Oh, what a world we live in

The train on monetizing this blog has long since left the station.

To make any money, I would have had to come up with a specific niche focus and stuck with it, becoming the go to for something or other.

Maybe I should have just stuck to lay-off stories. Become a clearing house for complaints about businesses behaving stupidly or badly. Turned into a dispenser of invaluable – or non-valuable – business advise. The review site for business books. (Gag.)

Or, if I’d decided to dump business as my central theme, I could have catered to folks who like colorful sweaters, Celtic music, shoveling out…

But that train left the station. I missed the boat. The wheels fell off the monetizing car – if that car had ever had wheels to begin with.

And, of course, with no one having time to actually read any thing, any more, having a blog is just so yesterday.

Everything, after all, can pretty much be condensed to 140 characters. (Or, as this last sentence demonstrates, 70 characters.)

And everyone knows that an Instagram picture is worth a thousand blog words.

Not to mention that people like lights, camera, action.

If it can’t be YouTube’d, forget about it.

YouTube, as it turns out, is where the real online money is to be made.

Or so I learned when I saw an article on YouTube money-makers a few weeks back.

Some of the biggest stars on YouTube may be earning big paychecks for playing with toys and video games -- essentially, doing things many kids do on Christmas morning. (Source: Huffington Post.)

An outfit called Social Blade – phew, I started to write Sling Blade there for a moment – figures out (very roughly, and with a very wide range of estimates) just what YouTube channels are worth.

Not familiar with Social Blade?

Well neither was I.

But now I know:

Social Blade compiles data from YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram and uses the data to make statistical graphs and charts tracking progress and growth. We include information such as estimated earnings and future projections, providing both numerical data and graphs. Statistics are freely available to anyone using our website or smartphone apps. Social Blade currently tracks over 4 million YouTube channels and 1,000,000 Twitch channels. Social Blade has over 1,300,000 unique visitors every month. (Source: Social Blade.)

Well, now I know, more or less..

For one thing, I’d never heard of Twitch, either. (Video community for gamers.)

Anyhow, according to Social Blade,  if you’re into fun and games, there’s gold in them thar YouTube hills.

At DisneyCollectorBR – the top YouTube channel - someone unwraps toy boxes and tells us what she sees as she goes along. And she’s not just a DisneyCollector. She does Nickelodeon stuff. And My Little Pony. And something called Bubble Guppies Surprise Eggs. (Go have a look. I guess I can see why this would be mesmerizing, in a goof-ball TeleTubbies kind of way….)

Still, it’s hard to believe that someone can make (in Social Blade’s estimate) between $1.5 and $23.4 million a year peeling the foil off a hollow chocolate egg, cracking the egg open, and show-and-telling us that there are stickers inside.

Sure, Google takes a hefty cut. But even after their skimming around 45 percent off the top, there’s a lot of dough to be had showing off Frozen themed Play-Doh.

PewDiePie, it almost goes without saying, I just do not get. In fact, it makes someone opening Bubble Guppies eggs almost make sense. But he hauls in $1.2 and $18.9 with his funny (?), often video-game related, videos. And, according to wikipedia;:

As of February 2015, the PewDiePie channel has received over 7.9 billion video views.

Make that 7.9 billion and one. (Although I may not count, as I couldn’t actually make it through one.)

Huffington Post provides an entire list of big-buckers, but I couldn’t bring myself to click through all of them.

Partially, that’s because I don’t give a hoot about Minecraft.

Okay, I did take a peek at the guy playing with Play-Doh. But WTF: someone might be making between $700K and $11.5M doing that?

I used to think that I at least vaguely understood how the world worked, but no more.

Just to think that there’s an audience for watching folks unwrap chocolate eggs, take Barbies out of boxes, roll Play-Doh around in their hands. Let alone someone willing to pay your for it.

Hey, a light bulb just went off in my previously thick head.

I didn’t look that far into the guy who plays with Play-Doh, so there’s a possibility that he hasn’t’ already thought of the really cool thing where you merge red and yellow Play-Doh to get orange, and blue and red Play-Doh to make purple.

This is stuff we had to do back in the day when Play-Doh came in only three colors plus white, and if you wanted orange, green, or purple, you had to make your own orange, green, and purple.

Surely there’s an audience for this out there.

Maybe it’s not to late…

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Thanks to my sister Trish for sending this one my way.