Can a YouTuber become a billionaire? Yes! Here’s how.

10 min readApr 18, 2022

When YouTube first began, people were just happy to be able to post their videos online, but then YouTube started sharing ad revenue with creators. Companies also started paying creators to promote their products. Suddenly, being a YouTuber was an actual job. In fact, it didn’t become just a job, it became the job. Countless studies have found that becoming a YouTuber is the most desired job in the world. Not astronaut, doctor, teacher, or pilot. Almost 75% of kids want to become YouTubers.

When the mainstream media talks about this, it’s normally in a dismissive way. They think these kids need to go get some real jobs. That’s because influencer has become kinda a dirty word. Upon hearing the word ‘influencer’, to many people, a talentless narcissist comes to their mind. A young guy/girl who films themselves for social media, fakes their life to look way better than reality and get paid ridiculously well to show products for companies. For sure, in some cases, this is true, but an influencer can mean many things.

Many influencers on social media are incredibly talented, creative people. In short an influencer just means, ‘a person with an ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service ’. It’s not a new concept, we’ve always had celebrities who do that. Remember the days Santa Claus used to advertise for Coca cola? The difference now is that anyone with a smartphone and a social media account has the potential to build an audience and influence people. It is open to anyone and everyone, due to which more people than ever are making money from their passions and interests, whether it is gaming, music, art, cooking, make up, or anything else.

The new Business Model

Here’s when things start getting interesting. The old way of monetizing a social media audience was, ‘You make money by advertising other businesses’. If you’re a creator, a company X would pay you to advertise their product in your content. But now, content creators have started to realize, what if I create my own business and advertise that instead?

One of the most famous examples is Mr. Beast launching a burger chain, that currently has over 1000 kitchens across multiple different countries. Mr. Beast could have just partnered with McDonalds or Burger King, and got paid a one-off sponsorship fee for promoting someone else’s brand. But instead, he now keeps a 100% of all future profits for himself. For life! Simultaneously, he’s growing a company he’s got equity in, which he could potentially sell in future, if he wanted to.

Another example is that Emma Chamberlain and Graham Stephan, both launched their own coffee brands. Now at first glance, this may just feel like next level merchandise, but it’s not. These are separate stand-alone businesses that are simply being kickstarted by leveraging their attention on social media.

Some Indian examples are YouTube channels that make book summaries. Zeeshan Shaikh, famous for his YouTube channel SeeKen, has been uploading a video on his channel every Sunday since past 5 years and currently has around 3.49 Million subscribers. Using this as a platform he has published apps on Play Store, where he has entire books in a video format. Even people who don’t know him on YouTube, have downloaded that app ( Online Video Books )as it is a stand alone business too. There are many such examples such as GiGL, Yebook, etc.

Your audience : An unfair advantage

Think about it for a while. What is the biggest problem of a business after it has a good product ready? They don’t have the recognition or brand power to compete. If you start a coffee brand right now but you didn’t have an audience to promote it to, you’d have to spend ridiculous amount of money in marketing just to get anybody to even hear about your brand in the first place. Upon that, why would they care about this random new brand anyway?

But if you’re a famous YouTuber and you start a business, you already have an established brand people love and a loyal audience to promote your products and services to. So you can get an influx of customers right from day 1.

Of course, this spans so much further than food and drinks. We’re gonna see Gaming YouTubers build their own game companies. We’re gonna see Tech YouTubers build their own tech companies. For channels like the ones we talked about before, the apps that have book summaries, may become good enough to compete with Amazon audible someday. The possibilities are genuinely endless.

Can you run a business?

But, wait a minute. I know what you might be thinking. “Dude, I am a YouTuber and I am good at making videos, that doesn’t mean I can just build a business.” Yes you’re RIGHT! But you don’t need to. 😏

You just need strategic partnerships with someone who can. Do you think Mr. Beast knew how to setup a burger chain all by himself? No. He hired a business manager to make these deals for him and they partnered with a company who helped setup and run Mr. Beast Burger. Obviously, nobody would expect normal YouTubers like you to setup and run multi million dollar businesses. But you can team up with people who can run businesses to create a product/service together. Someone else can handle all the logistics, supply chain & operations for you. You can focus on the branding and marketing. For example, you could show behind the scenes of running your business and show (advertise) your own product so that your audience feels even more connected to your brand. I remember a line that said,

The secret to success in social media marketing is making the line between content and advertisement as thin as possible or maybe even erasing it.

Since you know your audiences the best, you can think about what products/services will be best for your fans. Like with Mr. Beast burger, products are named after people on the channel. So it’s much more fun for fans, and actually makes the audience even more attached to the Mr. Beast brand in general. A fan of yours may not buy from you just once, but will probably keep coming back as a repeat customer which means they will regularly interact with the brand in the physical world, not just the digital world.

Imagine if an outlet of Mr. Beast burger was opened exactly opposite to McDonalds. I’m not saying nobody would go to McDonalds, but can you imagine what would happen if some random brand opened up opposite to McDonalds? How does that compare to a Mr. Beast’s burger outlet?

So, here’s the simple truth. If you’re making content yourself or you ever plan to, don’t just think yourself as an influencer or a video maker. Start thinking yourself as an entrepreneur and a whole new world of possibilities will open up for you. The crucial difference is that instead of doing a one-off sponsorship to promote someone else’s brand, you could be growing your own brand. It could be way more profitable for you and way better for your fans as they won’t see, you talking about your business, as an ad.

Reality check

Let’s see if the above stated claims are actually possible and profitable. Let’s see the calculations. Let’s say you create a product that costs $5 each when you produce in bulk. You sell it for $20 each. So $15 profit per item sold. If you had a million subscribers and just 2% of your audience buys it, that’s 20,000 people, which sums up to $300,000 profit. Now, let’s say the product is a recurring subscription that people pay for every month.

Congratulations!

You’ve now got a multi million dollar business in your hands. Of course, this can work if you have a smaller channel too, because the crazy part is, it’s not just your audience that can buy the product or service. Profits can be reinvested into other marketing to reach a whole new audience, and if it’s a good product or service, your customers will tell about your brand to their friends and family too.

So, this new business of yours can eventually be its own thing, totally separate from your YouTube channel. For example, even if a person has never watched Mr. Beast’s video, he may buy his burger. Maybe because his friend was ordering one and he ordered one too. It’s a stand alone business in its own right.

Now, even if you do partner with a company to help launch your own products and services, I’m obviously not saying this is easy… but, I am saying that there will definitely be a lot more private label companies looking to do joint ventures with creators. In current age, attention is the currency that matters the most. If you have people watching you and your content, you can make a lot of money. It’s that simple. Whereas, before that attention led to brand deals and sponsorships for other companies, now that attention is leading to new companies owned by the creators.

For example, the Kardashians and the Paul brothers are very rich because they’re masters of gaining attention and then directing that attention elsewhere. Whether it is selling expensive beauty products or pay per view boxing.

If you have the attention on you, it’s then just the case of where you direct it.

If you can also manage to match the right product or service to the right audience, that’s where the big money is.

Why only YouTubers?

As you could see, I only talked about YouTubers but not about TikTokers or Instagram stars. These concepts actually apply to anyone with an audience and attention, but I do feel strongly YouTube has a lot of advantages.

Videos can be evergreen on YouTube. Once you build your library of content, the algorithm can continue promoting them indefinitely. So if you promote your own product or service within a YouTube video, you could be getting new sales from videos you made months or even years ago. This doesn’t happen with TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. There posts are normally dead within 48 hours. That’s why evergreen content on YouTube is so crucial to your business. It means you don’t get stuck in the hamster wheel of social media where you have to constantly keep uploading new content to be seen by your audience.
Secondly, with YouTube, you can build a much deeper connection with your audience since the videos are longer. If people know, like and trust you more, they’re more likely to buy from you and your business.
Finally, with YouTube, it’s much easier to promote things, as you can direct people to the description below the video where you can have as many links as you want. You could even add links as cards on your end screen, reducing the friction even more.

So if you do have an audience on another platform, that’s great, but consider bringing some of them over to YouTube. Because, trust me, the creator economy is going to be a fascinating place over the next few years. People have finally started to realize its potential, but this is really just the beginning. It’s never too late to start. Once you have built your audience, create your own products and services.

That way, you don’t just build a YouTube channel, you start building your empire.

But seriously, how can you become a ‘Billionaire’?

Before self doubt kills your ambition, just think of all the billionaires in the Food & Beverage industry. Think of billionaires in the consumer goods industry. Think of billionaires who gained their fortune by building software products (it could even be an app on play store). Possibilities are endless and yes you can become a ‘Billionaire’.

What if you’re not a YouTuber?

If you noticed, I talked about YouTubers not knowing how to build businesses. That’s where you can play a role. If you’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, this is your chance. You can contact a YouTuber and decide on a specific product or service of your choice which you or someone else can make. You can make the YouTuber, a cofounder and start a business with them. To explain about this business model, you can just share this story with them.

If you think this idea is worth considering, please subscribe to my email list. I regularly write about such ideas.

Thanks for reading till here. Here’s a quote to leave you on a positive vibe:

“If Opportunity doesn’t Knock, Build a Door.” ~ Milton Berle

Goodbye :)