Oh, so much to respond to!
tragusa3 wrote:
I don't want this to come across as promotion, but it is on topic. I was so impressed with the new platform for sharing this hobby, that I decided to give it a go myself and get in front of (and behind) the camera. Although I think we are highly entertaining, apparently I'm no good at it. Our videos seem to get a few dozen views, and when I compare that to the 100k views that a video of a cat using the litter box gets....well, it kind of tells you the pecking order. LOL.
You ARE good at it, and I'm saying that as one of your subs. Hang in there! (which sounds odd coming from someone trying to break into the medium, too.)
I suspect that you do it for the same reason I do: the fun of it. For me, photography (and by extension, cinematography) is a hobby, or more accurately a passion. I simply enjoy it. Heck, I even enjoy the post-production. With a YouTube RV channel, I get to marry my love of cinematography with my love of camping. And YouTube is nothing but the modern day version of the vacation slide show that our parents projected on the living room wall for friends and family to watch as they sipped Manhattans from the couch. The more people who watch our videos, the happier I am.
pnichols wrote:
I've always considering long term living/traveling on a boat as too constrictive and boring ... all on a relatively flat surface except for waves. I just don't understand the fascination with that.
It's not constrictive or boring at all. We did the opposite of the current YouTube phase -- we came from a medium-sized sailboat to a small travel trailer. Years ago we lived along Florida's Gulf Coast, where we did a lot of weekend coastal cruising. Basically we got on the boat on Friday after work each week, and didn't get home until Sunday night. There's nothing like being out on a storm day, heeling 30ยบ to leeward as you're beating upwind, waves breaking over the bow and soaking you at the stern in the cockpit. Or being at anchor in the mangroves -- the maritime equivalent of boondocking -- having a smoke on deck at 2 a.m. where all you hear all around you are the dolphins surfacing for air. Or when we registered for the race across the Gulf to Havana, Cuba (but regrettably had to back out). Then again, there's the time that we took a direct lightning strike 3 miles off St. Petersburg and made the 6 p.m. evening news. That's a whole different story, but it sure wasn't boring.
๐Ironically, an RV is kind of an extension of the sailboat mentality for us. We can drop anchor for the night (boondock) or stay in a marina (RV park). We can travel wherever our mood takes us. We get to experience Mother Nature at her finest, and at her worst. And much like I enjoyed tinkering with, upgrading, modifying and fixing things on the sailboat, I get to do the same on the RV, especially as the systems are remarkably similar to one another.
free radical wrote:
if they have enough money to buy RV and cameras and computer they are doing better then me..and if they get famous, YT pays them plenty anyway.
Au contraire! Let's look at Nomadic Fanatic as an example, although with 135K subs he's near the top of the YouTube RV wave. SocialBlade estimates his annual YT earnings at $3800-61,400 (https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/nomadicfanatic), although I can guarantee you that the true number is well south of the median of that range, as SocialBlade's top end is beyond a best case scenario. A more realistic example would be, say, Drivin' & Vibin', which SocialBlade estimates at $919 - $14.7K annually (again, the true number is almost assuredly well below the middle of that range). Our channel doesn't yet make a penny off YouTube, because you have to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time over the preceding 12 months to even qualify for the YouTube Partner Program...to make $20 per year once we do qualify!
That's not enough to live off for a year, especially for a couple, so these full-timers find ways to supplement their income. For Drivin' & Vibin' almost all of their income came from an Etsy shop where they sold digital products. Sure, some go the Patreon route, but even as a YouTube publisher myself I do find that somewhat distasteful. Perhaps that's because I'd starve that way myself. LOL!
Amazon links are another story altogether. Those affiliate links take absolutely no money out of a viewer's pocket. The purchaser pays the same price to Amazon for something that they were buying anyway, it's just that Amazon pays the link affiliate a small (very small) commission. How small? Our site has earned a whopping $35 in four months that way. That's not even enough to cover the $15/month we pay to license music to use in the videos.
In my own example, I'll explain the backstory. I thought for sure that I was losing my job this past fall. My wife and I have sufficient financial resources that we decided that, should that happen, we'd tell the world to go screw itself, we'd pack up the dogs and the RV and go wander around the western U.S. until ski season started. At that point we'd return home and I'd ski while searching for a real job. It would be a three-month sabbatical of sorts.
And if we did that, we wanted to be able to document the experience for ourselves. I wanted to keep photos and video as a souvenir. As described above, I wanted to share my "modern-day slide show" with anyone who wanted to see it. So several thousands of dollars later I accumulated the drone, the gimbal camera, the microphones, the studio lighting, the camera bags, the green screen...
...and then I somehow kept my job.
So we're not full-timers, we're weekenders and vacation weekers who love sharing our own love of RVing with anyone willing to watch. Our Amazon links do a very small part to help offset that investment. We only provide links to products that we use ourselves, and would recommend to friends and family. Do I feel like an eBeggar because Amazon pays our channel a small commission on each sale? Not at all.
