them. Carney should be on YouTube and Viva La Dirt League should be on YouTube, and both of them are.
My own rule is to keep my base on things I control and let the platforms I don’t control contribute. If they delete something, it’s no big deal for me. Video is a good example. I upload my videos to Streamable. It’s cheap, and I get a link to each one. I own that account, so I own the videos.
The question is what the reach is being converted into. Attention that you sell once is income. Attention that becomes a book, a building, a list, or a reputation is an asset. The first pays this month. The second is still paying when the platform changes its mind.
My take
Copy the comedy troupe and ignore the sponsor slots. They raised money from their audience and bought a building, and that’s a business no feed can switch off. Treat the platform as a road. Your address is a book, a site you own, an exportable list, and a body of work with your name on it. If the platform vanished tomorrow, those four would still be standing.
What would you have if the platform disappeared tomorrow?
That’s the whole test, and it takes about a minute.
If your answer is a follower count, you have nothing, because the count doesn’t travel. If the answer is a list, a catalog, a site, and a set of people who know what you do, then the platform going away is an inconvenience instead of an ending.
Carney survives it because six books and an ethics award travel with him. Viva La Dirt League survives it because they own a studio in Henderson and the site their audience already visits.
Most writers reading this won’t raise four million dollars. All of them can write the book, own the domain, and keep the list, and those three cost months of work and very little money. I’d put a writer’s next spare month into the book before I’d give it to another week of chasing a feed. If the book is the piece you keep meaning to get to, the publishing and marketing hub covers what moves them, and writing them for other people is the work I do.
Too many writers pour their best years into platforms that can cut their income overnight with a policy change, and then blame themselves when it happens. Take the reach the platforms give you and turn it into a book, a site and a list with your name on them, because those are the parts of this business nobody else can switch off.
Make a Living as a Self-Published Author covers building the business behind the books. I wrote it for authors who want their writing to run like a business and keep earning.
