Youtube vs. Hive - Looking at Digital Nomads

6 months ago (Edited)

There is at the moment lots of talk about onboarding new users to Hive and showing the benefits of Hive and web3. Therefore, one group that you would think may be the perfect fit for Hive would be Digital Nomads. Those who try to live location independent and earn their income using a laptop and internet connection.

I also think this is a really great type of content that people would like to read about and Hive could be the perfect place for it. However, most people are choosing to become Youtubers and go the web2 route. Therefore I thought it would be worth to take a look at some of them and see how the proposition of youtube looks compared to Hive.

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One such digital nomad youtuber would be Chris the Freelancer who is currently in Brazil digitalnomading, which I think means creating youtube videos so that he can travel and enjoy other parts of the world. In his latest video here he explores a new possible digital nomad destination in Brazil with another social media darling from instagram.

Chris's channel is quite established and has been around since before the rona. Since the end of the pandemic, his channel awoke again recently and continued its mission. The first thing to note is that making youtube videos is not easy and takes some work. He is making many great scenes in the video. Using drones, beautiful scenery and some well thought out scenes with perfect sound.

His video is also broken down in the different bitesize sections so that it is easy to consume. Chris is also a tiktoker and instagram user. They seem to be other of the popular web2 social media platforms. His stats according to social blade show his earnings currently to be up to around just €30 a month currently. I think this is because he has only recently restarted his channel back up.

This shows however that he is not earning much from his work on youtube right now though and cannot sustain himself. He is also running a blog on his own domain here and therefore could be a prime fit for using Hive to boost his earnings. But what does that mean to a digital nomad?

They currently get paid in fiat for their time and work each month. Most of the content is evergreen and continues to earn but apart from the website rules that could shut them down at anytime, they don't have anything else binding them to the site. On his latest videos, they are currently just around 3k for the latest one, so he still has some way to build his audience back up, but with nearly 85k subscribers, he is reaching a larger audience than he would reach on Hive.

How do things look for a fairly new digital nomad?

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Richy Parkinson has a great channel where he is budget traveling around Asia and sharing travel tips, accomodation reviews, food and cultural insights and other useful titbits to his audience. His channel is more real and honest giving the viewer some real insights into the lifestyle.

He is trying to use youtube to help keep him on the road and therefore he is making a vlog nearly everyday and he tries to keep to low cost countries to keep him on the road and escape the west. In my mind, this would be someone well suited to joining Hive.

As he mentions, currently the vlogs are taking up quite a bit of his time and require some research in order to do them well. Something about youtubing to be successful is that you mostly need to brand yourself and put yourself out there. They say people buy from people, therefore I can imagine it would be hard to do a youtube channel without appearing in it.

How much does Richy make from his youtube endeavors so far? As I said he is a fairly new channel and is building it up quite well so far with lots of engagement on the videos. He has 1.45k subscribers and has made 122 videos so far. Social blade suggests he earns upto €144 a month and has video views of around 45k and growing rapidly.

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With these earning and his content, having a Hive blog could be the perfect addition to his online presence and give him greater earnings. Although in the web2 and fiat mindset, earning in social media is like visiting a prostitute in that you give them your content and you get fiat directly in return and have no further stake in the game.

Someone with no knowledge of crypto or used to using it, may not find it so easy to adopt a new mindset. Do you just upload your new content and cash everything out? Do you engage in return to your audience and making curation? These are not known things in web2. You just view what you like and finished.

Other earnings for Richy are where people can tip him or buy him a coffee. Again, unlike Hive where tips go directly from A to B. There is usually a middle-man who takes a large cut of it.

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The final case study is the channel Brett Dev. He is a long time digital nomad with a well established channel and over 50k subscribers. He lives in the digital nomad capital of the world Chang Mai in Thailand.

He makes videos about how people can earn online and is also building his own community called nomadskool. He didn't come across crypto as an earning method it seems or to using Hive which could be a good addition to his list of possible income methods. Also, the possibility to build his community on Hive could also be a good fit.

If we look at social blade again, it suggest the monthly earnings of the youtube channel are just up to around €134. This seems very low for a channel doing a niche subject that should be pretty lucrative to advertisers. He is though not making so many videos each month. Maybe just 1 or 2. So for the amount of time and effort, it is a bit of extra income and could be worth the time and effort but is not the main extent of the digital nomad income.

It seems similar to twitter or X, using the web2 to sell another product or service seems to be the way. The most popular products seem to be training courses or membership to exclusive communities or clubs. On some of the biggest fitness channels with millions of views, they give access to more videos and exercises, so youtube is used more as just a taster of content that is available.

Looking at the work and rewards, does it pay to use youtube to make an extra income? There certainly seems to be the audience there. It reminds me of eBay and although they had high fees, because they had captured the market, even competitors with no fees couldn't compete against them. A winner takes all sort of thing going on. However, for content creators, the income doesn't seem so great, especially when you look at the audience sizes and the work people are putting in, it seems that it is perfect for disruption.

Thanks for reading.

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