Network Marketing vs. Actors vs. Youtubers (Who Makes More Money?)
Today I’m going to be doing a financial comparison between YouTube Influencers, Actors, and Network Marketing Professionals.
It just so happens that a buddy of mine is at the top of his game in the theater industry. He happened to have access to the theater union and was able to show me all of the statistics in this industry. That’s how this came about.
I don’t mean to compare it from any other perspective. I love actors. I love YouTubers. Please understand this explanation doesn’t have anything to do with me comparing them in a negative way.
I’m sharing this with you because once I saw the data, I noticed something that was extremely fascinating when I looked across all industries.
How Sales Reps Earn Money
Let me first start with a basic concept. In sales, this is what we do: We generate a lead, we contact with setting an appointment, we do a presentation, we follow up and we get customers. If you’ve been following me for a while now, you’re already familiar with this Pipeline.
In every industry where sales are involved, people have to do the Pipeline. In an earlier video, we examined the Real Estate industry compared to Network Marketing, because realtors do the Pipeline.
With people who have a YouTube channel, the Pipeline categories are still the same, but the definitions of each are slightly different. I’ll explain.
With YouTube, the Pipeline is interesting because a YouTuber has to generate leads by consistently delivering content. When a video gets a lot of engagement with likes and shares, the video will appear on related topics and searches in Google and YouTube. So for example, if you released a video about network marketing and it had excellent engagement, your video would show up in the related topics or recommended videos when someone searches for “network marketing.” The goal of course is driving traffic to your video so that you can get subscribers, which would be the leads.
Contact for a YouTuber is like what I’m doing by releasing a new video. I set an appointment by being consistent, and delivering them each week. The presentation is the education and content in the video. There isn’t really a follow-up for a YouTuber, and people who watch my videos are not really a paying customer. They’re a viewing customer.
That’s the way that YouTube works. Now, some YouTubers can monetize their channel by showing ads. I do not monetize my channel because it’s not my goal. I’m really genuinely just trying to pass on (because I promise I will retire one day) to everybody my knowledge of the 32 years I’ve been in the industry. I’ve earned six to seven-figure incomes for 32 years. I just want to pass on what the network marketing industry is, and what people say about it and things like that. I’m not here to monetize the brand of Network Marketing Power. It is really just a pass-on of the knowledge that I’ve learned over the years.
YouTubers and Actors Compared to Network Marketing
This video is a continuation of the “who makes more money” series. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a good buddy who is a top theater actor, and he was able to get the latest stats from the actors union about what percentage of actors actually “make it” financially.
And at the same time, my team dug into the world of YouTube influencers, and people who make money with their videos from advertising.
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what the numbers showed when we lined them up against network marketing. Here it is all the way across the board.
The first thing I want you to notice is that every category starts with 710,000 people. If you look at the very first line in the image above, you’ll see that each category starts with this number of people.
The reason I started with this number in all categories is because of an earlier video I did where I compared real estate, and you have to have 710,000 people to start the pre-course to generate 50,000 new real estate agents per year.
That was where I started, and to compare other industries across the board, we need to start with the same number of people in each industry, so that is why we’re starting at 710,000 actors, or YouTube influencers, or real estate agents, or network marketers.
Here’s what the data shows.
YouTube has probably the worst compensation plan I’ve ever seen, if you’re doing it as a side hustle or if you’re doing it to make money. To make money, you have to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in order to be eligible to earn one-seventh of a penny.
Whoo! Let’s go to the bank!
What does that mean? Eligible. That’s what I was talking about when I said sometimes your content isn’t what somebody is going to run ads for. And so you become eligible for one-seventh of a penny.
So the data shows that 12.9% of YouTubers who are eligible to earn one-seventh of a penny.
Only 0.05% of YouTubers, or 366 people, earned $57,000 a year. Compared to Network Marketing, 7.5% or 53,000 people earned $57,000. And in acting it’s 0.4% making at least $57,000 per year.
It’s pretty much very similar depending upon what the process is to get there. Up at the top of the chart, the person starts the journey, and as you go down, each row is how many people complete different parts of it.
Continuing on, 0.04% of YouTubers, or 275 of them are going to make $75,000 a year, and in acting only 2000 people are going to earn $75,000 a year. In network marketing 25,000 will earn $75,000 a year.
And the numbers continue to get smaller – the more money that is made, the fewer people there are making the money. 0.026%, or 183 people will earn $110,000 in YouTube, compared to acting, which is 10 times more: 0.1%, or 1,000 people earn $100,000 a year. In network marketing 14,000 people would earn $110,000 a year or more.
Do Your Dream
Now that you’ve seen the numbers compared to Network Marketing, I want to just say that I applaud all entrepreneurs. Anyone who is going to hustle and make some extra money and do something on their own….I respect that. If you want to start your own YouTube channel? Great! Do your dream. That’s really what I always say. Do your dream, do your dream, do your dream.
I did not wake up one day and say, “I want to join network marketing.” That’s not how it happened for me. I was in a situation where I needed to make money, to go to settlement on a house. I underestimated the cost of closing.
So I answered an ad in a newspaper. I didn’t even know what network marketing was. I just jumped in and gosh, it ended up making me a side hustle kind of money that then grew and grew and grew and grew!
It wasn’t necessarily the dream that I had, because every single thing that I dreamed of doing, I had already done. But it hit a point where I needed money. What I wanted was something that would make me a lot of money. That’s what I wanted.
When I was in school, the school guidance counselor asked me, “What do you want to grow up and be?”
I said, “I want to weld underwater.”
He said, “What?”
I said, “I want to weld underwater.”
He said to me, “Well, we’ll try to find how that can happen.”
He came back and said, “I found a welding school out of Florida and it’s going to be $100,000 and Tim, I know your family and I know you cannot afford that.”
I said, “What do I do now?”
He said, “Well, you’re going to have to choose something else.”
And I said, “That’s not what I want to do. I want to do underwater welding.”
It just so happens that I was in a vocational school and somebody happened to come in and said that he just joined the Navy. I thought, “Hmm, does the Navy have diving school?” I chased down his recruiter and he said, “Yeah, we do.” And so that’s how I figured out how to go after my dream of going to underwater welding school.
So, go after your dream. My dream didn’t even include network marketing in it. But when I was in the Navy and needed to buy the house, I needed money. Network Marketing was a solution to make money. And once I discovered Network Marketing I fell in love with it because I just have never seen anything better.
Do the Pipeline
The main reason that I’m doing the “who makes more money” comparisons is because it really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in – it all comes down to using the Pipeline.
Take acting for example. To make money as an actor/actress, then you have to have someone who is doing the Pipeline. First, you’ve got to do your part at learning the different pieces to get good at acting. You’ve got to have an agent who’s getting you gigs. That is the quantity across this line. They’ve got to generate a lead. They have to contact the person. They have to set an appointment to show who you are and your skills and abilities, and then the agent follows up and then you get hired.
That Pipeline has to be done in all situations. Sometimes the reason an actor/actress doesn’t get cast for a certain role it isn’t due to the lack of talent. It’s the lack of the quantity across the pipeline by the agent, or by the person (if they don’t have an agent).
That’s what I’m trying to show you. So many people look at math and say, “Math is boss.” No, it’s not the “failure rates.” They’re always looking and saying, “Oh, only the 0.1% make it in acting,” or, “Only the 0.02% make it here.”
I tell you, if you understand the sub components, the components that make these numbers, then you are the boss. But if you just go by numbers and say, “Oh, I’m just not that good,” then of course you’re not going to get into those higher income levels. My advice to you– Just get good!
Get Good at the Pipeline, There’s No Such Thing as a “Natural”
There has always been this crazy discussion that people like to have with me. They will say, “Tim, you’re a natural,” and it’s all I can do to not do a roundhouse kick to their forehead.
I just can’t even fathom somebody thinking that I just “got there.” I worked. I worked hard. I had to learn. I was the shyest guy in the universe. I didn’t know how to generate a lead. Are you kidding me? I grew up in a little small town in Tennessee. I knocked on doors and I mowed yards. I didn’t know anything about marketing; I didn’t know anything about sales when I started in Network Marketing.
When somebody says “most people fail” in any industry, or they say “only a few succeed” or “IT doesn’t work.”
What is IT?
IT isn’t network marketing.
IT isn’t acting.
IT isn’t YouTube.
It’s you didn’t do enough quantity across the pipeline. That’s what IT is. There ain’t no more.
I do have other comparisons coming. I’ve got the team working on these around the clock because I really want to get you the information. It’s hard to get this data. It really is. It’s hidden.
It’s easy to see why people have been so opinionated on network marketing because there weren’t any comparisons.(until now!) We had to dig really deep to find these things, but the numbers are there and, as they say, they don’t lie.
When you look across the bottom of the board on who’s making the big incomes, you’re always going to see that 1%, or 2%.
The Law of the Very Few
When you look at any income earned from any company or the network marketing space, you’re going to see if you sorted it, a whole bunch of these people at the bottom (this also looks just like the IRS income tax figures), and then you’ll get a little spike and you’ll get a little spike. That goes for a little bit, and then it spikes a little bit more and then it starts spiking a little bit more, until at the end it spikes up into very high incomes.
Management consultant Joseph M. Juran, way back in 1896, saw this phenomenon and called it “The Law of the Vital Few.” It’s also known as the Pareto Principle.
Following this principle, 80% are going to sit in the low income group. 20% are going to sit in the high income area. When you tear out the 20%, you can do that math again. And then the 20% of the 20% are in the high income bracket of that group.
If you’re talking about business ownership, if you’re talking about solo entrepreneurship, if you’re talking about network marketing, if you’re talking about YouTube, if you’re talking about acting, if you’re talking about anything that’s solo, you’re going to see that there are a few, around 0.1%, who are going to be making the most.
Then you’re going to see a few making slightly less income below that, and then a few slightly below that, and it begins to fall off.
What I have absolutely committed to doing is taking the mystery out of why. That is why the Pipeline is essential, because now you know – if you’re still in the low income category after this, well, then it’s your fault. Really.
Because what this data shows us is that while the data is mathematically true, these comparisons have little to do with real estate, or YouTube or Acting, or Network Marketing, and has EVERYTHING to do with the sub-components that make money.
So, learn the Pipeline. Do quantity across the Pipeline. Do your Dream. That’s how you get what you want in life.
Now, it’s your turn. Tell me what you think about this. I’d love to know your thoughts or what you learned. Let me know in the comments below.
P.S. If you don’t have a team, haven’t recruited anyone (or less than 10 people), this is THE course you should get – Network Marketing Training Course
