Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 11 months, 2020–2025
12:13 · 2.3M views · Oct 3, 2020
Linus Tech Tips gives its 2020 breakdown of how the company earns money, including ads, sponsors, merch and affiliate links. It includes a pie chart of revenue sources.
HN cites it as concrete data on how a big YouTube channel diversifies revenue and how little comes from AdSense.
13 comments from Hacker News
Linus tech tips did an enlightening breakdown video of their earnings and YouTube ads make up around 25% of their revenue. I think they have to upload to YouTube because that’s where their audience is (IIRC it’s the world’s second largest search engine). There are lots of channels that I’ve only discovered as related videos to other videos I’ve watched. this video
> Their opinion changes depending on who is sponsoring them, no? No, to the extent humanly possible. They have reviews, which are not sponsored by anyone having anything to do with the product being reviewed. Those are their actual opinions and evaluations of products. Separately they have sponsored showcase videos, or whatever they call them, where they won't say anything untrue, but they're just showing off whatever it is, not really evaluating it deeply. These videos are _very_ obviously different, and very obviously labelled. LTT has top tier policies and openness about these issues compared to really anyone on youtube or anywhere. More anecdotally, I've seen them give takes on previous or current sponsors that were _very_ not in their financial best interests. If sponsors are paying for easy coverage, they're not getting their money's worth. > Well, no, it would work way better if he had no bias. That would just be lying. There are no humans without biases. this video is probably a good summary on Linus's thoughts on sponsors/funding. If you trust what he says or not is up to you. I do though.
A lot of people see the usefulness of PeerTube but don't move because the creators they watch are on YouTube. It's the same for the creators, though - they can't move off of YouTube entirely, because none of their viewers will go to a PeerTube instance just to watch that one creator. Thus nobody moves to PT unless there are other factors (like extremist creators moving because their videos keep getting removed by YT). Another major problem that prevents creators from hosting on PeerTube is that there are no ads - many see direct-from-YouTube revenue driven by Premium views/Ad views generate a significant portion of their income. Even Linus Tech Tips, with their audience of gamers who mostly running an ad blocker, sees YouTube generate 26% of their profit[0], almost exactly as much as they get from sponsors spots in their videos. If everyone were to move to PT, we'd either need an intermediary for ads, or only creators with audiences that could afford to personally finance them (via Patreon or similar) would be able to survive and make a living off of running their channel. 0: this video
That's kind of an issue then - YouTube is only partly (probably a single-digit-percent given they dropped the direct share feature[0]) about sharing videos with friends - most people stick around for the recommendations, ie. the endless stream of interesting/intriguing/funny content. Most of that content currently dominating YT (at least, at the quantity that it's produced) is only possible due to these creators making YouTube their full-time job and getting paid to do it. Linus Tech Tips (which also runs Techquickie and Techlinked) attributes 26% of their total revenue to YT Ads[1], and the other categories (like merchandise/affiliate links) aren't something everyone can do if their videos aren't about products available on Amazon or can't grow their merch at the rate LTT does. If PT is just about sharing videos, then you might as well run a nextcloud instance instead since 'no ads' is a huge downside to PT for creators. 0: [LINK] 1: this video
So I turned off adblock, but I see no ads, even though you have some ad domains. Is imgflip pro the way you make money only? I tried again and all I saw is one banner ad, sometimes. Do you have more ads more frequently, or is it just a relatively minimal amount in general? What is the revenue split between pro & ads? For linus for example, it's about %26 youtube ads, this video How do you deal with moderation? Is it automated, I see you even have comments? Or is it just report buttons and your takedown form? How is the support load? What is your tech stack? PHP? Python? C#? Java? Golang?