Emir wrote:
I’m left handed and I can do the same. And even more – I can do that with both hands simultaneously. Do I deserve followers? What are my chances with YouTube career?
There are people with all kind of fetishes out there, give it a try and maybe you’ll be able to afford a DA62 
Just discovered your channel Maoraigh.
Scotland from the air wil keep me busy for a few hours 
I hiked there with a friend last year and can’t wait to fly up there !
backcountry182 has quite a successful youtube channel, with around 25k subscribers and quite a few OEM sponsors.
He does a nice job of editing original clips from Costa Rica and the western US mainly in his relatively stock 182P. He has cockpit view cameras and uses drones and annoyingly around four ads per video, two to start, and two in the middle.
The content is interesting mainly because of the locations and the quality of the videos/editing. The narrative tends towards ‘mother and apple pie’ style advice, but the narrator does not sound annoying.
I wouldn’t try some of his approaches and all the videos at 1.1x Vso are in very calm conditions. When he takes the nose wheel 182 into gravel bars, he has a buddy in a Cessna 170 check out the surface conditions first, somewhat like a royal taster :)
Wind shear or rotor turbulence would lead to different outcomes.
It is a great advertisement for the 182. In this case lightly modded: Airglas nose fork, VGs and larger tyres.
Peter wrote:
FWIW I have been doing flying videos for years, on Vimeo and more recently duplicated (in the usual poor quality) on YT, and while I have not been plugging them all over the internet, the number of followers is … 53. And that is despite them being on EuroGA (which has a massive amount of traffic; thousands of pilots reading it every day) and peter2000.co.uk (100GB/month of traffic). One of them, a short flight from Split to Brac, got a very unusual ~3k views in a day or two when it got published in a Croatian newspaper. My YT channel has 15 followers. Hence I find it hard to believe someone is making real money.
Not in Europe, they won’t. I don’t think anybody in aviation publishes on YT primarily for the money, it’s more of a side hobby, a way to promote yourself and gain fame, “impress the girls”
and so on.
Buying all the equipment and investing all that time in editing, rendering, processing, uploading the videos etc. is not worth it from a purely financial point of view. Recording flights in good quality is expensive! I recently spent around 500 GBP on a single GoPro and surrounding kit. Most aviation YouTubers have 3, 4, 5 or more camera setups…
FWIW: I have a YT channel with 1.5k subscribers gained over 7 years or so. Most of my videos are on flight simulation. I would upload more of my real flying videos but knowing my terrible luck I am 100% certain that somebody will at some point find something they don’t like and report me to the CAA, so I keep most of those videos unlisted.
It’s interesting how much sponsorship flying video people go for. Just watched this video on a DA42 ME training
and the guy has got sponsorship from
The first two probably need you to already be slightly “famous”, especially #2 if you are getting a DA42 flight FOC. But how does #3 work? One sees it a lot on YT, IME mostly on videos on science and history where sponsorship from companies is obviously not possible because you aren’t mentioning any.
What seems clear is that “making money from YT itself” is not what people generally aim for, which is not surprising because you need a huge audience to make money that way.
He quit his day job, so he needs all the money he can get. 29.5k subs won‘t cut it. Sponsorship is ok, but of course, viewers must realize that the videos are staged to make the sponsors and their products look good. Therefore, I prefer non-sponsored videos (which however does not guarantee the objectivity of the producer).
Anyone else noticed the massive increase in 15 or 30 second ads on YouTube? Very annoying. Will look into Patreon, is it ad free?
He worked for the BBC and it would take a lot of income to replace the typical BBC regional reporter/producer salary – maybe 50k?
I pay Vimeo the basic annual sub – about $50 – and that ensures you see no ads. The quality is also way better than Youtube. But of course I don’t make any money from it, and Vimeo has much less SEO than YT so even fewer people find the videos in a search. They are also pretty boring for a non dedicated aviation audience
AFAIK Patreon is a regular donation/contribution scheme to finance channels you like – a pun on the word “patron” which is basically somebody who gives you money.
There is indeed a massive increase in adds on YT and FB (though they would like us to call them Meta now). The core revenues of both companies have been impacted by the recent changes in iOS and EU regulation that forces publishers to have users actively opt-in rather than opt-out of cookies (your data being used)
Ads are becoming less targeted (hence the cluster bombing) and more repetitive and less profitable (CTR click through rate, CPE Cost per engagement) are all getting lower.
iOS users on average gross about 40% more than Android users which is another element impacting the overall eco-system. There are massive changes happening in the was content is being monetised.
On TV (if you are watching YT on your TV set in particular) the additional phenomenon is driven by the increase in low end ad networks coming onto the exchange, in short the model is pretty broken. Creators (like our flying reporter here) could previously opt-out of the monetisation of their video’s by YT (you disable ads in the settings) as this was happening more and more (Patreon) Alphabet started looking at options. which came through the form of a different type of DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) agreement with Music Labels where the profits from the music and the video were split. So any creator using commercial music’s video would automatically be monetised (as a creator if you use commercial music you can no longer demonetise). You need to be very careful as Alphabet’s finger printing technology (called Content ID) identifies even bastardised versions of a song.
The last change in the algorithm is in the length of videos being monetised (Demand is highest in Q4 of every year, as people try to sell you more shit) and instead of a add every 7 mins (roughly standard) things appear to be up to an add every 5 minutes.
So any creator using commercial music’s video would automatically be monetised (as a creator if you use commercial music you can no longer demonetise).
This is interesting. I also have copied some of my videos to a YT channel, where they pick almost no subscribers organically (73 last time I looked). In some of my videos I use copyright music. YT detects these with 100% reliability and says it is ok but the moneytisation will go to the copyright owners, which is of course fine with me; I don’t care. Vimeo remains silent; if they detect them and send money to the copyright owners, that’s fine with me too. Actually Vimeo may take some money out of the 50 bucks I pay them and pass that to the copyright owners. There was a thing whereby a lack of music in the first 30 secs of a video prevented any detection and while that may still work on Vimeo it certainly doesn’t work on YT. Previous thread.
The fact that my YT channel picked up only 73 subs over a couple of years makes it very clear that to make money you have to do a LOT of work. Well, it could be that the videos are crap but YT is packed with flying videos (and ski videos, etc, etc) which truly are total crap
It is obvious which formulae work. A good looking girl (see back in this thread on maths lessons, and e.g. this one) will alone improve followers 10:1 to 100:1, which probably means most followers are not actually interested in the topic. Someone suggested this to me the other day. That, if true, is obviously very important.
