The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 95 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dhar Mann Studios ranked as the #2 global YouTube creator in 2021
“So we went from hardly getting any views our first couple of years to 20, 21 finishing as the number two creator on the platform globally. And number one, in scripted.”
Pansino: Sony commercial booking was driven by casting director's daughter being a fan
“I only booked that because the casting director's daughter was a fan of my YouTube content.”
Rosanna Pansino turned down over 90% of early brand deals
“So in the beginning, I turned down over 90% of brand deals that were brought to me, and some of them very high paying, but it just wasn't worth it to me”
Pansino spent 70 to 80 hours per week producing one YouTube video
“And again, it was just me, so it took me about, to do one video was about 70 to 80 hours a week.”
Most of Rober's YouTube videos cost at least $100,000 to produce
“I don't do, most of my videos now are, they're almost never less than a 100,000. Sometimes there's as much as 400,000.”
Rober's YouTube earnings surpassed his Apple engineering salary around 2017
“Yeah, and that deal, that one specifically, I think, was a brand deal for, like, 40,000 dollars, which to me was, like, really big money, like, to make that much money on a brand deal. So I started to make more money on YouTube than I was at Apple, for starter…”
Rhett and Link made $25,000 from a 2007 sponsored cornhole video
“We probably ended up making, like, 25 grand off that video.”
Good Mythical Morning eclipsed all prior Rhett and Link content by 2016
“In that 2014, 20 15, 20 16, though, that three year period, Saw Good Mythical Morning eclipse everything that we had ever created.”
Rhett and Link joined YouTube after fans reuploaded their videos
“We only did it because people started taking our videos from our website and uploading them to YouTube, and they were getting thousands of views versus hundreds of views, and we were like, oh, we should do this on purpose.”
Rhett and Link's 2007 YouTube sponsorship charged $2,000 upfront and $20 CPM
“With the help of my dad, I, like, put together a little contract where it was, hey, you give us 2000 dollars up front to make this music video, and then we have a 20 dollar CPM.”
YouTube funded 12 episodes of The Mythical Show for $100,000
“We were like, 30 minutes of content times 12. We have to hire a team to help us do this. And we, like, worked the numbers, and it came to, like, 92,000 dollars. And then we just, like, well, I guess we should just round up to a 100,000 dollars. We just didn't …”
Keeping college comedy secular enabled Rhett and Link's YouTube career
“Well, and that calculation, which was kind of accidental, is honestly the reason that we're sitting here talking to you today, because it was the fact that we were making comedy that could be divorced from that Christian setting. And just some of those sketche…”
Oh Lin: KiwiCo's founding team included YouTube's first engineer and PayPal co-founder
“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”
DiGiovanni enforces a limit of one YouTube video filmed per day
“I made a rule for us that we will never spend, we will never do more than one YouTube video in a day because I don't want the quality to suffer.”
Green: YouTube refused to sponsor the inaugural VidCon in 2010
“Yeah, I mean, we were on the phone with you two telling them what sponsorship number we thought made sense, and. And they were telling us, no, we will not sponsor this janky convention.”
Hank Green: Vlogbrothers reached 70,000 to 80,000 subscribers by late 2008
“And then by late 2008, we were at 70 or 80,000. Which was, you know, one of the bigger channels on YouTube.”
Vlogbrothers produced 200 videos before reaching 200 YouTube subscribers
“I mean, we, we'd made 200 videos before we had our 200th YouTube subscriber.”
Brownlee: Making 3% Marginal Improvements on Past Videos Compounds Over Time
“Yeah, I think honestly you just look back at what you used to do and try to do that three percent better again and again and again and again, and that adds up to pretty big improvement over time.”
Brownlee: YouTube Channel Generated Full-Time Income by College Graduation
“All the sorts of built-in tools that YouTube's given creators over the years were all contributing to a pretty steady income to the point where, like, it was making full-time job money by the time I graduated.”
Brownlee: The Profession of 'YouTuber' Did Not Exist in 2009
“There was no such thing as a YouTuber in 2009.”
Brownlee: AdSense and Direct Sponsors Are MKBHD's Biggest Revenue Sources
“So we have the YouTube ads, but we also will sell our own ads. So you'll see something like a sponsor inside of a video, things like that. Those two things are, yeah, easily the biggest sources of revenue for the business.”
Rea: Direct brand integrations surpassed YouTube ad revenue for Babish
“And then, you know, it became for a minute was the lion's share of our income, but then that was superseded by integrations.”
Andrew Rea: Babish Videos Have Never Said 'Like and Subscribe'
“You might also notice that I've never ever said like and subscribe, which is a very common YouTuber trope to say, to finish, begin and finish a video with, hey guys, like and subscribe. And I've never said that.”
Showing beginners' mistakes authentically made their DIY content accessible and successful
“I think the thing that was really successful for us was showing that online, that this is our first time using this, and we're going to gonna show you how it's not so scary, and it really made it feel more accessible to people out there as well.”
YouTube Ads Paid Dude Perfect's Bills, But Sponsorships Supported Their Families
“I think that's the cool thing about the ad side, is you can start to predict and get a little bit of a, you know, predictable cash flow there, so it helped. I would say we probably thought about it more so as our YouTube money, meaning the ads, we can pay for …”
Krim: Organic YouTube unboxing videos were an early growth catalyst for Casper
“When we started looking at sources of traffic to our website, we started seeing a ton of traffic come from YouTube in our early days, and it ended up that the Casper unboxing experience was something that people love to film on their phone and love to post onl…”
Conte: YouTube drives creator discovery via search traffic for familiar songs
“That's kind of when I learned that YouTube is a search engine, and so people are searching for songs that they know. And if they then see a cool band who is singing that song, but maybe in a completely different way, with a completely different sound, and they…”
Neistat: 'Bike Lanes' exploded faster than iPod video due to social media maturity
“Not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere, and the difference now is that social media was just really starting to pick up and I shared it as best I could, but it, Didn't need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exp…”
Daily vlogging boosted Neistat's subscriber growth to 10K-20K per night
“My YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years, seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400 Thousand subscribers. All of a sudden, every night I'd wake up and there'd be 10,020 thousand new subscribers.”
Neistat started daily vlogging solely to build an audience for Beme
“I thought, you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged so when I tell them about this product that they'll, they'll be there for me. And I came up with this idea then to make a video every day, and every day share sort of a story f…”
Dhar Mann: YouTube videos averaged only 1,000 views from 2018 to 2020
“So for two years that happened from the middle of 2018 when we started on YouTube all the way to 20 20, they stayed at around a thousand views. So I completely disregarded YouTube. But on Facebook, we were experiencing rocket ship growth.”
Rober's median YouTube viewer is 23 years old
“The analytics on average, it's like a 23 year old is like my median watcher.”
Rhett and Link initially avoided YouTube because they had a website
“And people were asking us at the time, in, in 2005, early 2006, people would say, why don't you guys have a YouTube? And we'd be like, because we have a website. You know, YouTube is for people who can't make their own server.”
Hevesh: Early domino builders reverse-engineered designs from video screenshots
“At the time, people didn't really have a lot of tutorials, so I remember I'd have to, like, zoom in on screenshots of videos and, like, look at how people were building these structures and try to copy that to see, you know, if I can make a two-D pyramid or a …”
Yassin's college video sending a hamburger to 'space' got 1M views
“Me and my friends were one of the first to send a hamburger to see the curvature of Earth. Not really space, curvature of Earth. We called it space because it's more fun. And it, Did really well. It got a million views.”
In 2007, YouTube's homepage was curated by human editors, not algorithms
“Back then, the front page of YouTube was curated by a human”
Brownlee: Earned $30,000 to $40,000 Annually From YouTube During College
“Not yet at that point, so I think I was more just like, oh, I can pay my rent and buy food and have money to reinvest in the business, so probably like 30, 40 grand, something like that.”
Rea: Showing amateur mistakes drove audience loyalty on YouTube
“That's why I made it as patently obvious as I possibly could that I was an amateur, and that meant showing my mistakes, that meant, you know, having a laugh if I spilled something or burnt something, that meant being very, very honest with the audience, and I …”
The Sorry Girls never paid for ads to grow their YouTube audience
“I mean, we never paid for, like, ads or anything. It was just, it was taking opportunities that came to us, whether it was to be on, like, a local talk show, talking about a DIY project, or just creating those videos that we were excited by, that we knew the a…”
The Sorry Girls' early Halloween tutorial hit 100,000 views in 2011
“I think it, I want to say it got around a 100,000 views that year.”
Cassey Ho's TikTok growth lowered her average YouTube viewer age
“I went on there, and I gained a whole new following. I have, like, 2.8 million on there now, and when I joined TikTok and I was teaching Pilates and workouts, there were so many people being like, oh, a tricep dip? That's so cool. Like, it was new to them, and…”
Chaudry: Pivoting Video Niches Meant Starting From Zero Audience Again
“The audience that we had built in La Crosse was not that interested in us talking about Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. And we were, where we thought we were starting from a position of, we've built an audience, we've done this for four and a half years on YouT…”
Chaudry Launched The Lacrosse Network With Only A Camera And Laptop
“I spun up a YouTube channel. I thought about it as the NFL network for lacrosse, and by no means did I have the financing to do that, but I had a camera, I had a laptop, and I had a bunch of ideas.”
Dude Perfect's First YouTube AdSense Payout Was One Cent per Member
“Technically we had each made one cent, but I had the incredible foresight to say one day we will each be able to take this money that we made from people watching our videos and we will be able to go buy a sandwich with it.”
Dude Perfect's First Upload Was Banned Worldwide for Using Space Jam Music
“Very quickly, after we load the video like Tyler said, you know, this video has been banned worldwide, was the error message we got back, and we learned that you can't just use someone else's music.”
Neistat: Commercial directing revenue funded early independent YouTube videos
“Out of that, I built sort of what was my first business post Neistat Brothers, post working with my brother. And what that business was making videos on YouTube that would garner enough attention and enough interest from the industry that would then offer me j…”