Gadgetory

20-18 was a big year for the channel we started pushing for contracts experimenting a bit out of the box and running component giveaways I've learned a lot about what it takes to run a channel and full-on business and the space most of us in the tech media industry just kind of jump straight into it and adapted to consumer preferences as they changed we work for you we also inadvertently work as contractors for YouTube so that's interesting we've also had to adapt to YouTube's ever-changing and holier-than-thou algorithm something I still can't quite comprehend but these are the risks we all take in this space and we do it willfully because we get to be our own bosses we risk losing everything if YouTube decides to turn a blind eye to something as absurd as a sham copyright strike or two likewise a viewer stop watching altogether for whatever reason we're finished we've fully invested in this platform now I say all of that to say this your trust in me as a reviewer is vital if I lose my integrity I lose you and then I lose my business so without getting into exact dollar amounts I'm gonna break down science videos finances for you maybe satisfy your more curiosity maybe really one of the how things work around here I want you to see where our money comes from where it goes and how we handle contracts ads and big events I think you'll enjoy this one whether you're looking for a mid tower with plenty of room for a stack of hard drives or a silent profile even under load the be quiet dark bass 700 has you covered and act fast only 3000 units of the white Edition you're seeing here are being made click the link below for more details so let's get the ball rolling with a pie chart I made I feel very very proud of this chart what you're looking at is science studios 2018 revenue by percent so take this green pie slice for example it represents promotions so sponsored video and pre-roll income generated externally meaning it doesn't come from YouTube or any major retailer directly instead it comes from the companies we either one work very closely with in the industry like a sous and deep cool and be quiet or to share a similar target audience with other products and services they offer aren't tied directly to the computer tech industry an example of this would be like expressvpn we've run a few ads for them in the past and while VPNs themselves aren't exactly tangible bits of hardware we can review in videos many of our viewers share common interests with their target audience so they choose to advertise with us another part of this slice is event revenue which is an indirect way of labeling the revenue we generate to fund the big trips would take each year to places like copy tech CES PACs and others consider copy text which is coming up actually in a few months time is flying by with this event we sell packages to companies that include event pre-rolls discounted promotional content in the future especially if bundled and guaranteed coverage at the event in question everyone tends to handle this financing a bit differently I know some people just sell pre-rolls like general pre-rolls to cover this stuff but we just we don't generate enough revenue from pre rules to get us to these events and a Computex event costs thousands of dollars to attend especially if you plan to bring others with you to edit in film it's plane tickets are like two grand in and of themselves from my city so we do things this way to build the relationships with companies long term and at the same time produce as much content as possible and by the way we also visit the Busan Suites of companies at these events who don't pay us at all to be there so at CES this year for example we covered Coolermaster and alpha cool and dedicated videos to companies that have never paid us a dime so I just wanted to clear that one up so a 40% of our total revenue for 2018 came these external companies in fact it almost perfectly matched our Google Adsense income which is the money we received directly from YouTube viewership through the use of baked in ads and banners I bet you didn't know that Adsense revenue accounted for less than half of science videos total income for the year you learned something today I further dissected YouTube revenue into ad revenue so that's the pre rolls and banners I just mentioned YouTube red which is technically now YouTube's premium and super chats which of those donations we receive from viewers during our live streams so to read this smaller pie chart correctly 2% of our total channel revenue for 2018 came from Super chats and as much as 34% of it came from ad revenue directly these three percentages should sum to 40% of the total pie area which is what this red slice represents so after YouTube and promotional revenue is Amazon affiliate revenue our third largest revenue generator which accounts for 16% of our total revenue for the year I don't think I need to explain how this money is generated at this point but in a nutshell if you click on an affiliate link in one of our videos and buy a product Amazon gives us a small kickback typically around 1 to 3 percent of the total cost of the item it really depends on the item and its category fun fact it doesn't even have to be the product whose link you originally clicked on so if for example you click on a graphics card affiliate link in one of our videos and then navigate to a computer case instead we'll get the kickback for the case if you decide to purchase that essentially Amazon is incentivizing us as the influencers to draw traffic to the platform and it's our job to disclose to our viewers the fact that the links are affiliated so that they know what's going on next up on the pie chart is this 2% blue slice here which represents new egg sales we use an affiliate program called Commission Junction or CJ to pull traffic to this source Newegg doesn't have a baked in affiliate program at this point which kind of sucks but CJ works well enough we pull a much smaller audience to the site for a few reasons for one a majority of our links even on older videos or Amazon links but just started doing new wake stuff a couple of years ago and for two new egg is significantly more exclusive when seen in the context of the sheer size of Amazon so our affiliate links for Amazon work pretty much anywhere Amazon sells goods like the UK the US Canada Germany etc Newegg is much smaller an hour traffic reflects this nonetheless the revenue is still noteworthy I mean 2% I'm super small but it's something and that's why we use CJ for them otherwise it's lost revenue lastly our smallest pie slice is patreon which is just another way for our viewers to earn a bit of exclusivity and support us indirectly we provide perks and our public discord for them including private channels and play games like pub G with quite a bit essentially they get preference when we do things like this I do have plans however to terminate patreon account of YouTube's membership feature which is that enjoying button down below next to the subscribe button it's similar to twitch a subscription button and this kind of makes patrons features a bit redundant more on the YouTube membership feature in this video right here so that's where our money comes from and that's how it's divided but let's take a closer look at some of these slices consider the YouTube slice we could do a lot with this one but a chart I think you'll find very interesting is the percent revenue generated by individual videos on the channel now I don't have a problem showing this because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together typically the more views the video earns the higher the payout I mean whoop-dee-doo but there are a few caveats which we will discuss shortly a few trends you can actually see in this chart so up top here is the verge PC video which was actually uploaded toward the end of 2018 still it accounts for nearly 8 percent of total Adsense revenue and it was our most lucrative video that entire year up next is the I read a terrible Craigslist PC ad video that's this one right here for those wondering 6% of total Adsense revenue came from it then my review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro another Craigslist video and so on you can kind of see a trend here Craigslist videos tend to do very well as to do Apple videos and that's a very persuasive metric for some you might think wow why isn't Greg doing more of these and my answer is well if I did I'd probably face out a huge chunk of my core audience a lot of you hate Apple and just you know pop into dislike the video leave a weird comment and then leave you can do that it's an open platform that's fine but it's one of the reasons why I like to take these videos and stride and gonna sprinkle them in every now and then same goes for the Craigslist videos a lot of you actually enjoy those but apart from the kind of street smart knowledge and use price breakdowns the videos lack true you know heavy scientific substance so again I sprinkled them in every now and then now another important thing to consider with this chart is CPM which is effectively the cost per thousand views advertisers pay to plant ads in a video some videos have higher CPM than others it's kind of related to tags and the you know the the vibrancy of the channel at the time but typical range is usually between one and three dollars that means if a video earns one million views the content creator typically earns between one thousand and three thousand dollars but don't get too excited only the huge channels pull millions of views per video right in our case it verges to between maybe fifty to a hundred thousand views and that usually has to accumulate over a month or so so most videos in our case don't earn more than about $100 that doesn't sound like too much money fun fact number two Craigslist videos for whatever reason tend to earn higher CPM s than normal so we actually make more money on those per view than the typical video but even if we assume something is absurd as like a five-dollar CPM that only translates to is it half of one penny per view is my math right there I mean yeah it adds up but still at least it puts things into perspective and that's why promotional content is so vital to larger channels typically when channels reached like a half a million or a million subs in this space they plant an external pre-roll in nearly every video this again is not Adsense we're talking about anymore those are usually in by default external pre-rolls or those pre-rolls we as content creators usually put together we get the green light from the company sponsoring the content we create the content sent it in for approval it gets approved and then we plant that video or that little clip that add into one of our videos along with corresponding links consider this video you saw a pre-roll early on from be quiet and you got the links attached in the video description we offer two different kinds 15-second and 30-second pre-rolls and nothing longer than that since audience retention rates tend to drop rather fast when you approach a minute long pre-roll we also have two different pricing structures depending on who is buying a pre-roll whether it be a single ad or a discounted bundle remember the two different types of companies we talked about in our promotional slice discussion companies are either within the industry or outside the industry obviously those within the industry sell products pertaining directly to the computer industry has to do with what we do on the channel on a daily basis we you know showoff graphics cards test things like motherboards CPUs cases coolers power supplies gosh LED strips yet the point if it's something I can review and mix in with traditional content on this channel it's within the industry and as a result I charge these companies less per ad now you might be thinking but Greg why would you charge less to companies that share your target audience I mean typically if you know you can provide a decent ROI for the company in question you charge more because you can but there's a conflict of interest not many people talk about and that's affiliate program so Amazon and Newegg B&H whoever when we review products we know in the back of our heads that our conclusions and critiques will directly affect our click-through weights for affiliate programs so if I give a computer case a terrible review I probably won't earn much affiliate revenue through the cases Amazon link see what I mean so to be clear that does not affect my ability to objectively review products I imagine doesn't affect much many other reviewers out there either we have enough content on our channels and a fair balance of good and bad one more negative review won't change much at all I'm going to tell it to you straight up exactly how it is how I see it but tech companies know that pre-rolls planted on channels like mine tend to have a better engagement since the hardware is similar to stuff they see all the time on the channel that means we get to double dip I make money from the company for creating and planning the ad in the first place and I make money from Amazon a new egg whose customers purchased products through those corresponding affiliate links so to lower the stakes I charge less for those companies it's probably not the norm and I'd honestly be surprised if any other tech youtuber did things of this way but it's a way for me to incentivize industry reps and ensure that we have promotional content to include in future videos that said if the product sucks I won't be advertising on a science studio I'm not gonna happen if someone buys a garbage product off of my recommendation and realizes that it's you know actually garbage my reputation is ruined in baby steps I mean one ruined you know opinion of myself isn't gonna do much but every step counts and if many people began taking the same thing they won't watch the channel so I only promote products that I'm confident my viewers that's all of you will either enjoy or at least consider because thankfully there's more than one good product from one company out there and recall this pie chart promotional content is a huge chunk of our revenue it suddenly disappeared I'm honestly not sure I'd be able to keep doing what I'm doing full-time I'd have to use my BS PE or my MBA and be a financier or an engineer somewhere but I don't want to do that I like doing this I love this job I love the fact that I can make videos like these compiled around stats gathered from an entire 2018 calendar year it's like a presentation with that I'll conclude the video one of the questions do you have about our finances I won't give away specific numbers for obvious reasons but I'll try my best to clarify any policy by which we abide I think transparency is important I know Linus did a video similar to this maybe a year or two ago I wish smaller channels would do this because it's an interesting interesting deep dive maybe you guys learned a few things about how we how we run things and that way going forward you won't be surprised by some of the tactics that we have when it comes to pre-rolls or Computex CES coverage whatever with that if you liked the video thumbs up you know what to do click the red subscribe button if you haven't already and become a member by clicking the join button if you are feeling especially lucky I appreciate all your support even if it's just something as simple as watching this video yes even if you're running ad blocker I don't get Jack when you run an ad blocker or watching this video but the view itself still helps I mean if anything it just shows that our channel is still driving traffic and it helps me sell some ads some external promotional content for you guys and if you buy products through our affiliate links that helps us a ton as you just saw as well this is science studio thanks for watching thanks for learning