PPL and making a living as a youtuber (and YT advertising policies)

Sebastian_G wrote:

steveo1kinevo

He also got investigated by the FAA for an enforcement action because he was making the videos; the FAA relented in the end but it must have been a bit of an uncomfortable time for him until it was resolved given it was his job.

I think what “helps” one to get enforcement actions is having made enemies on social media.

Just running a forum (and participating on it, with an open identity) will make you loads of enemies. It is totally unavoidable. But short of that, beating people up on social media will work similarly. I know a number of characters who had been doing that for many years and whenever they have some incident, there is a lot of “background chatter” about what they did, and some of this spills over to letters being written to the CAA. The CAA staff are on flying forums in large numbers, too.

It is hard to be anonymous if doing flying videos, however. You could do anonymous ski videos allright

It also seemed like selective enforcement when at the same time the infamous Jerry was posting some really questionable videos to YouTube (such as the one when he was doing 1900fpm down at the DA – here – https://streamable.com/usuwo ) and the FAA weakly says “We can’t take action on videos seen on social media”.

Is that the one where he (Jerry) forgot the PCL but saw them?

I’m following “Itchy Boots” on YouTube. She’s touring the world on a motorcycle and makes videos about it. A new 20-minute video almost every day. And I think she’s currently making a living. However:

First off, making a new 20-minute video each day requires her to put in about four hours of solid work every day. That’s time spend in the late afternoon/evening after she rode 300+ km on dirt roads. She does subtitles too to make her channel more appealing, and she’s on other social media as well. So she really puts in the hours.

Second, her “living” is basically food, hotel/hostel fees and petrol for the bike. She does not have a home or family to pay for. So she’s not going to need/spend as much as somebody trying to do the same thing with an aircraft, and especially not if that person also has a home/family/hanger/airplane to feed/maintain.

She has 300K+ subscribers and even her most recent videos (just a few days old) all have 100K+ views. You’ve got to have a very interesting story to tell, every day over and over again, to reach and maintain those numbers. Every now and then she also does this “YouTube live” thing where she talks about her journey, and answers questions of users, live on YouTube. People can contribute “petrol money” during these events and that brings in quite some money as well.

She does make the videos with relatively modest means. I think she carries around three GoPros, a handheld camera (compact that shoots good video), a compact tripod and a drone. Plus probably quite a decent laptop with decent editing software and some accessoires like powerbanks, spare batteries and such.

And she’s got a major challenge in that she’s riding in parts of the world where internet is exceptionally slow by western standards, or completely absent. A 20-minute video can easily be 500 MB or more to upload, and she’s regularly in places where that takes all night or even more. That – and the obnoxious habit of some of her followers to attempt to follow her in real life, not just on YT, and to ask her to marry them – causes her to release her videos by default only something like a week or two after they were shot.

If you want to make your living as a flying YouTuber, I think you should start your “business plan” with her. Follow her for a longer time, and in particular watch the replay of some of these “live” sessions. In those she talks a lot about the practicalities of shooting, editing and publishing her videos. Once you’ve got a good idea how she handles things, how many hours she puts in and such, and what she uses to attract these follower numbers, then see how you can translate this to the flying world.

To be honest I find flying videos a bit boring – basically I’m happy with a few pictures and a video of the landing . Otherwise something more like a documentary, interviewing people, looking inside machines, like in this thread. Most people post videos for their own gratification, not the edification of others.

My wife occasionally watches everyone’s favourite Mormon family, who apparently make upwards of $1M a year from 1.6M subscribers: their tax return was visible in the background of one of their videos . This is mostly from sponsors, e.g. holidays, a car etc which they then feature. A big problem when your main income is dependent on Youtube is that you’re vulnerable to them changing the rules, e.g. all videos with children being deleted because of fears of child exploitation.

I recently found this (cool photo) looking at what to do in Dinan LFEB, which has a page on how to make money from travel blogging: spend years unpaid building up followers, and try to sell ancillary stuff like photos, copy, consultancy etc.

I’ll stay with the day job

Nowadays you can edit videos completely adequately and even professionally on a high end laptop. I have for years had a Thinkpad X230 (i7) which I got in 2013 and which does it easily, and is perfectly portable. I still have that one but now travel with a Dell XPS13 (i7 QC) which is lighter and probably a bit faster still. These run Vegas Pro 16 – a fairly typical higher-end video editor – without any problem, especially if not shooting in 4K (doing 4K is totally wasted on Youtube). And Apple hardware will be very similar to these, at any given price point (they are all the same inside) which for these was about €2k at the time they were new. I would expect the motorbike girl to be 100% Apple.

So you don’t need anything special.

I am seriously impressed that anybody can make a living – even at the level of just getting B&B and motorbike petrol bills paid. As I wrote before, it doesn’t matter how good your videos are, the only way to get the clicks to get money out of Youtube will be to massively promote them via all other social media, to get them to go viral. You basically have to reach the millions who dedicate their lives to multimedia consumption Can that be done with aviation videos?

Getting sponsored by say Foreflight is a different thing. Then you are getting Foreflight money, not Youtube money. I am certain this goes on in most product reviews; for example ski reviews are mostly bollox if you actually listen to the language, and it’s obvious the manufacturer paid for it from start to finish. They also pay reviewers to put the correct product positioning slant on it i.e. a €200 ski will be perfect for beginner/intermediate (nobody wants to be called a “beginner”) and a €1000 ski will be advanced/expert level (nobody will buy a €1000 ski if a beginner can ski on it without killing himself) Foreflight is a nice company and getting sponsorship from them is relatively non-controversial.

Peter wrote:

especially if not shooting in 4K (doing 4K is totally wasted on Youtube).

Don’t quite agree. If I were to produce HD (1080p) video content, I would shoot in 4K. This allows for some cropping afterwards in the editing process, but most of all is needed to perform image stabilisation in the post-processing. Which is essentially required for any footage shot from a moving vehicle (or on skis), or any footage taken with a handheld camera.

If you know what to look for, you can see that this is something that Itchy Boots relies on a lot. One of the easiest places where you can see this in action is for any footage that’s taken by the “selfie pole” that she’s got mounted on the rear of the bike. That selfie pole and by implication the camera, is pretty rigid on the bike so it should receive all the bumps of the road. Yet if you look at that footage it is extremely smooth. But at the same time the frame of the image moves relative to the bike – in other words you see the bike moving a bit in the frame. That’s the image stabilisation at work and it needs a buffer margin around your eventual resolution to do so. So you always shoot in one resolution higher than what you’re going to produce. Most of todays “action cams” have image stabilisation built-in, and all high-end video editing software packages have it too.

Personally I’m editing video on a 2013 MacBook Air and that’s fast enough for eventual HD video. However if I were to undertake a job like this professionally, and I would be shooting hours of 4K video per day, I would upgrade to something that has multiple USB-C ports. That would cut down on the media load times significantly compared to USB2. And I’d get as much memory and SSD as the manufacturer can cram in a 13" laptop: at least 16 MB memory and 512 GB SSD. Because of the USB-C requirement, you’d need to look at 2018 or later laptops. (Oh, and I’d also look for a hardware HEVC codec built-in. This started happening from about 2016 onwards.)

Fly310 wrote:

I find it simply ridiculous to think that YouTubing would require a CPL, remember that a CPL in itself is almost never enough since you need an AOC/SPO/DTO or another suitable operational permit in order to get money from the flying.

Not in FAA-land. Aerial photography is one of the exceptions here where you do not need an AOC. If these YT videos fall into the aerial photography classification may be a different matter, though.