Dave, thank you for your honesty and being so open about everything. I've been watching your blog ever since I heard about it, and enjoy every episode and participating in the forums. I started doing some YouTube stuff a few years ago, not to make money, but just for fun.
My first video was on how to fix a Samsung TV whose caps on the power supply blew after only 2 years. As you know, that was just a fluke of good luck for me as it generated a ton of hits. YouTube then monetized my channel. Since then, that video has gathered > 726,000 views. My next most popular video was how to "hack" an Apple TV 3 at about 269,000 views. After that, it dwindles substantially but still, my channel has a total of 1.5 million views across over 100 videos and now just recently surpassed 1000 subscribers! EEVBlog is also added as a "Featured Channel", followed by Ben Heck, Make and Instructables.
As far as income goes, I get a direct deposit from Google about every 1-2 months for ~$100. Maybe $500-600 a year? I haven't checked lately. Nothing to live on, but it makes me happy as I put that in to my "extra goodies" account if I need to buy something from "flee-Bay". It beats my BlackBerry developer account which earns me about $3 per quarter in PayPal revenue from my app sales.
And I had put way more effort developing my apps for BlackBerry than my YouTube channel.
Dave, you may not get rich on YouTube but we all appreciate all the hard work you do in teaching us all about electronics, busting scams, and being the independent "say it like it is" no B.S. guy you are!!!!
Thanks for not being a sell-out, like a lot of other YouTubers and Bloggers who claim to be unbiased but sell everything on the side and get paid to product place. When you get gear from a company to review, you're not even afraid to criticize it and tell the truth about stuff you don't like! That takes integrity, which is worth more than any amount of money.
So keep up the good work! I may never be able to retire on my YouTube account but it's a pretty neat world we live in where these opportunities do exist. Of course, to make big money on YouTube you'd have to be doing stuff that the average Joe is interested in, which is not electronics education related... I can show you plenty of channels with millions of subcribers, hundreds of millions of views pandering to the lowest common denominator of filth, swearing, nudity, people getting hurt, dumb stupid things, embarrassing people, conspiracies, scaring people, etc... Those types of channels do much better.
A quick search on YouTube revealed the following "starlet" Tana Mongeau who has managed to get over 160,899,282 views (double that of EEVBlog) since joining in April 2015 (EEVBlog says 2009), and over 2.2 million subscribers (EEVBlog at 400,000+). Not to create any more traffic for this young lady, but just to show you where the interest of society lies and that it will keep rewarding this kind of content:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClWD8su9Sk6GzZDwy9zs3_w/aboutSadly, the number of educational and science channels subscription and view rates dwindle in comparison to this type of garbage.