Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington, and this episode is a solo. I’m going to talk about YouTube as a profession and whether or not it’s a good profession for kids. Now I don’t have kids, so maybe don’t take my advice. This whole episode was inspired by an email that I sent out to my list and I got a few responses back.
One of them was a little bit critical, and I may have been a little defensive, but I sat on this for a few days and Vojta, who I’m Wrote the email back and we had a little debate slash, I think we agree on a handful of things, but I checked with Vojta and I believe we got through it. Everything’s good.
But he said, Hey, feel free to use this on an episode. So here’s the deal. A survey in 2019 by Lego, the toy maker, found that one third of kids between 8 and 12 years old aspire to be YouTubers or a vlogger. And I used a headline in my email for the subject, and it was 30 percent of children say they want to be YouTubers when they grow up.
And I remember I heard this story way back and I was like, Oh, wow, that’s crazy. And it stuck in my head. So when I was sending out an email about an interview I did with my friend, Paul Lipsky about his YouTube channel on drop shipping, I was like, Hey, I, this is perfect. This is a great headline. It’s about YouTube.
Paul and I talk about starting a YouTube channel, growing it and sort of the life cycle because both he and I have been doing this for around the same amount of time and we’re both. Avoiding burnout, right? A lot of people burn out, but Paul and I are extremely self aware of the pitfalls and issues that you can run into with YouTube.
If you don’t want to check out that episode, it’s 515. So Doug show 515. Anyway, when I sent out the email, I just used that headline. 30 percent of children say they want to be YouTubers when they grow up. I mentioned the survey and then I, I didn’t really say much else about it. I’m just like, kids are into YouTube.
The reason why it was a little bit defensive is because Vojta essentially said I was being irresponsible by suggesting that a career in YouTube might be a good path for kids because Vojta believes that AI generated content is basically going to take over all written content and all video content. I just don’t.
Believe that’s going to be true. So I’ll quickly summarize some of his other thoughts, but Vojta argues that AI will soon dominate content creation, including writing and video production, making it perfectly tailored for user demands, basically making human created content less valuable. Thus Vojta believes that.
Me guiding kids to be YouTubers is irresponsible. And the thing is, I never guided kids to do that. These videos are for adults and I am not targeting any videos to kids. I don’t have kids and I. Think people can take some of my you know, my, my thoughts and the way I think about things and either agree or disagree, I’m not telling other people how to live their lives or how to raise their kids.
I merely said, Hey, there was this survey and people were into YouTube. Do you want to hear from real YouTubers? Watch the interview. One thing to note, I did ask Vojta if he actually watched the interview or read the transcript or anything like that. He didn’t confirm or get back to me on that point. We, we did have an exchange, but my hunch is this is one of those deals where Vojta read the headline.
He already had his thoughts formed. He assumed that I thought a certain thing and was like, Doug, you’re irresponsible for telling kids to be YouTubers. And I’m like, I’m not fucking telling kids to do anything. People can do whatever they want. He also mentioned dropshipping. And I’ll get to this because my interview with Paul was two parts.
One was about dropshipping. The other part was about YouTube. Paul’s YouTube channel is about dropshipping and Vojta was like, Hey, you shouldn’t be talking to people that do dropshipping. And I’m like, what? Does that mean like because it’s an older business model It doesn’t mean we should not talk to people these business models come and go and they have popularity and we don’t know when they’re going to run out and i’m going to come back to this in a second, but essentially just because a business model isn’t as popular or it’s been around for a while doesn’t mean that’s Irrelevant, so I will come back to one portion of that now I did argue that being a YouTuber can be valuable.
So, even if Vojta is right, and video production is going to be done all by AI, and writing is going to be AI, and people are not going to write anymore, which I call bullshit on that. People are always going to write, people are always going to create, and I think you’re going to end up with more, you know, interesting ideas when humans actually put the ideas together because we’ll draw connections from five different books that we read plus a movie we saw in our own personal experience.
We’re going to have some interesting insights versus AI. I could be wrong, but my hunch is there still will be value in human thoughts. All right. One side note, Vojta did mention that Handcrafted items might be valuable in that people want the authentic experience. So I do see value in that, whether it’s podcasts, writing YouTube.
I mean, people watch reality TV and that is nonsense, but it’s not even real, but it has the feeling of realness. So there’s still value in having a YouTube channel and I would advise people. To think about it. So I’ll give you a couple quick, hopefully obvious things that YouTube can help you develop skills.
And one is communication. You literally have to communicate and talk. You can use a more cinematic storytelling, however you want to do it, but you’ll develop your communication skills. You’ll also develop marketing, whether it’s just marketing to growth, the channel, or if it’s literally using the channel as part of your sales funnel to sell something, there’s tons of other interviews I’ve done where.
This is illustrated very clearly and you can just take a look around YouTube. Sometimes it’s entertainment. Sometimes it’s more tactical and tutorial based but a lot of times both of those will lead into some sort of marketing and the third main valuable Thing that you’ll learn is confidence.
So if you are producing videos, a lot of people are nervous about that. A lot of people are even nervous about recording their voice for a podcast, but if you’re able to present and put yourself out there on audio and video on YouTube, you will develop some confidence. Maybe the didn’t have an easy way to develop in the past.
So, I’ll get into a couple other pieces of the exchange and then I’ll give you some other pros and cons of people having a YouTube channel. In the email that I sent out to my list, I never said if I thought kids should aspire to be YouTubers.
It was merely a study that I cited. Vojta already had his impression made up about that headline, so he came at me and said that I was being irresponsible by suggesting that kids should be YouTubers. It was just the study, like I, I didn’t do the study and I don’t know if he listened to the The interview, but like Paul and I were not painting a rosy picture.
He and I were like, it’s a slippery slope out there. YouTube’s interesting. We both like it for certain reasons, but there’s a dark side to the whole thing. So I don’t know if he listened to it, but I don’t think he did. Let me know Vojta if you actually check out this episode. So I asked this specifically.
So I said, Vojta, are you suggesting that my peers on YouTube and I only cover topics that aren’t going to be obsolete sometime in the future, because one of the issues that Vojta mentioned was just me mentioning YouTube. As a content creator and mentioning drop shipping, he said, you know, both of those are dead.
Both of those are dead or they’re going to be dead. So the thing is, I, I don’t, number one, I don’t know when a thing is going to be obsolete. That’s like telling the future here’s the deal, right? I’m not a huge fan of drop shipping. So I’ve rejected all the pitches from drop shippers for Several years. I don’t give a shit about dropshipping, but Paul is actually a friend of mine and we never talked about business.
So I asked him if we can do an interview and I was like, Hey, I can ask him hard questions because he’s a friend. And the thing is, I asked him some hard questions. Now here’s the deal. In 2007, Tim Ferriss wrote the four hour work week. He talked about dropshipping then in 2007. I was like, is this saturated?
Is this a dead business model? Like, why are we still talking about drop shipping in 2024 when Tim Ferris put it in a book in 2007, and it was already a thing then. And then even more people have done it over the last several years. And the thing is, I’m not saying drop shipping is the thing to do. I never said that.
I was like, Paul, what are you doing? What, what are people doing out there? The purpose of some of these shows is to hear what’s going on. And then maybe you take an idea from one business model and another business model, and then you mash it together where you take the dropshipping idea and you apply it to an industry or dropshipping.
Is not very popular. And then you have a competitive advantage. So I’m not recommending specifically that anyone do any specific business model. People can do whatever they want. On top of that, I’m not recommending the kids do any certain thing. I’m just talking about things that I’m interested in and you can do with it what you, so.
So Paul and I never said, Hey, kids should do YouTube. We talked about how YouTube can be a grind. We talked about the pros and the cons, which I’ll get into in a second. But here’s the thing, right? I talk about drop shipping. Someone could have predicted, Hey, drop shipping is going to be obsolete because it was in the four hour work week in 2007 yet.
People are still doing it as a viable business model right now. So my issue with Vojta saying, Hey, why are you recommending these business models, which I didn’t do? Why are you recommending this shit? That’s going to be obsolete. How does Vojta know things are going to be obsolete? It’s just his belief, which he has a right to, but it’s a big leap to say, Hey, it’s irresponsible for people to talk about things that might be obsolete in the future.
That’s just silly. No one can talk about anything because eventually everything will be obsolete. I’m a bit of a nihilist though, so keep that in mind. Let’s hit some of the pros and cons. And I went to my friend GPT4O to get some of the pros and cons for kids aspiring to be YouTube stars. And some of these are obvious, but you know, GPT4O, it just lists the stuff out.
Pro number one, we’ll do the pros and then we’ll do the cons. You can be creative and do whatever you want. You can create a channel and whatever you want. And I have plenty of different hobbies. Everyone out there does too, or interest, and you can find a channel on almost anything, and you could find someone who has a much bigger channel than you could have imagined.
So you could be creative and express yourself. Number two is entrepreneurial skills. So, You learn how to run a business. You learn all these sort of micro skills or even bigger skills like marketing and branding, business management, video production, audio management, and lighting and the whole deal, right?
So you can learn some technical and entrepreneurial skills. You potentially can earn a lot of money. It depends on what you’re doing and how you monetize, but there is. Potential to earn a lot of money. The other portion, the other pro is just global reach. So it does provide a platform for reaching a global audience, very big in other countries, much actually bigger countries than the U S and just happened to be more popular there for some reason, I’m not really sure.
All right, some of the cons are income instability. While you can earn a lot, it can be highly unpredictable. And a few years ago, I think Paul got caught up in this, he was earning quite a lot of money. And then there was a change in the way the advertisers were working on YouTube and the content. In which ads could be shown on and what advertisers wanted to work with.
So that changed things and generally suppressed the ad revenue. Another one, this is huge. The mental health concerns. So there’s a, there’s a dark side to YouTube. The more videos you publish, the more views you’re going to get, and the more you feel like you need to create more videos, there’s also the audience capture issue that’s out there where.
Let’s say I do a video on adult massagers and it takes off all of a sudden I have to start doing all these reviews on adult massagers, which you could use your imagination folks. And then I’m like, well, now my audience is growing. I’m actually getting sponsors, I’m earning a lot of money and I’m making all these videos about adult massagers that I’m not really interested in.
And then I’ve created a job that I don’t like where I’m actually very successful. But I hate what I’m doing. It can lead to stress and anxiety and burnout and just having too many adult massagers around. Next for the cons is privacy issues and concerns. So being in the public eye can actually be a big drag.
You think you want to be famous. You think you want to be noticed, but. It can have a very dark side and luckily it’s pretty fucking hard to have a really huge YouTube channel. So chances are people are not going to recognize you going around, but if you do have a big channel or if you are sort of a big fish in a small pond, you may have some privacy concerns around that.
And it could be a little bit risky depending on, you know, who you are, who your audience is and how crazy your audience is. Potentially might be.
Fourth con is the insane amount of competition from the headline that spawned this whole episode. 30 percent of kids 8 to 12 want to be YouTubers. They’re growing up. There’s more competition. People that are in their mid forties, like me want to have YouTube channels, like it’s a thing now, or, you know, social media in general, like I’m mentioning YouTube here, but it could be any platform out there, but I heard some stat recently, like some huge percentage of kids under 18 use YouTube and watch YouTube pay.
I don’t know the stat exactly, but it’s like they use YouTube like every day. I mean, I watch YouTube videos every day, so very competitive. A lot of people want to do it. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it could be hard, especially if someone doesn’t have a very, Robust kind of drive to keep pushing forward because it’s hard.
It’s harder than you think. Number five is the dependency on the platform. It really becomes apparent if you’re relying on your income solely from YouTube or mainly from YouTube ad revenue doesn’t pay that well, like AdSense.
So. You need to think about it like a business. And that, again, that can be valuable from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but like, basically if you are relying on your revenue from one place, things could change fast dependency on the platform is an issue no matter what the platform is. YouTube is pretty good from an overall standpoint, but it’s still great to have your own audience that you can contact.
Directly email list is great. If you could spread to other platforms. That is cool. If you’re able to if you want to have you know social media platform, reach as well, but as long as you’re diversifying it You’ll be a little bit more secure in the longevity of the whole thing. So again, obviously pros and cons for working on YouTube.
I do think just about everybody should at least consider having a YouTube channel or a podcast or both the value that you get from the communication. Skills and the confidence and just being able to get past the issues of creating a video Creating a podcast episode putting yourself out there for people to Reject you criticize you make fun of you like even this video, right?
Like i’ve done a lot of these and the way Um, expressing my not fully developed thoughts is a little bit, uh, it’s a little bit stressful because I know it’s not fully developed and I know it’s very easy for people to disagree with me. And I would love to hear from you. By the way, leave a comment. Over on YouTube.
It’s great for the algorithm, even though, even though it means you will literally be criticizing me if you disagree, or if you agree, you know, you can tell me that too, but like, that’s good from an algorithmic standpoint. So like when people put out videos and you’re like, this information isn’t even correct.
Like they, sometimes people create videos to bait the audience. To actually reject their thoughts or challenge them. Sometimes it’s healthy. Sometimes it’s not, but, but anyway, let me know what you think out there. Again, I can’t emphasize it enough. My channel is not for kids. I don’t, I don’t know the controls that are out there, but I marked the videos like, Hey, this channel, it’s not for kids.
I’m not targeting kids. If someone out there ends up watching it, it wasn’t directly aimed at kids. Like I, I, again, I, I checked that little box. So let me know what you think out there. I think YouTube’s a good thing. It’s good overall. I like it. I like these videos. All right. I’ll catch you on the next episode.
Have a great day out there.