Both are straight facts.
@Real One it can work out but at the end of the day you’ll be a slave to an algorithm made by Googl that you’ll never fully understand that can change at any moment and take your earnings from HERO to ZERO overnight.
My advice is that if you want to use youtube as a means of generating income, look at yourself like a fisherman. You’re the fisherman, your Boat is your Website, Youtube is the Ocean, their viewers are the Fish, and your content is the Worm and Hook.
What you wanna do is bait the fish in the youtube ocean and once you hook them, get them on the boat so that you own and control the relationship. You need to have content, merch, and etc on your own site and lead the viewers on youtube to it so you can generate income there and not have to rely on superchats and ads (Things Google can take from you).
When I had a sports memorabilia business, 90% of our income came from selling on eBay…you know what my #1 concern was? Getting them to buy from my site directly, so I put coupon cards in every box that went out to an eBay user.
When you’re on a marketplace like eBay, Amazon, Youtube, etc…they can shut you down at any time for any reason and if it’s your sole source of income, you can be screwed overnight.
This is why there are labor laws to stop companies from doing that when you’re employed. But when you’re in an independent contractor type relationship with one of these dystopian future tech companies you are fully at their mercy and the second they have no use for you they will destroy you.