For the first eight years, I made close to nothing.
I was chasing attention with no intention behind it. Parodies. I once ate a Big Mac in a bubble bath by candlelight because I thought it might get views. I had a video do four million views and pay me basically nothing.
Then in 2016 I went legally deaf in my left ear. I was a music producer at the time, which made that roughly a quarterback losing his arm.
When I came back to YouTube, I stopped trying to be entertaining and started trying to be useful.
In 2019 I made one video. Twenty-five minutes, shot in a spare bedroom. It generated over a million dollars.
Same channel that made me nothing for eight years. Nothing changed about my gear or my talent. The video was just built to do a job.
Then I did it again on purpose. A second channel from scratch, different market, no promotion from my main one. It's at 56,000 subscribers on under 50 videos.
