Could YouTube be my Career??

[Gaijillionaire]

No. Try your best but it's not going to be a viable career. You need 10-20k views a day to get money and I don't see anyone doing it for 40 years.

 

[nad]

Yes, YouTube could be your career but you should always have a plan B after YouTubeing. Because you might not wanna do it till you are 65.
To live off YouTube, AdSense should definitely not be your main income source. But AdSense + affiliate links + sponsorships can make good money. However, before seriously thinking about doing so, you should make a decent amount of money with YouTube constantly. Means several hundred dollar per months.

I only make 250.000 views/months and could finance my current life entirely through the channel if I wouldn't have decided to rather spend the YouTube money on fun stuff^^ If I would plan to always stay single and only be responsible for myself, I would probably try to have a YouTube career, but since I am going to marry next year and have a children in a few years, I would feel quite irresponsable to do so.

 

[PopsLetsPlay]

YouTube is already my career..who says you needa make muniii

 

[Psychotic Squirrel]

i think you are much safer looking at youtube as a secondary source of income rather then a career. At one point in time it may grow to where you can do it full time, but in all seriousness if your goal is making money on the internet, you are better off learning SEO or something similar. The amount of time you spend on a youtube channel would make you an SEO expert within several months.

My first child is due to be born soon so i'm looking at youtube as a several year long commitment. If i can build my channel to generate some extra cash to help with my son within the next 3 to 5 years, I'll consider it a success. That's really all i'm after. I think the people that start a channel thinking they are going to do it full-time or become youtube famous are inevitably setting themselves up for failure.

 

[The Mach Project]

Is YouTube money good enough for it to be my career? Like if I I grind enough and work hard could I actually make a good living off of it?

The chances are slim - VERY SLIM, in fact - but it IS possible. You can approach YouTube with the mindset that it's simply a hobby. Or you can approach it with the mindset that you want, and must, make it your successful business venture. Superwoman (Lilly Singh) approached YouTube exactly as the latter. And she worked with a deadline. If she couldn't make her channel successful by the end of 2012, she would have to give it up.

Any successful career will be good enough money to live off of. But it takes more than just hard work. In this day and age, marketing is everything. I see so many videos on YouTube that don't deserve the millions of views they get but get them anyways, and I see so many videos on YouTube that do deserve millions of views but don't get them.

If you really want to make YouTube your career, you must keep learning and adapting.

 

[MarkRodriguez2012]

I'd also say there are a million other ways to make money while making video content, so explore figuring out alternate income streams like merchandise, a store, sponsorships, self-publishing, helping with editing or other things for other creators, etc.

That is quite true, and many people do make the bigger bucks off their merchandise rather than just ad revenue. The only thing is, you have to be really big so that the average joe would actually want to buy a shirt based around yourself.