Being a “Real” YouTuber Is a Waste of Time, Here’s What to Do Instead
Save time and money
Unless you make it big — and chances are against you here — YouTube is a waste of time as a side hustle.
Being a “real” YouTuber that is. What do I mean by this?
Putting the “hustle” in side hustle
Imagine you’re a vlogger. You shoot hours of material every day. You have to redo takes all the time. Once you’re done filming, you need to edit. A-roll, B-roll, drone shots, external footage. Sometimes, you need to add in audio which means recording your voice for multiple takes. And then editing that as well.
This will eat up time quickly. It’s not unlikely for beginner YouTubers to spend a full-time job’s worth of hours on a channel that doesn’t earn any money and might never do.
Combine that with the fact that you need 1000 followers and 4000 hours of watch time within 12 months to even get into the YouTube Partner Program and start earning money… and a regular 9–5 suddenly sounds like a dream.
Be faceless instead
Instead of going through that hassle, be a faceless YouTuber.
With a faceless channel and the right strategy, you avoid many of the time-consuming aspects.
- You don’t have to record yourself. Meaning you don’t need great lighting conditions, retakes, B-roll, extra audio, and all the editing that comes with that.
- You can get creative commons video clips and music in a billion places online. Use these to your advantage. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Use tools like Google Presentations, Apple Keynote, or Microsoft PowerPoint to create slideshows or simple animations for videos. You’d be surprised how many channels make a living doing slideshows with a little background music.
- Use a service like Flourish to make animated graphs, statistics, timelines, etc. I go over this in more detail in my post about faceless YouTube channels.
Once you have the resources, you only need a bit of editing with free software — I use iMovie for this — and you’re good to go.
Closing thoughts
Some of the largest YouTube channels in existence are faceless channels. And some earn millions a year.
I have two faceless YouTube channels. And while I certainly don’t make a living with those, I have earned more than $3000 without ever recording my face or my voice. I can’t edit very well and I don’t use any paid software.
And I only spend about 1–2 hours per week on YouTube. Considering this, 3000+ dollars is not a bad start, is it?
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