At one time, YouTube was a simple site where people would upload content, viewers would stream it, and YouTubers would get paid a share of the advertising revenue. However, as the times have changed, YouTubers and sponsors have found several ways to monetize their earnings. Along with corporate sponsorship with top brands, creators have also started fan funding and selling the merchandise that garners millions of dollars in sales. While these YouTubers earn big money, they ensure takeaways to offer financial support to people who need it.

Youtube is making people millionaires

Photo: Getty Images

Youtube is a platform(app) that allows low budget filmmakers to share their videos online. It is free and very easy for all users. Before youtube, in order to become a filmmaker, you would have to go to school and land a job in the industry, so eventually, after years of moving up the ladder, you can convince people to fund your film idea. Once youtube was created anyone, educated or not, could share their videos with the world as long as they had any type of camera, and with an easily accessible editing platform, anyone could become a filmmaker. Youtube like many other social media platforms provides an audience.

Advertising

With YouTube's massive boom of viewers, advertisers were not far behind. Thousands of businesses paid YouTube to feature their advertisements on YouTubes page. YouTube gives a large percentage of the advertising money to the creators that are bringing in viewers. That is how YouTubers make their money through advertisements.

YouTube is low budget entertainment so the creators receive almost 100% of the profit, unlike high budget entertainment that requires loans, investors, actors, crews, and all types of fees.

Sponsorships

Just like with celebrities or influential people YouTubers can get sponsored by businesses. Sponsors will pay YouTubers to shout out their brand and maybe review a product or service. It’s basically just a more direct way to advertise. When you see a movie and the car in the movie is a ford F-150 the movie gets paid by Ford for that advertising. So in a youtube video YouTubers will drink “white claw”, for example, in their video, then say something like “ Man, I love white claws”. This is another example of how the ability to obtain an audience is worth money.

Jobs

Even though Youtube is typically done by individuals there is always an opportunity to upscale your content. Though youtube is usually low budget once you start making money from youtube you can create higher quality videos. Thus leading to the hiring of more people. Many successful YouTubers now hire friends and family to help produce their videos.

Freedom

Typically when working in a film you are an employee. Whether your a director or an actor you have a boss, you're working a job. Youtube is a little bit different. In youtube you are acquiring you're own personal audience. You control what you say to them, how they perceive you, everything. Your youtube channel is completely yours. You choose what to make, how to make it, if it gets edited, when it gets posted, everything is your choice. It is complete creative freedom.

Views not Subscribers

Just like every form of visual entertainment you get paid off of the number of people that watch you, in other words, your views. For youtube, you only get paid off of the number of views on each video. Your subscriber count definitely helps your views but it does not equate to money. Many people believe that if you have 20 million subscribers then 20 million people are watching your videos. That is incorrect. Subscribers are like fans to a musician. It’s great to have a lot of them, but not all of your fans are going to come to your concert.

The average salary of a YouTuber with 1 million subscribers is about $57,200 per year according to turbo.intuit.com, but just like entrepreneurship, it is not a salary, every paycheck fluctuates. Most people, however, are probably not getting any money from youtube. It is not an easy job. Obtaining an audience is a lot harder then it sounds and it is definitely not for everyone, but if it is for you, it could be a step to a very wealthy life.

10 Youtuber Millionaires of 2021

1. Ryan Kaji

Photo: Youtube

A nine-year-old boy has made nearly $30m in a year from “unboxing” and reviewing toys and games on YouTube to hold the title of highest-paid YouTuber for the third year running.

Ryan Kaji, from Texas, made $29.5m (£22m) from his YouTube channel Ryan’s World, as well as a further estimated $200m from Ryan’s World branded toys and clothing, including Marks & Spencer pyjamas. He also signed an undisclosed, but likely multimillion dollar, deal for his own TV series on Nickelodeon, according to The Guardian.

Kaji, who is described as a “child influencer”, first began making YouTube videos in March 2015 after watching other toy review channels and asking his mother, “How come I’m not on YouTube when all the other kids are?”

His family – who changed their real surname, Guan, to his on-screen surname, Kaji – now run nine YouTube channels. Ryan’s World was the most popular with 41.7m subscribers and 12.2bn views. Kaji’s most popular video, Huge Eggs Surprise Toys Challenge, has more than 2bn views, making it one of the 60 most-viewed videos ever on YouTube.

2. Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson)

Photo: The New Consumer

At just 22 years old, Jimmy Donaldson, also known as MrBeast, is one of the most-viewed and highest-paid creators on YouTube.

He's known for such stunts as reading every word in the dictionary, turning a backyard into a ballpit, buying everything in a store, and giving away a million dollars but only giving people one minute to spend it. His ambitious challenges and money-giveaways have helped him grow his channel to roughly 53 million subscribers.

The YouTube star and his brother, CJ, grew up in eastern North Carolina in the city of Greenville. In 2016, he graduated from Greenville Christian Academy, a private high school in the area.

The teenager began his YouTube career posting videos under the username "MrBeast6000." For the first few years, Donaldson attempted, unsuccessfully, to master the YouTube algorithm by creating the content he thought would attract the largest audience.

MrBeast first went viral in January 2017, when he uploaded a video showing himself counting to 100,000 — which he later revealed took him 44 hours. "I just really wanted it," MrBeast later said about the challenge. "I had dropped out of college, I wasn't really making much. I knew it would go viral."

MrBeast has been credited with helping to launch a new style of expensive stunt videos on YouTube in which creators pull off elaborate challenges and large-scale sponsored giveaways.

Mr Beast has a net worth of $25 million.

3. David Dobrik

Photo: Los Angeles Times

Dávid Julián Dobrík (born 23 July 1996) is a YouTuber, podcaster, and co-founder of the photography app Dispo. He found early success on the video-sharing platform Vine, before starting his vlog on his YouTube channel in 2015.

Dobrik is known for being the leader of the popular YouTube ensemble The Vlog Squad, which features prominently in his vlogs and comprises rotating selections of his friend group. As of February 2021, Dobrik's vlog channel had accumulated 18.9 million subscribers and 8.2 billion views. The channel was the fifth-most viewed creator channel on YouTube in 2019, with 2.4 billion views that year.

Beyond internet entertainment, Dobrik voice-acted in The Angry Birds Movie 2, was one of the judges on the Nickelodeon TV show America's Most Musical Family, and hosted a SpongeBob SquarePants special, as well as the first season of Discovery Channel's reality competition TV show Dodgeball Thunderdome.

David Dobrik has a net worth of $25 million.

4. Markiplier (Mark Fischbach)

Photo: Twitter

Mark Edward Fischbach, better known by his online alias Markiplier, is an American YouTube personality, online entertainer, producer, actor, and voice actor. He is the younger brother of web comic author and artist Jason Thomas Fischbach known for TwoKinds, as well as the co-host of the now-defunct Unus Annus channel.

Mark is known for his various playthroughs (Let's Plays) of games, usually in the horror genre, such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Five Nights at Freddy's and Slender, but his main focus is on indie games of varying genres, for the purposes of giving them more attention. He is also known to have played games outside of horror, such as Minecraft (in his popular and long-running series Drunk Minecraft), as well as Happy Wheels (in his series Happy Wheels Highlights) and other projects in which he collaborates with his good friends Bob Muyskens (Muyskerm) and George Barnes (LordMinion777). Of the three, Mark is the second eldest/youngest, but he acts as the group's firm leader.

During the course of his channel's run, Mark has released several sketch comedy videos (one of which his trademark alter ego, Wilford Warfstache, was born from), commonly collaborating with fellow sketch comedians from the channel Cyndago. He formerly resided in Cincinnati before moving to Los Angeles on March 4, 2014. Since then, he has made numerous visits to his hometown on various occasions, usually in the case of setting up a live streaming event with Bob and Wade.

Markiplier is an American actor, writer, producer, director, and YouTube personality who has a net worth of $35 million. He is one of the highest-paid and most-popular YouTube stars on the planet. Markiplier's YouTube channel has over 29 million subscribers and 16 million views as of this writing, and it is in the Top 100 most subscribed channels on YouTube.

5. Blippi (Stevin John)

Photo: Wikita

Stevin John (born May 27, 1988 as Stephen J. Grossman), better known by his alias Blippi, is an American children's entertainer and educator on YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Video. The Blippi character that John portrays has a childlike, energetic and curious persona and is always dressed in a blue and orange beanie cap, blue shirt, orange suspenders, and a bow tie.

The videos would eventually garner a large following with over a billion views on YouTube and the production staff expanding. The Blippi team would begin producing videos in Spanish, establish Blippi Toys, and begin offering DVDs and digital downloads from the Blippi website. Although Blippi's childlike demeanor has met with much success from children, some parents have questioned the simplistic nature of the character in regard to his tone and repetitive songs about things such as garbage trucks, fire trucks, and pizza.

In 2020 he was one of the highest-paid YouTube stars on the planet with earnings of $17 million.

6. Smosh

Photo: Variety

Smosh is an American sketch comedy YouTube channel co-founded by Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. In 2002, Padilla created a website named "smosh.com" for making flash animations, and he was later joined by Hecox. They began to post videos on Smosh's YouTube channel in the autumn of 2005 and quickly became one of the most popular channels on the site. As of June 2021, the Smosh channel has over 9.9 billion views and over 25.1 million subscribers, putting it just outside of the top 9,000 most subscribed channels on YouTube.

Since 2012, the Smosh brand has expanded to consist of multiple channels, including a Spanish-language channel (ElSmosh), a channel focused on video gaming content (Smosh Games), and a variety channel (Smosh Pit). The sketches have also included more actors. Padilla left Smosh in June 2017 to pursue independent ventures. The Smosh channel has experienced three different spans as the most subscribed YouTube channel. The first period spanned from May to June 2006, the second from April 2007 to September 2008, and the third span from January to August 2013.

On September 2, 2020, they launched a Twitch channel named after one of their YouTube channels, Smosh Games.

Smosh's real net worth is not publicly reported, but networthspot.com thinks it to be about $4.51 million.

However, some people have hypothesized that Smosh's net worth might truly be higher than that. In fact, when including other sources of income for a YouTuber, some estimates place Smosh's net worth closer to $6.31 million.

7. Nastya

Photo: ICTNews

Anastasia Yuryevna Radzinskaya (Russian: Анастасия Юрьевна Радзинская; born January 27, 2014), also known as Nastya, Like Nastya, and Stacy, is a Russian YouTuber. She and her parents run several YouTube channels for children, including Like Nastya, Like Nastya Vlog and Like Nastya Show. As of May 7, 2021, her channel is the fifth most-viewed channel on YouTube, as well as the single most-viewed channel owned by a YouTuber.

Anastasia's parents signed with multi-channel network Yoola. The videos are created by Anastasia, her two parents and two video editors.

According to Forbes, in 2019 Anastasia was "one of the world's fastest-growing creators, thanks to videos in seven languages", becoming the third highest-paid YouTuber in the world, with an estimated annual income of $18 million.

Altogether, her channels make her the biggest children's YouTuber in the world and the most popular children's videoblogger on YouTube in terms of total views and subscribers, and she is the third-largest children's YouTuber in the world by subscribers alone. Her largest channel (Like Nastya) is the 8th most-subscribed channel in the world.

She has a net worth of $20 million.

8. Roman Atwood

Photo: Billboard

oman Bernard Atwood (born May 28, 1983) is an American YouTube personality and prankster. He is best known for his vlogs, where he posts updates about his life. His vlogging channel, "RomanAtwoodVlogs", has a total of 5 billion views and 15 million subscribers. He also has another YouTube channel called "RomanAtwood", where he used to post prank videos. The channel has been inactive since 2016. His pranks have gained over 1.4 billion views and 10.4 million subscribers. He became the second YouTuber after Germán Garmendia to receive two Diamond Play Buttons for his two channels.

He net worth of $14.5 million.

9. John Green

Photo: The New York Times

John Michael Green (born August 24, 1977) is an American author and YouTube content creator. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and has had several of his subsequent books debut at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list, including his most popular novel, The Fault in Our Stars. The 2014 film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars opened at number one at the box office and was a commercial and critical success. In 2014, Green was included in Time magazine's list of The 100 Most Influential People in the World. Another film based on a Green novel, Paper Towns, was released on July 24, 2015.

Aside from being a novelist, Green is also well known for his online content creation, most notably his YouTube ventures. In 2007, he launched the Vlogbrothers channel with his brother, Hank Green. Since then, John and Hank have launched events such as Project for Awesome and VidCon and created a total of 11 online series, including Crash Course, an educational channel teaching literature, history, science, and other topics. John also hosts the weekly comedy podcast Dear Hank & John and the monthly essay podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, both of which the brothers have gone on tour and performed live versions of.

He has a net worth of $17 million dollars.

10. DanTDM

Photo: Youtube

Daniel Robert Middleton (born 8 November 1991), better known online as DanTDM (formerly TheDiamondMinecart), is an English YouTuber, gamer, musician, author, and actor known for his video game commentaries. His online video channels have covered many video games including Minecraft, Roblox and Pokémon.

His channel has been listed among the top YouTube channels in the United Kingdom. In July 2015, he was listed as one of the most popular YouTubers in the world by viewership. He has won several Kids' Choice Awards and set Guinness World Records for his gaming and presenting. In 2017, Middleton topped the Forbes list of Highest-Paid YouTube Stars, earning $16.5 million (about GB£12.2 million) in one year. As of June 2021, his YouTube channel has reached over 25.3 million subscribers, 18 billion video views, and has posted more than 3,490 videos.

He has a net worth of $35 million.

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