Hi, and welcome to this week's Influencer Dashboard newsletter!
This is Amanda Perelli, and I'll be briefing you on what's new in the business of influencers and creators.
This week, my colleague Dan Whateley took readers inside the new TikTok talent company, TalentX Entertainment.
TikTok, the short-form video app, has become one of the hottest social platforms among Generation Zers. With the sudden rise in popularity, the need for talent-management firms dedicated to helping these new teen creators has expanded.
Los Angeles-based TalentX has a current roster of 32 influencers, most of whom are primarily TikTokkers.
"These guys are the next generation of YouTubers, like it or not," said Michael Gruen, vice president of talent. "When you put a video with their name in the headlines, they're going to get a 100,000 views. It's a phenomenon that no one's taking advantage of."
TalentX even has its own TikTok "collab house," a Bel Air mansion called The Sway House where six of its influencer clients live and make videos (similar to the popular LA home Hype House). These influencers don't have to pay rent, but they do have to hit their content quotas, Dan reported.
TalentX also explained how much money its creators charge brands for sponsored videos on TikTok versus YouTube.
Check out the full post inside TalentX and its content creation hub, Sway LA, here.
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How Bon Appétit built its wildly popular YouTube channel, which has turned its editors into social-media stars
Since the rise of social media, magazines and digital-media publications have fought to adapt their video efforts to new mediums.
While some magazine brands have failed to keep up, Bon Appétit has found success by launching shows that live on YouTube, and accumulate millions of views, attracting new audiences and revenue streams.
I spoke to the team behind Bon Appétit's viral YouTube channel, which has 5 million subscribers.
Contributing food editor and pastry chef, Claire Saffitz, is the star of the YouTube channel's most popular show, "Gourmet Makes," which averages between 3 million and 5 million views an episode.
But she didn't set out to become a YouTube star, she told me.
Read the full post on how Bon Appétit's channel turned editors like Saffitz into social-media stars.
YouTube stars Rhett and Link explain how algorithm changes supercharged their business to an estimated $17.5 million in yearly income
The YouTube pair Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal were some of the early stars on the platform, but their business didn't kick into overdrive until nearly a decade later.
Dan spoke to McLaughlin and Neal who said everything changed for them in 2015, when YouTube shifted its algorithm to reward long-form videos.
The duo, who were making an estimated $17.5 million per year as of June, according to Forbes, now run an 80-person business, Mythical Entertainment.
Read the full post on McLaughlin and Neal's YouTube powerhouse Mythical Entertainment.
How YouTube stars Zane Hijazi and Heath Hussar used their internet fame to sell $590,000 in podcast ads in 3 months
Besides YouTube, podcasting can be another lucrative way for an influencer to build a digital business.
Social-media stars Zane Hijazi and Heath Hussar - who first found internet stardom on Vine - recently launched a podcast, "Zane and Heath: Unfiltered."
My colleague Alyssa Meyers spoke to Hijazi and Hussar about their podcast and they told her that they work with HiStudios, a new podcast network focused on sports and influencer content, to sell ads and promote their show on YouTube as well as podcast platforms.
Hijazi and Hussar said the show has enabled them to grow their business beyond YouTube.
They also sold a whopping $590,000 in podcast ads in three months.
Check out the full post how Hijazi and Hussar built a successful influencer podcast, here.
How much money do YouTube stars earn in a year? 4 creators reveal what the platform paid them in 2019.
To officially wrap up 2019, I took a look at how much four YouTube creators with completely different channels earned from Google-placed ads last year.
From our previous coverage, we've learned that how much money a YouTube creator makes varies wildly depending on a number of factors, like a video's watch time, length, and viewer demographic.
I spoke to four YouTube influencers - Shelby Church, Kevin David, Sienna Santer, and Andrei Jikh - who broke down how much money YouTube paid them for the entire year of 2019.
In general, business-related YouTube channels earn more per 1,000 views (called the CPM rate) compared with other types.
For instance, Kevin David (856,000 subscribers), posts videos about how to make money online and on Amazon. He told me that his YouTube channel earned over $400,000 in 2019 from the ads in his videos.
Read the full post to see how much each of these 4 influencers earned in 2019 from ads.
Creator Spotlight: Jared Watney
This week, I'm highlighting Jared Watney and his YouTube channel for our Creator Spotlight.
Similar to Bravo's reality series "Below Deck," Watney's YouTube channel takes viewers inside the world of luxury yachts - and what it's like to work on one.
Watney, who is from South Africa, launched his YouTube channel as a way to share his experience living and working on a yacht. His most popular videos include what it's like to work on a yacht in bad weather, with 1 million views, and inside crew cabins.
He has 119,000 subscribers on YouTube and the oldest video on his channel is a vlog from 2016.
You can check out Watney's YouTube channel, here.
Send tips or feedback to me at aperelli@businessinsider.com.
Here's what else we're reading:
The Photographer of Choice for Influencers Is Everywhere: New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz featured the choice photographer for LA influencers, Bryant Eslava. He is known for working with the biggest social-media stars, like David Dobrik and Emma Chamberlain.
Tana Mongeau's new $48 perfume sold out in 76 minutes after she debuted a commercial about her multiple personalities: Kat Tenbarge, from Insider, reported on YouTube star Tana Mongeau's fragrance release last week, which quickly sold out on the ecommerce site Shopify.
The first download numbers for Byte, the app heralded as Vine 2.0, show it still has a long way to go to catch up to TikTok: Paige Leskin, from Business Insider, broke down the new app Byte, which has been dubbed the successor to defunct video-sharing app Vine and launched to the public last week.
