Is nobody else surprised the amount is so low? If you look at his video catalogue, basically every video is a "hit" even if upload frequency is relatively low. Youtubers making 20 videos a month with <1M views/video make considerably more money, i.e., is better to upload less quality videos and have "moderate" views that to make high quality infrequent videos with a lot of views. You'd think advertisers should pay more per ad on a high quality video than on a trash one. The extreme example of this is Mr. Beast, who makes "high" quality videos (at least in the sense of production) but uploads pretty frequently (specially considering he has multiple channels).
As a YouTube addict, I'm not surprised. There's a whole other advertising revenue stream that BEC is just not doing, because they have the monster viewcounts to avoid it and still make a living: in-video sponsorships.
I follow a lot of smaller full time YouTubers, nearly all do sponsored advertising within their videos.
That is where advertisers are indeed paying more for quality content highly targeted to their consumers - directly to the creators, not through Google's platform.
Those deals can be very lucrative because audiences are more receptive to advertising that comes from, and directly supports, the creators they follow.
I've seen creators I respect take somewhat dubious sponsorships and still be supported by their fans. The recent Established Titles controversy was a good example of that. [1]
It's not very surprising, as other mentioned on this thread (and in the blog itself) this channel's popularity is only organic growth, they do not do $$$ sponsorships, they do not employ clickbait practices (which work, sadly), and the audience is relatively niche compared to your random trend-setting garbage youtuber like Mr. Beast.
"The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year."
Maybe this is splitting hairs but this didn't make publishing seem like gambling to me. It sounds like if I can publish enough titles at a low enough cost per title I'm guaranteed to make money.
You're guaranteed to make little money, yes. The big publishers make most of their revenue from a small number of titles that make publishing any other title viable.
