Ben Huberman points out that you can have millions of followers on YouTube and still be flat broke.  As someone who has never had millions of followers, I can say with certainty that having less than millions of followers on YouTube will likely have the same result.

It’s really no surprise. The only way to make money off of content is to own your own infrastructure, and the gorillas in the social networking background are making money off of other people’s content. OPC. And that allows them to negotiate better advertising rates than you, lowly YouTube channel owner, can negotiate.

Welcome to publishing.