The Rise And Fall Of Make Money Online YouTubers

In 2018, a faceless YouTube channel could upload a video titled “10 websites to make $100 per day” and pull tens of thousands of views within the first few hours. In 2024, that same keyword generates a fraction of those views. Something broke. This video is Alston’s attempt to explain exactly what happened to the make money online YouTube niche, why the data is so bad, and what it actually means for someone who is still trying to find a real path to online income.

Before building Platform Proof, Alston spent hours watching make money online YouTube channels trying to find something that would actually work. He tried what they said. He got little to no results. Eventually he found something that did work, and it had nothing to do with the methods being promoted in those videos. He covers that at the end of this post. But first, you need to understand what actually happened to this niche and why the numbers look the way they do today.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The three forces that built the make money online YouTube niche from 2010 to 2020
Real view-to-subscriber ratio data from over 70 channels, including Alston’s own numbers
Seven specific reasons the niche collapsed and why most creators in it are now invisible
How copy-pasta, AI tools, and inflated income claims destroyed viewer trust across the entire category
What Coffeezilla, Spencer Cornelia, and Mike Winnet changed about how audiences approach this content
The method Alston actually used to generate 500,000+ views and make real money in a simple niche
How to find the right online income path for your specific skills and situation at finder.platformproof.com

The Golden Era: How Make Money Online YouTube Built Itself From 2010 to 2020

The oldest make money online video Alston could find was a simple 9-minute video from Pat Flynn, uploaded in 2010. No flashy thumbnail. No jump cuts. No B-roll. The production was basic because YouTube itself was basic back then. The thumbnail did not try to reach into your eyes and grab you. The video appeared to be genuinely helpful, and that was considered enough. At the time, this was the normal standard for the platform.

Fourteen years ago, the internet was a completely different world. The average global internet speed was 2.8 megabytes per second. Verizon’s 5G network today is over 7,000 times faster than that. The iPhone had already been invented, but it was essentially a larger iPod that also made phone calls. Most people were still figuring out what the internet was even for. The idea of building a full-time income online was genuinely foreign to most working adults.

Between 2010 and 2020, three forces combined to build the make money online YouTube niche into what it became. First, advertisers were willing to pay a premium to appear in front of make money online content. They had specific products to sell: software, tools, and online courses aimed directly at people searching for income. Second, as internet speeds and smartphone adoption grew, more people became comfortable using the web for income, and the potential audience for this content kept expanding. Third, the basic human need to provide for a family never went away. When people were stressed about money, they turned to the most accessible resource available. By 2018, that resource was YouTube.

Why the YouTube Partner Program Made This Niche Especially Attractive

Most people do not realize that YouTube does not pay all creators at the same rate. The YouTube Partner Program pays based on what advertisers are willing to spend per video category. A video of a cat playing with a ball is entertaining, but advertisers cannot easily predict what the viewer wants or what they might buy. A make money online video is different. The viewer’s intent is obvious. They want income. That makes them a clear, high-value prospect for companies selling courses, software, and financial products.

The result was that make money online creators earned significantly more per thousand views than creators in most other categories. That premium was a magnet. Creators who might otherwise have made content about cooking, travel, or fitness saw the payout potential and pivoted toward teaching people how to make money online. The financial incentive was real, and it pulled a lot of people in who cared more about the payout than about whether their advice actually worked.

The Data: View-to-Subscriber Ratios Across 70+ Channels

Rather than just saying views are down in the niche, Alston ran the actual numbers. He looked at over 70 of the largest YouTube channels in the make money online space, including his own, and calculated what he calls the view-to-subscriber ratio for each channel. This metric is straightforward: take the number of views on a channel’s most recent video and divide it by total subscriber count. A higher percentage means more of your actual subscribers are watching your content. A lower percentage means your audience has largely stopped paying attention.

The average view-to-subscriber ratio across all make money online channels he studied was 0.62%. His own channel sat at 0.41%. That means fewer than 1 in 200 subscribers is watching the most recent video on a typical make money online channel. To put that number in context, the average view-to-subscriber ratio across all of YouTube sits somewhere between 7% and 12%. The make money online niche is running at roughly one-tenth to one-twentieth the engagement of a healthy YouTube channel. This is not a gut feeling or anecdote. It is a number.

For further comparison, Alston looked at channels outside the make money online niche. Kitboga, who has over 3.5 million subscribers, has a view-to-subscriber ratio of 1.28%. Audit the Audit, with 2.7 million subscribers, runs at 5.95%. Tommy G, with almost 2 million subscribers, hits 22%. These are normal YouTube channels with healthy engagement. The make money online niche, by comparison, is in a completely different category, and not in a good way. The numbers confirm what many creators in the space already suspect but rarely say out loud.

When Did It Fall? Seven Reasons the Make Money Online Niche Collapsed

The decline in the make money online YouTube niche coincided with COVID. While it is tempting to just say COVID broke it and move on, the reality is more specific. COVID was the trigger that accelerated several separate problems that were already building. Here are the seven reasons the niche fell, in the order they compounded on each other.

Reason 1: COVID Sent Everyone Home and They All Started Channels

In 2020, people were told to stay home. With no commute, no office, and mounting financial uncertainty, millions of people turned to YouTube looking for ways to generate income from home. Some of them tried what they saw and made it work. Many more realized that teaching people how to make money online was itself a business model. Almost overnight, the niche went from a few hundred creators to a few thousand. Anyone who had made even a small amount of money online suddenly became an expert and launched a YouTube channel to explain how they did it. The supply of content exploded while the quality per video dropped sharply.

Reason 2: Selling Shovels Was More Profitable Than Mining Gold

Mark Twain described the California gold rush of the 1840s with a quote that still applies today: during the gold rush, it is a good time to be in the pick and shovel business. The same logic played out in the make money online niche. While most viewers were trying to find income, the people making the videos quickly figured out that the real money was in selling courses and coaching to those viewers, not in actually implementing the methods being taught. The channel was no longer a side project. The channel became the business. And once that shift happened, the incentive structure for producing honest, useful content went away.

Reason 3: The Income Numbers Became Disconnected From Reality

Back in 2018, a video promising to show someone how to make $100 per day online was considered an aggressive claim. By the peak of the niche, that standard was completely abandoned. Thumbnails started displaying numbers like $19,725, $1,400,000 in profit, $900 per day, $8,327 per day, and $202,072.61 from faceless digital marketing on Instagram. The specificity of numbers like $202,072.61 was a psychological tactic. Why would someone invent such an oddly specific number? Because precise numbers feel real. The truth was that the numbers were getting bigger because competition for attention demanded it. There was no audit. No accountability. And the audience started catching on.

Alston makes a point worth noting here: if someone is genuinely making $100 per day online with consistency, they probably do not need YouTube. They need a personal mentor to help them scale from there. The videos promising massive income were aimed at people in the earliest stages of their journey, who had no way to evaluate whether the claims were realistic. That audience trust was spent quickly once people started trying and failing to replicate what they saw.

Reason 4: Copy-Pasta Replaced Every Form of Original Work

When a make money online video hit 19,000 views, other creators would immediately go out and make the exact same video with the exact same title and a nearly identical thumbnail. This became a strategy that was openly taught. One creator, before he deleted his channel, built an audience around this approach. The workflow he taught looked like this: find a viral video in the make money online niche, download the script, put it through an article spinner, hire a voiceover artist to read the rewritten version, add stock footage, and upload it as your own video.

The results were visible in search results. If you search “earn $2 every 60 seconds” on YouTube today, you can find ten different videos with that exact title from ten different channels. The copy-pasters did not even change the title. They uploaded the same video concept over and over, each version slightly blurrier than the last, each one adding more noise and less value to the viewer looking for real information. This flooded the niche with content that had no original thinking behind it and trained the audience to distrust the category entirely.

Reason 5: Fake Guru Callouts Made the Entire Niche Suspect

One side effect of all the inflated claims and copied content was the rise of investigative channels built specifically to expose misleading gurus. Coffeezilla, Spencer Cornelia, and Mike Winnet built large, loyal audiences by calling out unethical claims, fake income screenshots, and misleading course promises in the online business space. Their work was and continues to be a genuine public service. But it had an unintended consequence for honest creators in the niche.

Once audiences had been burned by fake gurus and exposed to hours of investigative content showing how common the deception was, they started approaching all make money online content with a default assumption of fraud. If you were a creator trying to share something real and useful, you were competing not just against other content but against an audience that had been trained to assume you were probably running a scam. Starting from a position of assumed guilt is a very hard position to build a channel from.

Reason 6: Short-Form Video Fractured the Audience Across Platforms

Before 2020, YouTube was essentially the only major platform for video content. If you wanted to reach an audience through video, you had to build on YouTube. Videos had to be long enough to feel substantive, and you had to look reasonably professional to be taken seriously. Then TikTok arrived and changed all of that. Short vertical videos meant faster consumption, lower production barriers, a completely different rhythm, and an entirely different discovery system. The attention that used to flow toward a 12-minute YouTube explainer got split across dozens of platforms and formats.

The make money online marketers followed their audience to these new platforms and brought the same copy-pasta tactics with them. A creator could now find a viral video, rip the script, and reproduce it as a 60-second vertical video. The result was that the same low-quality, high-claim content that had flooded YouTube now also flooded TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. No single video could accumulate the view counts that were normal in 2019, because the audience was spread thinner across more surfaces than ever before.

Reason 7: AI Made Mass Production Instant and Killed Originality Entirely

The final blow came from AI content tools. What used to take hours now takes minutes. Alston describes what original content creation required before AI: you had to either think of or steal an idea, write or rewrite a script, either record it yourself or hire someone, add B-roll, and then upload. Each of those steps took time and created at least some barrier to lazy duplication. AI removed every one of those barriers at once.

There is now software that lets you paste a link, and it produces either a complete script or a finished video. The AI voices are good enough for most viewers. The scripts are passable. The motion graphics are getting better every month. What was already a saturated niche filled with copy-pasta content became a niche where anyone could produce dozens of videos per week with almost no effort or original thought involved. For honest creators who put hours into original work, the math stopped making sense. Why spend three hours on one real video when a competitor can generate ten AI-produced videos in the same window?

This is the reason Alston says genuine content creators are leaving YouTube. The original effort no longer has the competitive advantage it once had in the make money online niche, because the floor for production dropped to nearly zero. The question of what happens next depends entirely on what YouTube, advertisers, and viewers decide to reward. YouTube is a business, and a soulless one at that. It does not care about the creator or the viewer. It cares about revenue. If AI content starts pulling ad spend down, the platform will move against it quickly. But if advertisers and viewers keep rewarding it, more AI content will come.

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What Actually Worked: The Security Camera Guy Story

After watching hours of make money online content and getting little to no results from what was being taught, Alston eventually found something that worked. It was not a trending method, a viral hack, or someone else’s playbook. It came from a problem he noticed in his own neighborhood. High school-aged kids were going in and out of houses under construction nearby, and the concern that they might eventually break into his home pushed him to start researching home security cameras.

While doing that research, he stumbled into a specific sub-category: video doorbells. There were plenty of people searching for information about them, but very few videos or blog posts providing clear, specific answers to the questions people were asking. That gap was the opportunity. He launched a blog and YouTube channel called The Security Camera Guy, built entirely around sharing what he was learning about video doorbells and home security. That channel generated over 500,000 views and made real money, not from teaching people how to make money online, but from answering genuine questions about a product category he had personally researched.

The lesson Alston draws from that experience is direct: find something within your interest, hobby, passion, or skills. You do not need to teach other people how to make money online to make money online. You can build something useful in a completely ordinary niche if you find a real gap between what people are searching for and what is currently available. The niche does not have to be exciting. It just has to be real and underserved.

Honest Drawbacks: What This Approach Actually Requires

The niche-based content approach Alston describes is not fast. The Security Camera Guy channel did not produce overnight results. It took sustained effort over time before the views and income became meaningful. Anyone who tells you there is a fast path to consistent online income is almost certainly selling something tied to that claim. The honest version is slower, but it is also more durable. A channel or blog built around genuine expertise in a specific area does not get wiped out the way copy-pasta channels do, because the content is actually useful and hard to replicate at scale.

The other real requirement is that you need to pick a niche with actual search demand. Interest and passion are necessary starting points, but they are not sufficient on their own. You need people actively searching for answers in your area. That is the gap worth building into. If the demand is not there, even the best content does not get found. Alston found his gap by noticing what people were already looking for and what was missing from the existing results. That combination of personal interest and real demand is the starting condition that makes the rest of the work worth doing.

It is also worth being honest about scale. A niche channel on video doorbells is never going to compete with the view counts of a general entertainment channel. That is not the goal. The goal is to reach the specific people who are searching for what you know and to earn income by helping them. A smaller, more targeted audience that actually trusts you is worth considerably more than a large audience that does not believe anything you say. The make money online niche as it exists today is a cautionary example of what happens when creators choose scale and income claims over trust and usefulness.

Find Your X

The make money online YouTube niche fell because it became detached from real problems. Creators stopped solving specific issues for specific people and started competing for attention with inflated numbers and copied content. The path that actually works is the opposite: find a real gap in your area of interest, skill, or experience, and build content that genuinely answers the questions people are already asking. That is what Alston did with The Security Camera Guy. It is what works.

If you are not sure where your gap is, or which online income method fits your specific situation, the Platform Proof Finder can help you get a concrete starting point. Head to finder.platformproof.com to get a specific recommendation based on your skills and goals, instead of watching another video promising numbers that have nothing to do with where you actually are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the make money online YouTube niche completely dead?

Not completely, but the engagement numbers are genuinely bad. The average view-to-subscriber ratio across the niche is 0.62%, compared to a YouTube-wide average of 7% to 12%. Channels can still grow in this space, but the conditions that made it easy to accumulate views in 2018 no longer exist. The saturation, copy-pasta content, and AI-generated videos have made it significantly harder to build a loyal audience in the make money online niche today than it was five years ago.

Why does YouTube pay more for make money online content?

Because advertisers bid more for those viewers. Someone watching a video about making money online is an obvious prospect for courses, software, and financial tools. That clear purchase intent makes the viewer more valuable to advertisers than someone watching a cat video or a travel vlog, where the viewer’s goals and spending intent are harder to predict. Higher advertiser bids mean higher payouts per thousand views for creators in the niche.

What is a view-to-subscriber ratio and why does it matter?

It is the percentage of a channel’s subscribers who watch a given video. If a channel has 100,000 subscribers and their most recent video has 10,000 views, the ratio is 10%. The YouTube-wide average is between 7% and 12%. A ratio below 1%, which is where most make money online channels sit, means the vast majority of subscribers are not watching. This signals that the audience accumulated under conditions that no longer apply, or that subscribers have stopped trusting the content enough to engage with it.

Did COVID actually cause the make money online YouTube decline?

COVID triggered the flood of new creators but was not the only cause. The niche was already attracting low-quality content before 2020. COVID accelerated the oversupply by sending millions of people home with time, financial stress, and access to a camera. The resulting wave of new creators, combined with inflated income claims, copy-pasta content, the rise of investigative channels, short-form video competition, and later AI-generated videos, collectively drove the decline. COVID was the accelerant, not the root cause.

What is copy-pasta and how did it harm the niche?

Copy-pasta refers to duplicating another creator’s video almost exactly: same title, same thumbnail concept, same script run through a rewriting tool. It became a strategy that was openly taught as a legitimate business model. When a video performed well, dozens of channels would produce near-identical versions within days. This flooded the niche with repetitive, low-value content, made it nearly impossible for viewers to find original work, and taught the audience to stop trusting make money online content in general.

Who are Coffeezilla, Spencer Cornelia, and Mike Winnet?

They are investigative YouTube creators who built substantial audiences by exposing misleading claims, fake income screenshots, and dishonest marketing practices in the online business space. Coffeezilla in particular has become well-known for detailed investigations into prominent figures in the space. Their work made the broader audience more skeptical and better equipped to spot red flags, which raised the bar for honest creators but also made it harder to earn viewer trust even when the content is genuine and well-intentioned.

Does AI-generated content actually work for building a YouTube channel?

Short-term, some creators have used AI-generated content to accumulate views and subscriber counts. Long-term, the outcome depends on what YouTube, advertisers, and viewers choose to reward. YouTube is a business that responds to revenue signals. If advertisers pull spend from AI video channels because the audience is not converting, or if viewers stop watching, YouTube will move against AI content faster than most people expect. For anyone trying to build something durable, AI-generated content in the make money online niche is a fragile foundation with an uncertain shelf life.

How did Alston actually make money online?

He found a real gap between what people were searching for and what content existed to answer their questions. After watching hours of make money online videos and getting little to no results, he discovered that high school-aged kids were going in and out of houses under construction in his neighborhood. That concern pushed him to research home security cameras, where he found a specific sub-category (video doorbells) with strong search demand and weak existing content. He launched a blog and YouTube channel called The Security Camera Guy, which generated over 500,000 views and made income from a specific, useful, underserved topic that had nothing to do with teaching people how to make money online.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “The Rise And Fall Of Make Money Online YouTubers,” YouTube, 2024 (https://youtu.be/0uZzdHQbBu0)
View-to-subscriber ratio analysis: Alston’s original research across 70+ make money online YouTube channels
Comparison channels referenced: Kitboga (3.5M subscribers, 1.28% ratio), Audit the Audit (2.7M subscribers, 5.95% ratio), Tommy G (approximately 2M subscribers, 22% ratio)
Mark Twain, pick and shovel business quote (attributed, in reference to the California gold rush of the 1840s)
The Security Camera Guy: Alston’s first blog and YouTube channel focused on video doorbells and home security cameras, generating over 500,000 views
Pat Flynn’s earliest make money online video, uploaded to YouTube in 2010

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.