Wow, what a year 2020 has been. Over the summer I took a long pause on my builds, podcast episodes and this newsletter. I was still hard at work (more on that in a second) but now I'm excited to be bringing all of that back, and (hopefully) better than before.
If you're getting this newsletter then you've signed up to receive in the past. The Makerspace Weekly is a weekly digest of all the cool things I’ve run across in the maker world as well as the projects and interviews from my shop. Feel free to opt out here at any time.
Alright let's get into it!
🖥️ I spent the majority of the summer working on my brand new course - Furniture Design in Fusion 360. Learn the design process to take your next furniture build from idea to finished plans that is instantly adjustable.
I also created a companion course CNC and CAM in Fusion 360. This builds on the Furniture Design course and walks you through how to create 2D and 3D toolpaths in Fusion 360.
Since you're a Makerspace Weekly subscriber use this link to get 25% off either or both courses.
😯Speaking of Fusion, Autodesk just rolled out a bunch of changes to the free license that has caused a pretty big stir in the maker community. I put out a video walking through all the changes and my thoughts. Bottom line, they likely won't really affect you unless you're in a manufacturing setting and optimizing for time.
🎃 With Halloween coming up we needed some new decorations around the house. I downloaded a 3D scan of the Haunted Mansion Sign from Disney World. Then I cut out with the CNC! I'll be making a full tutorial on the Fusion process later this week, but the build video is already live!
🚀If I had to do everything all over again I would want to work at Industrial Light and Magic. Especially in the hey day of practical effects. One of the reasons I have loved The Mandalorian so much is that it has that practical real world feel to everything on screen. A big part of that was the Razor Crest which ILM just put a video walking through the modeling and stop motion capture process!
🔫 Ever wanted to make your own NERF gun? How about one out of walnut and brass? The guys and gals over at Carbide 3D just put out this awesome Nerf style blaster! It really is amazing to see the things you can create with a small scale CNC. Plus they link to all the files and tool paths if you wanted to make the same thing.
👻 For the Haunted Mansion plaque I did a test cut on some cheap pink foam insulation. It's amazing how useful that material can be considering how cheap it is. A few years back Pfeiler Fabrication created a life size Slimer prop from Ghostbusters using a ton of pink foam insulation. He goes into the full build process over on Instructables.
Each week I want to feature a new maker that I've run across. My hope is to find people that might not be as well known (but I'll throw in some old favorites as well ;).
This week it's my internet friend Donovan from Once Upon a Workbench. He was actually on my podcast way back where we talked about his recent Millennium Falcon cockpit build (back then he was the Beardless Man).
While he is still beardless, Donovan leaned hard into the geekier side of making. His Ninjago LEGO builds have absolutely blown up over the last year.
But the main reason I wanted to feature him is his recent Zelda: Breath of the Wild Playhouse. This has been a long time coming and the attention to detail to both the build and build video is awesome!
I mean he has a health meter for picking up lumber at Lowes!
Donovan is also one of the hosts of the long running Making Geeks Podcast.
Be sure and give him a follow!
I want to test this section of the newsletter out to give some space to talk about ideas that intersect with the making world but also have bigger implications. This week let's talk about money and YouTube.
As I've gotten deeper into the career of being a "YouTuber" I'm always looking to see how other people are making it work. YouTube has the weird dichotomy of being very secretive AND very open. On a nearly weekly basis we are invited into people shops, homes and lives to see what they are up to. But we are left out of some of the most important conversations and decisions that happen behind the scenes.
Money is a big one, but thankfully more and more people have begun to share their experiences over the years making it easier to answer the age old 21st century question:
How do you make money on YouTube?
Linus Tech Tips, one of the biggest tech channels on the platform, recently put out a video that details how he earns a living. While he doesn't give exact numbers he does breakdown percentages:
A few people have done some back of the napkin math to get an estimate on how much he makes. Here is my best guess…
We can estimate the monthly amount he makes off of AdSense since we can take his average of 100 million YouTube views (per month) and multiply that by CPM (cost per thousand views). CPM can range widely depending on niche, channel size and load of other factors. I did a video early this year that pulled together all the numbers that people shared publicly and came up with a range of $1-30....which is big I know. But let's go with an average of $6.
That gives us a MONTHLY YouTube AdSense number of $600,000 (100,000 X $6). Now, if that is only 26% of total monthly revenue that gives us a total of roughly $2.3 million.
Which is pretty insane.
Now that isn't profit and Linus is in the top 1% of 1% on YouTube, but it's still a pretty staggering number.
The awesome DIY duo Evan and Kateyln broke down similar percentages on their recent podcast.
The real important takeaway is how many different revenue sources they are pulling from. The ability to diversify seems to be a key to anyone looking to make a long standing career out of online content. I know for my own business those varying sources of income is something I want to continue to work on.
So what about you? Do you create online content or run a small business, do you find something similar?
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Also if you come across anything interesting let me know, just hit reply to this newsletter to send it my way.
