Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I am excited to watch Kathleenlights’ new video on Youtube. She has over three-million subscribers, and her beauty videos have over 365 million video views across 677 videos all together. These numbers sound big and the amount of money these videos produce is as well. Kathleen makes an average of $185,000 per year (Sifferlin, Time Magazine), which is more than some doctors who need many years of schooling to reach this type of income. Meanwhile, it took Kathleen four years to reach this level of success.
Kaliah Little, a Chicago beauty guru, mentions that, “Having YouTube as a source of promotion can help beauty gurus create a career out of being on YouTube.” For Kathleen, different partnerships have helped her create her own brand. While this career seems very splendid there are some complications that “YouTubers” face. Angela Guzman, a beauty guru with 300K subscribers, says that her biggest challenge is the audience’s response to sponsored videos. She says, “This creates a challenge because I will not be able to gain profit but I would still want to please my audience. It’s really hard to please everyone.”
Viewers might not see Angela’s opinion on the specific product as reliable since she is paid by a company to promote their product. The greater the number of subscribers, sponsorships, collaborations and views, the greater the opportunities a YouTuber may have for income. Some traveling agencies have contracted vloggers to advertise their vacation destination to attract tourists. According to Tom Samiljan in Bloomberg Magazine, “One especially successful vlogger who often plays in the travel space, Casey Neistat, even built a spin off app to help creators share their videos, then sold it to CNN last November for $25 million as part of the network’s push to compete with YouTube.”
Although these were best-case positive examples, individuals have built successful businesses on YouTube or used YouTube to help build businesses. So next time you watch a YouTube video for entertainment, consider creating videos yourself so you could turn those views into dollars.