How one creator made thousands of dollars in passive income
Let's go through thought-provoking insights directly from a creator and talk about the importance of passive income.
Hi! 👋
In this newsletter, we share thought-provoking insights directly from a creator and talk about the importance of passive income.
Scroll down to dig into the dollars and the ideas! 💵 💡
Welcome (back)! 🤗
This is Petra from The Creators' Diary. If this is your first TC’D newsletter, welcome! We’re happy you’ve subscribed!
Share what you think about this issue or the questions you struggle with as a creator by simply replying to this email. A real human (Petra) reads it.
Story of the week 🗞️
In his latest newsletter, Kevin Parry, stop-motion animator and visual effects artist, wrote about how it's possible for him to be a full-time artist on the internet.
For this purpose, he analysed how he turned one idea into separate short and long-form videos, and how those performed compared to each other and on different social media channels.
- He posted the original video as a YouTube Shorts. He says that format doesn't pay well relative to views, earning him $0.06 per thousand views. He now has 700k subscribers, so that's around $7 per day for him. He made $9,792 from that one Shorts video.
- He posted a classic YouTube video, and explained in this longer format how he filmed and edited the original video. This brings in more money for him than the Shorts, at an average of $2.48 per thousand views. He made $6,098 from the long-form YouTube video.
- He even posted the original video, believe it or not, on Facebook for his 638k followers. He gained more than 5 million 15-second views with an average of 29 second watch time, and earned a little over 1K USD with the Facebook video.
What's the lesson here? 🎒
Kevin makes his own conclusions in his newsletter, and I urge you to subscribe to that, but for us now, let me point out how important it is to think along the lines of passive income as a creator.
Kevin put in the effort and time, "It took me a total of two days to script, film, and edit the breakdown", and as you can see from the above, he could sit back and watch the money coming in later.
I know what you're thinking: BUT he has a huge following, already! Yes, BUT, that doesn't mean you can't start utilising video or other platforms for earning passive income and see how fruitful those initiatives become.
Kevin also admitted in his newsletter that it took him a DECADE to figure out how to balance short and long-form videos (as a stop-motion and visual effects artist this is his main league).
Never assume that thousands of followers or dollars, for that matter, are gathered in one day. Or two.
Any tips on earning passive income? 💲
You know I have tips 😅.
Besides leaning into video content as described above, and if you're comfortable with it and feel like it fits your creative business, we also have an article with tips that will help you make money while you're asleep (after putting in the work, of course).
👉 Passive income for artists – 5 ideas you can try today
Hint: These ideas are great for many kinds of creators, not only artists—I wanted to mention it as I know that not every creator categorises themselves as an artist.
And, in case you're considering starting an Etsy shop or you already own one but need some inspiration, we have passive income tips just for that, too:
👉 How to make passive income on Etsy – 17 product ideas and how much you can make from them
Creator quote of the week 📌
From stop-motion animator Kevin Parry, of course, a smart thought on Bluesky:
Do you have any passive income channels as a creator? What works well for you, and what are the ideas that you had to throw out the window eventually?
Share your knowledge with us and we're happy to feature you in upcoming articles.
See you next week,
Petra
Petra Gönczi
