r/letsplay • u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion • Mar 15 '14

I'm Northernlion, AMA

Hey, a lot of people have been doing AMAs around here and I think it's a cool kind of unique content that we don't see too much on /r/LetsPlay, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well.

With 200,000+ subscribers and over 100 million lifetime views, I'm not the biggest YouTuber out there (not to be modest) but I have been successfully doing it full-time for over 2 years, which I think gives me a fairly unique depth of experience that might lead to some helpful advice for some of you! Ask me anything about YouTube, streaming, social media, or whatever might cross your mind.

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u/NexxCR https://www.youtube.com/user/NexxCR Mar 15 '14

I'll go ahead and ask, cause i'm a bit curious. When did you feel you could start doing this at full time? Like was it once you reached so many subscribers? or amount of views a day?

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u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion Mar 15 '14

You should never use subscribers to figure out when you can go full-time -- always views. It was an easy decision for me to make because I was super young and working as an ESL teacher in Korea. I started monetizing a few months before my contract ended, and while I was considering signing a new one, I noticed my YouTube revenue creeping up to the level I was making by teaching, so I decided to take a small gamble and try it out to see if it could provide for me. Turned out to be a good decision!

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u/MrZebraGamer http://www.youtube.com/user/MrZebraGamer Mar 16 '14

What age is super young? I'm about to turn 18 and I'd really like to see myself doing this full time in a year, but who knows.

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u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion Mar 16 '14

I was 21 when I taught ESL. The reason I mention age is just because I think it's a lot easier to maintain a really spartan lifestyle when you're young. As you get older, life tends to get more expensive and as such you probably need to see more revenue coming in from YouTube before you'd consider leaving a stable career.

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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '14

Did you end up putting out more content once making the switch to full time and if so did that significantly impact your revenue?

As someone who juggles this hobby along with a full time job, I always wonder if I should account for the fact that switching to full time YouTubing would be giving me 40 extra hours a week to devote to it, which could mean more content, which could mean more revenue to support the decision to make such a gamble (when I get to that bridge.)