Youtube advertising revenue is driven by the six million subscriber contingent. The majority of views are going towards the vloggers and videogaming channels who are making Youtube millions. It's all teenagers watching five minute videos on the bus home from school.
I subscribe to a couple of the bigger channels, because there is some entertaining stuff in them and I generally have those videos playing while I'm doing something else like making dinner, but there's not enough money in it for the smaller makers who are trying to make twenty minute videos tailored towards a specific audience.
It's backwards because a lot of the bigger videos are just a guy with a camera filming themselves doing something interesting, which doesn't cost them too much money to make. Maybe they have some cheap props in there or something. The makers are cutting up £100 boards of figured walnut with a £500 table saw and taking twice as long to do it because they're partly focused on filming and explaining it. It's more overhead for the woodworkers and it seems necessary to do in the internet age, but it's another thing that's eating in to the margins of an industry that's already struggling.
