The Swede Seth Everman (29) is a popular musician and YouTuber. Earlier this year, he announced his intention to retire from YouTube at the end of 2023 to focus on other projects. Until then, he wants to deliver as much content as possible. Now he spoke about his most successful video – and explained why it was not such a big hit financially.
Who is the YouTuber? Seth Everman has been running his YouTube channel since May 2013. In addition to his shaved head, he is known for music videos in which he deconstructs and parodies popular songs. So also in 2019, with his most successful video.
What was that video? In 2019, American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish landed a huge hit with her song “Bad Guy” and the accompanying music video. Seth Everman then published his parody.
The video is just 46 seconds long and shows the musician in a wig recreating the sound of “Bad Guy” using everyday objects (and his keyboard). At the same time, he wrote a comment under Billie Eilish’s music video: “I’m the bald guy”.
Both the video and the comment were a success: the video received over 92 million views, the comment is the most liked comment on YouTube with 3.2 million upvotes (via youtube.fandom) We embedded the video here for you:
92 million views, but hardly any money
How much did the YouTuber earn? In a Jan. 8 video, Seth Everman shared some stats on his top-grossing video. So he looked at which demographics it was particularly popular with and where his viewers came from.
You can watch the whole video including all statistics in English here.
He then shared how much the video earned him. $31,410 total with the clip. This is a decent sum at first, but it refers to the entire period since publication – i.e. more than 3 years now.
Of that $31,000, around 11,000 came from YouTube’s “Premium” program, with advertising bringing in only around $20,000. The musician was paid around 33 cents for every 1,000 calls.
That doesn’t seem fair to Seth Everman: After all, the Super Bowl would be viewed by as many people as his video, but a 30-second commercial during the football event would cost more than $5 million.
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The analysis should surpass the original
Why is that? The CPM on YouTube indicates how much a content creator earns per 1,000 views via advertising. This means that even if 2 videos have the same number of views, their creators’ earnings can differ significantly.
Once that value is down, it’s hard to get it back up. The German content creator Maximilian “Trymacs” Stemmler, for example, has such a problem. He only gets paid €2.80 per 1,000 clicks on his main channel, while his secondary channel makes significantly fewer clicks, but 1,000 of them are still worth €4.60.
Trymacs shows his Twitch earnings, is dissed by fans – “That’s a lot, you get 7 € pocket money”
Another aspect is that the video is simply very short at 46 seconds and YouTube generally prefers longer videos. The longer a video, the more advertising can be placed on it. So it is possible that a bad 8-minute video makes significantly more money than its most popular video.
What can you do there? The musician explains that videos on financial topics often have a significantly higher CPM, which could be as high as $30. And finally, his video is about advertising revenue, i.e. finances.
So he encourages his viewers to post comments on finance-related topics to encourage YouTube to increase their CPM. At over 12 minutes, the analysis video is also significantly longer than the original. Whether the plan works remains to be seen.
Content creators, whose content is used by larger streamers as the basis for so-called reactions, also have to struggle with similar problems:
Twitch streamers make money by responding to good content from others – A YouTuber claims his share