good morning john so as you know i run a youtube company that makes educational videos and then gives them away it's not a super great business model but it does work most times the company continues to slowly grow making more things doing more stuff we have around 50 employees now you might find yourself asking how does that work and that's a great question i imagine complexly to be a project of nerdfighteria this is very much where complexly started and so if you are curious i would like to share how we make ends meet in this very new weird world first youtubers make 55 of the money that is made by the ads running on our content youtube also shares 55 of the money they make from youtube premium after their record labels take their cut which if you are curious turns out to be significantly more than an ad supported view but most people aren't signed up for premium so that's around three percent of complexity's revenue while youtube ads are around 28 number two grants a lot of people recognize that our content specifically crash course just generates a whole lot more value than it could ever capture like maybe millions of times more value and some of those people are wealthy or they work for wealthy people or institutions they want people to have access to great resources and so they give us money to make them now grants do sometimes have strings attached some are extra stringy but we always make it very clear that they can give us input and give us ideas but we are in charge of what gets created now this can fluctuate a ton from year to year but last year grants were responsible for about the same amount of revenue as youtube was at 29 coming in at just under 20 is crowdfunding so because people know that basically everything that we do is not sustainable given the current business models of internet content they give us money either through our patreons or through the crash course i think everybody supports things for different reasons but i think there's like a mix of like a selfish thing where like i want this content to exist so i will pay for it and more of a selfless thing which is that like i will pay for this so that all people can have access to it now crowdfunding does not come with any strings at all where advertising or grants could so not only does it make our stuff possible i think it makes it better because we get to make all the choices fourth at fourteen percent of our revenue we also sell our own ads so like policy genius on dear hank and john or curiosity stream on scishow that comes out of our internal sales team it's more of a pain in the butt but the ad rates are higher and we don't have to split it with anybody number five we also license our content to various platforms like it's all available for free but some people want our content like curiosity stream has a lot of crash course on it and we get paid for that altogether all of the licensing last year was about five percent of the company's revenue and last at two percent which is not nothing but it is two percent is physical product just bringing high quality things that provide value into people's lives like the micro cosmos microscope which i'm looking at but you can't see and we'd like to do more stuff like that which is why get this we are selling five calendars for five of our shows the eons and bizarre beasts calendars features the best of the original art created for those shows the micro cosmos calendar features the microphotography of james weiss our master of microscopes and the scishow and scishow space calendars just showcase the variety and beauty of our world and of worlds in our solar system every calendar is printed on high quality people in the us they ship everywhere and they feature not just beautiful images but also lots of interesting facts about those images because we cannot stop ourselves from sharing how cool the world is every show it complexly has a really different mix of how it makes itself sustainable some of our shows don't break even for a pretty long time some of them never do and we end up canceling them and it's hard and it's weird and it often feels like we don't know what we're doing but there's a reason for that which is that no one's done this before like companies like this didn't exist 10 years ago when complexity started we're just very busy trying things out seeing what works just using the talents and skills of people on the team to make things that are great and that we think people will like so how about this i come back next year and i tell you whether or not that two percent changed because maybe you needed a calendar and we made some great ones and they are available at complexitycalendars.com john i'll see you on tuesday
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