Clicking into the article you see that it was built over the course of five years. And from other comments it seems that ~half of his revenue is from Patreon.
That means that five years of labor has netted a salary of $60K per year (only $30k from YouTube)… Almost certainly that’s top line revenue and not net profit.
That’s… not much for the work involved. The benefit here is with this strong presence and smart thinking he can likely turn this into significantly more income. Perhaps as an affiliate for travel sites or packaging historical vacation packages. But it certainly dissuades me from any business model where showing ads is the primary revenue driver (unless you on a platform, of course, a la Google, Meta, et al.)
But it scales. If he keeps at it (while keeping the quality - I watch most videos), it's likely that each year will bring as much revenue as all previous years combined. It may saturate at few millions subs but at that point it's not a bad profit and revenue from potential partnerships increases.
I'm not saying it's an easy money, but it could be much more rewarding than working for big tech. Of course having a yt cahnnel is still kind of working for big tech, but he seems to be smart about it, heavily promoting newsletter, presumably to be able to switch platform if necessary.
It also could go to nothing any year, as audiences move on or a youtube algorithm change murders his watchtime (Patreon a little less risky here but it could shrink as watchtime/new audience shrinks).
This is an important point… I purchased a website about 3D printing at the beginning of this year and have been steadily improving the content quality and posts… Only for a recent Google update to obliterate 90% of my traffic overnight.
Two months later it’s starting to recover but that’s not the bedrock of a business you’d like to build upon.
The thing to remember is that it's a two-way door: current audiences move on, but we keep making more humans, and they keep "discovering" what youtube recommends to them, so realistically the threat is "leveling out" rather than "losing viewers" if you run a quality channel that isn't built on slagging others off.
Plus, we're already seeing alternatives (or rather, in-parallels) becoming quite established, most notably Floatplane and Nebula as created-by-youtuber(s)-who-wanted-an-off-platform-alternative.
It's a part time hobby about things he has an interest in. There is no employer employee relationship and no alienation of labor. Given all that, 60K is pretty damn great.
That means that five years of labor has netted a salary of $60K per year (only $30k from YouTube)… Almost certainly that’s top line revenue and not net profit.
That’s… not much for the work involved. The benefit here is with this strong presence and smart thinking he can likely turn this into significantly more income. Perhaps as an affiliate for travel sites or packaging historical vacation packages. But it certainly dissuades me from any business model where showing ads is the primary revenue driver (unless you on a platform, of course, a la Google, Meta, et al.)