JJ Buckner: How Much Content Creators Really Make?

You're probably considering starting a YouTube channel to make money. You see how massive YouTube personalities like MrBeast can get rich quick. Maybe if you watch him, you'll figure out how to make money and you'll be the next YouTube overnight multi-millionaire.

"Step aside PewDiePie, it's MY turn to shine in the spotlight!" And with massive views, buckets of money will rain down. Money from ads, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, selling merch.

"Selling merch? Like t-shirts and hoodies and stuff?" You ask.

Yeah. Merch. But that's a topic for another time. Let's stick to the plan.

Let's take this step by step.

First you see how other content creators are managing their YouTube accounts while trying to make some money.

This guy, JJ Buckner, he's going to spotlight some YouTube creators telling their various audiences how much they got paid for one month online and how they did it.

First, who is "JJ Buckner"? Well, he's a YouTube content creator with 220K subscribers, over 14M channel views spread over the 200-plus videos he's uploaded in the last 9-10 years. He's the guy you call for financial advice.

But not a professional financial advisor like all the finance guys have to say to cover their butts if anything the talk about goes south. That's actually a good thing although a LOT of viewers hang on the words of some influencial online money management guys a bit too strongly. So its good there's something of a disclaimer.

JJ starts off strong saying "Making money. Let's get into it" and we're immediately reacting with JJ to a clip of a youtuber sharing the gory details of her making money on YouTube story.

Here's a link to her @kycarter on TikTok where she has 20K followers.

JJ listened as she told her story. He wasn't pausing the video every other second to interject something about what she did right or wrong, he sat in silence with a few gestures of support at important moments of her story. Then he reacted afterwards to how she was building up her Youtube channel.

She has seven revenue streams "with 3 being affiliate programs". Here's your chance to see how much money people can make using affiliate links (and the sky's the limit with affiliate marketing).

She starts with $0 for her Like To Know program, $2 for Amazon, $13 from TikTok Shop and $42 from TikTok's Creator Rewards Program. So about $50-$60 for the revenue streams with the non-affiliated links.

That's not nothing, but we need more than fifty to sixty dollars a month to get out of bed, but she has the answer.

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
(say that 3 times fast).

She used affiliate links to help her viewers buy the right baby stroller to fit their needs. A simple strategy and one that saw her receive around $100 from sales of other baby buggy choices plus another $1.8K from all the purchases her viewers made through this Zoe brand.

That $1,900 was her fee for acting sort of as a middleman, guiding the viewers of the advertment on her video, to the seller. Some of her viewers bought the product (in this case the buggy) from the seller and she got some money from the sale, almost like a commission.

JJ starts talking about how "We're talking realistically how much money you can make from creating content" and continues talking about the "tarnished reputations" of youtubers who had success with the "finance niche" at one point but lately, not so much.

He talked about how much he enjoyed watching Graham Stephan back in the day. (Me too)

I watched his stuff and started watching The Dividend King Andrei Jikh up until he stopped with dividends and went in another direction financially. Graham Stephan was also involved in the FTX business and you can watch Coffeezilla's "Sorry You're Bankrupt" video for more info on that tasty little scandal.

JJ was impressed how much Graham Stephan was making during those early years when he showed how much he he was bringing in with those money management videos, and the light bulb went off.

"If Graham Stephan can make this much money talking about money, I want that job!" And now he's got the job (220K subs and all that) and he's helping people with prudent financial advice.

But he's not a personal financial advisor or consultant (this is usually stated for liability reasons). If you lose money, it's your fault. Not the latest YouTube financial guy's fault.

These quick peeks into another youtuber's management style and Adsense is handy and instructional. We can compare their results against our own, or look at one creator vs another.

How would you handle the problems they've faced? Did any of them leave you with a nugget of an idea for starting and running a YouTube channel?