As my son and I fall deeper into the Minecraft hole, we came across a great set of videos on YouTube by paulsoaresjr, particularly his Survive and Thrive series which gives a good overview of playing Minecraft.
What's great about his videos is that they're family friendly. So many of the Minecraft videos we've tried to watch end up being a group of kids swearing at each other and making racist comments - it is the internet after all.
Example Video
You can click here to jump to the more interesting part of the video where he starts actually building his house, or watch the whole thing below.
Money in Minecraft
As of this post, he's got almost 670,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and that particular video has almost 900,000 plays.
I don't know what rate he's on with YouTube but using videos I've uploaded as a rough guide, let's say YouTube pays out around $0.005 (half a penny) per view. A video with 900,000 plays would give him $4,500. Not bad for 20 minutes worth of video.
But that's just one video in that particular series of 80, as of this posting, videos. One video in that series has nearly 3.5 million views or approx. $17,500 using my very rough calculations.
On average a video in the series ends up around 450,000 views - give or take. So 80 videos x 450,000 = 36,000,000 views x $0.005 = $180,000. Again, very rough and guestimatey math here.
Can You Make a Living on YouTube with Minecraft Videos?
The first video in the series was posted, if the data is correct, sometime in January, 2012. So $180,000 over the last 19 months isn't bad work if you can get it.
Except that's just that one series.
His Paul Plays Minecraft series has 43 videos with an average of 240,000 views. Using the same numbers as above, that's another $51,000.
He's got a whole ton of other videos - over 1,400 as of this post - and a lot of them have under 1,000 views. And I don't know what rate he's actually being paid by YouTube for the ads playing before his videos. Could be less than the $0.005 I'm guessing - but likely it's more.
Awesome
It's interesting times when someone can make money showing others how to do stuff in a video game - but how much different is it than somebody trying to make money showing others how to use apps on their Mac? And Paul does an amazing job of keeping the videos entertaining for both me and my 6yr old son.
Plus he gets to play with his sons which is all kinds of awesome.