Nine Suresh asks: How does the long‑term earning potential of an entertainment‑creator streaming path compare to focusing on a business? I currently make $1.8k–$2.7k/month from streaming and am considering switching to business. What are your thoughts on entertainment creator vs. business for long‑term money?
I think streaming is an awesome industry to be in, and you should definitely monetize it more while also leaning into the business side. The real value of a streamer—and of our current economy—is the ability to get and sustain attention; just look at how attention drives even the President’s influence. If you’re good at grabbing and holding attention through streaming (whether gaming or anything else), you’re already far ahead, and figuring out monetization is the easier part. Looking ahead, with AGI poised to replace many knowledge‑worker roles, streaming may be one of the few jobs humans will still have in 10‑15 years, so getting started now puts you ahead of the curve. I often bring up Magnus Carlsen as an example: even though AI has long surpassed humans at chess, he’s still printing money, building a massive following, and people love him not just for his chess skill but for his human traits—wit, candor, and his exemplary mastery of the game. Those qualities are what draw an audience, and the same principle applies to any streaming career: showcase your personality and expertise, not just the game. As a quick side note, be careful with automation tools on YouTube—scheduling videos or uploading back‑to‑back on new channels can actually tank your views; the platforms claim no impact, but in practice the performance drops dramatically. So, keep that in mind as you grow.
The reality is AI has not made anything new possible. It has just made old processes more profitable. And it is in the making of old processes more profitable that some things appear more possible. But I don't want you to feel confused — nothing here is fundamentally new. These are all market opportunities that are pre-existing and either growing slightly or shrinking slightly. The people that, as a rule in my life, have always made the most money are not the people that pick up every new shiny object, every new cool video gen tool, every cool new cinematography tool. The people in my life that have always made the most money are the people that just pick one thing, get really good at that one thing, and then milk it like a fat cow. So my recommendation: I understand it feels paralyzing because so much is happening so quickly. That is only going to increase. You best deal with it now, not in a year from now when we have 10x as many developments in a tenth of the time. Figure out a couple of things that you feel reasonably confident provide value to an end user. Learn them really, really well. Stick your head down in the sand. Turn off all social media platforms aside from maybe my daily updates channel. Then get really good at them and sell them.
Yeah, it's cool—I don't play many video games. My League of Legends sessions are just occasional half‑hour meet‑ups with a buddy I rarely see, so it's not a crippling addiction; even if someone like Elon Musk got hooked on Diablo, it wouldn't be a problem. Playing a game or having a vice like Netflix doesn't stop you from making money. Regarding work hours, I put in about 50 to 60 hours per week, roughly eight hours a day, every day of the week. Not all of that is intense brain work; a lot is low‑stakes tasks like community management—I spend at least an hour a day responding to YouTube comments, which is about 12‑15% of my week. I do this because nobody else justifies the time, and it actually scales by boosting engagement. I manage my time as effectively as possible. From a leverage perspective, content is high‑leverage: recording one 8‑minute video that gets 1,000 views turns 15 minutes of effort into 8,000 minutes of watch time—a massive multiplier. It may look like I'm working more than big entrepreneurs, but I'm actually doing a comparable amount; I'm just not working crazy hours. When I was poor and scraping by, I worked far harder and longer, but much of that panicky, sub‑effective activity never produced results. Now I focus on impactful ways, especially the non‑scalable work like comment responses, which improves the likelihood that any subscriber will buy. That's why my channel is now the most monetized in the space—around $2.50 per subscriber at 50k subs—while others with larger audiences aren't achieving that. I credit this shift to people like Matthew Larson, who taught me monetization and a straight‑line approach. Overall, I hope that makes sense.
Ask yourself why you want to be a creator first. If it's for fame or the idea of people watching you, reconsider. But if it's because you're genuinely a great explainer, capable of educating people better than most, with some unique knack that fills a real market demand — then yes, go for it. If that's the goal, focus on becoming top 1% at whatever you want to talk about first. For me that was business, then I niched down hard into AI and automation because that's where my initial content did best and where I was genuinely strongest — I'd say I'm well beyond top 1% there. Achieve real results first, then talk about it — the world isn't short on people with opinions telling others what to do; what's rare is someone who's actually done it and can say 'here's my recommendation, and here's the proof that it worked for me.'
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My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.