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Night Light | X Marks The Spot

Night Light | X Marks The Spot

Earlier this week, Jimmy uploaded the entire $1 Car vs $100M Car video on X (Twitter). At the time of writing this, it’s nearing 100M views on the post. To understand why he finally posted one of his videos on X, we have to go back and look at how we got here.

Jimmy and Elon’s Twitter History:

Elon Musk has been trying to get Jimmy to post his videos on X for a while now. I think that the money isn’t quite there yet, but that doesn’t mean Jimmy isn’t willing to test out his videos on the platform to see what monetization looks like. To put it in perspective an average YouTuber makes between $3-5 per 1,000 views. Building upon that, it’d be $3-5K per million views. Considering YouTube is by far the best at monetizing videos, I would imagine revenue from videos on X would look similar to how much Meta pays creators. Even if his videos saw a billion views, he’d only be getting a fraction of that.

I do think X is still undervalued. I’ve said it before, but it’s one the best platforms for building social loyalty. We’ve seen it when Jimmy sends a tweet about Feastables and they fly off the shelves. I also noticed years ago that independent creators selling the most merch usually had the highest engagement on Twitter.

I think this does bring up a good question about additional content syndication for creators…

Creator’s Content Distribution Strategy:

YouTube shouldn’t be your only source of ad revenue. Creators have realized there’s multiple places to post their videos to remonetize. Here are some other platforms where I’m seeing this happen:

Facebook/Meta:

100 Days Trapped was posted on Facebook a week after it was posted on YouTube.

In general, Meta claims creators are making about $1-3 per 1,000 views. I think this number is pretty low unless you put out a lot of content and it does very well.

Snapchat:

Similar to Facebook, Jimmy uploads his videos to Snapchat about a week after YouTube.

Snapchat is a little different. Instead of a guaranteed payout based on views, not every video is going to be generating money. Instead creators are paid based on their engagement rate, niche, and the type of content they create. The biggest revenue drivers are through ads in-between stories and content featured on Snapchat Spotlight. Some of the biggest creators like David Dobrik were estimated to have been making between $20K and $40K a day between Spotlight and posting a ton of stories. I’ve also heard creators say they’ve made anywhere from $5-8K in a given month.

Amazon Prime Video/Roku (Fast Channels):

Unspeakable has 11 seasons available on Amazon Prime Video.

Creators like Unspeakable also have videos on Amazon Prime Video and Roku. This falls more into content licensing, but can be a big revenue generator.

Streaming Platforms:

Cocomelon has been on Netflix since 2020, consistently being in the top 10 most watched properties globally.

This is the highest bar for licensing content. I think it’s mostly animation and kids’ content because the biggest deal that comes to mind is CoComelon on Netflix (which they bought for $250M). In September of 2020, it was the 3rd most watched property, and has consistently been in Netflix’s weekly global top 10 reports since then. “Baby Shark” and “Lucas the Spider” are other good examples of content syndication on streaming platforms.

TikTok:

Jimmy’s content on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts is made for those platforms.

TikTok revenue has to be one of the worst out of all the platforms. Since rolling out their Creator Fund program, creators have been seeing 2-4 cents per 1000 views. If videos are getting a million views, creators are only seeing about $20 from that. It’s still one of the best platforms for discoverability, and they’re testing out horizontal video/long-form video (10 minutes). Interested to see how this changes in 2024.

YouTube is the still the dominant force in this space (so far). A lot of it has to do with their ad network, longevity, and scale. Creators should never post on a platform that takes views away from YouTube (or where they’re seeing the most revenue). A way to think about this is windowing the content: posting first on YouTube, and then other platforms at a later date. That way creators can supplement views, not take them away from them.