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All you need to know in 1 visual, and yes that’s monthly, not yearly :
from https://substack.com/home/post/p-160984454
Compare that to the average teacher in most countries, including countries like Finland or Luxembourg which pay their teachers quite well.
Is that an average/median OnlyFans creator, or one of the ones who are considered successful?
Edit: Oh, that’s actually the creator from the post. TBH that seems like really intimate information, in a different way than whatever she’s probably doing on OnlyFans.
The channel is real:
pornhub.com/zara-dar(And I don’t want that other site in my history, so I’m not looking it up.)
oh yeah, only way Im browsing youtube is with a vpn and incognito on
lol
good work censoring one of the names
She’s literally a public figure posting for money. You can see her name below. Obviously the person who censored it doesn’t understand the topics of her content.
…you should get your sarcasm detector to the shop…
To compare this to music streaming, I have a couple of tracks with ~4 million listens, and they each made ~$20.
Almost 3x higher pay per million views, but that specific PH video has less than 5% of the total views of YT
This is between stages 3 and 4:
wiki/Enshittification
The fourth stage is to run away with the money, leaving stockholders and investors with a failed company in their hands which they can’t bring back from the dead because both users and business partners hate it.
stage 5: revolution - overthrow the oppressive corporate system; nationalize all monopolies, split them into different smaller companies, give those companies to the workers who will collectivize them. seriously!
Doesn’t seem like she is doing this but watching a coding tutorial with a topless girl presenting it would be much more fun. I wonder if there is a market for this
True story.
A while back I needed to learn how to tie a necktie in a double Windsor knot. Looked for some videos.
Found one with a hot girl in lingerie showing me how.
I watched it twelve times, then found another video with an old man demonstrating.
Was the old man in lingerie too?
Narrator: He was
I walked into that one, didn’t I?
Take your upvote, you magnificent swine.
Decades ago ago there was a series of videos of girls teaching calculus. For example they had a girl lay down on her back and then described how to use integrals to determine the area of her boobs.
Reminds me of a math rhythm my older brother taught me when we were teens
You subtract the clothes
You add the bed
You divide the legs
And then you multiplyThis was a whole video series, I think like 6 parts. The described Calculus using girls bodies.
lol, that’s amusing.
I remember a sexy video teaching how to do CPR. Oh dang, found it https://youtu.be/aWNEU6bIJsk 100% sure its a reupload, I remember seeing is like, 15+ years ago (PSA: dont do CPR while sitting on top of the person please)
We aren’t that base.
Are we?
Uh, guys?
During the inception of image algorithms all the engineers started to use a playboy model.
And then kept using it for an extremely long time until basically forced to stop lol.
There’s a BobbyBroccoli video on the topic, and it’s pretty interesting.
Naked News
Problem with them was the bolt ons were way too common. Otherwise, they are the best objective news in Canada!
I watched that years ago and I’ve never been less turned on watching someone strip. It was just so incredibly dry and lifeless.
That must’ve been why YT allowed it
I gonna teach my wife how to install linux, gimme a month!
Take one piece of clothing off every time she gets a question right
But why should I do that when she is on camera? 🤔
deleted by creator
Maybe she’ll get flagged for appropriate content.
Hope not, that would be a crushing blow! Since I generally boycott YT, I checked out Zara Dar’s What is a Neural Network. It’s a good overview, and well presented. Ah, a look there’s a part 2. It would be great if she could hit 1M views on ProhNub, as a result of this post. Only 207K over the past year, with 2K updoots.
Since people are probably not going to PH to search for this, I wonder if she gets views from people with some kind of autoplay.
Why do you suppose people won’t go to PH? Here’s the link: https://www.pornhub.com/model/zara-dar
Also, she’s not the only one. At some points, Pornhub crew joked about entering competition with YT and they really don’t mind non-porn content.
Theres defintely some guys out there edging to her cleavage while shes talking
Clothing fetish is a thing
Hey, musicians, Pornhub pays better than Spotify!
Wheeler Walker Jr. released music out there.
Her name is crossed out in the post, but not her screenshots….
Weird.
Also why we hiding the name of the YouTuber? Presumably they actually want people to find their content otherwise they wouldn’t have uploaded it.
This self-censoring epidemic is getting stupid.
Having to use a VPN to learn about neural networks feels somewhat dystopian.
WTF I had no idea the CPM had gotten that low. $1 per thousand views for however many ads are in each video is practically nothing.
The more resistant to clicking ads we get the less each ad is worth to the corporate ad buyer and the more ads the services want to jam in to get their profits.
The part I struggle to understand is why corporate ad buyers are okay with the fraud that the big tech companies seemingly routinely get caught on. Famous example being pivot to video on Facebook where they just cooked the books to sell the concept.
1 million users is success.
It also pays bellow the average wage
I mean how many of those ad views translates into someone buying something?
Probably just below the cost to buy a thousand views.
CPM for a STEM video.
This is another sign of how youtube’s story of “we’ve never made a profit” is bogus. More and more organisations are advertising on youtube, youtube is pushing the limits on the amount of advertising that viewers can stand & at the same time they’ve started paying creators less.
It looks like they’ve really started abusing their market position in the last few years: more income and less expenditure. And it’s probably no coincidence that there are no financial figures for youtube alone.
Someone did the math and estimated YouTube would cost $2bn in cloud costs (i.e. no creator payments) if hosted on AWS.
AWS is incredibly expensive, if you’re hosting something like GitHub or Netflix on them instead of just owning the servers, you’re incredibly dumb
Ok, what are the alternatives? A fully kitted out server rack, switches, redundancy, CPUs, multiple drives, backup storage or tapes, backup batteries, own power supply, software and licenses can cost as much as a new mid sized car? Asking for a friend…
At the scale of one of the top websites by daily active users, owning your own infrastructure is absolutely cheaper than just throwing it on AWS. At a more realistic smaller scale where you might exceed the bandwidth available for your own hardware, there’s also the option of a hybrid setup where your content is mainly hosted on hardware that you control and then it automatically scales out to AWS or similar when demand spikes.
There’s really tons of ways to make web apps and server infrastructure cheaper than just renting it from a cloud provider, but many orgs lack the vision and drive to do so and just fork money over to [insert hyperscaler here] and watch their app go down when that hyperscaler goes down. I really question this mentality especially when the same organization has constant discussions about not liking how large their cloud provider bills are
One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware. AWS allows you to pay more but have a predictable constant cost.
But I think that you’re right that it’s lack of vision. Everyone’s following the VC-backed company path, where it doesn’t make sense to save money for next year because we’ll be selling some entirely new company then.
One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware
Yes this is absolutely a value proposition that CTOs/CIOs/IT Dept Heads need to be considering. You’re not just paying for the VMs and storage, you’re also paying to outsource all of the hardware and some of the configuration work, however you still need admins to manage all of the VMs and configs. If that labor savings is actually enough to cover the immensely increased cost of cloud resources over local/colocated resources that you own (the infrastructure costs are pretty minimal in comparison) than awesome, more power to you.
I really think the biggest value is putting all of your baseline compute in hardware that you own, whether on-prem or colocated, them if you need bursts of resources place that in the cloud. With hardware you own you can spin up temporary VMs, you can keep legacy VMs around, you can fling data around with impunity. These are all tasks that have real costs in the cloud that they will happily bill you for.
But your owned hardware is a set quantity, so if you are rapidly hiring a thousand people or bringing in a new organization or have publicly facing services seeing immeense growth or anything like that and need more capacity immediately, you can’t. It can easily take weeks to bring more servers online even in a rush job, meanwhile the cloud can hand you capacity immediately. That’s the value of the cloud that’s being missed
Does that include the storage costs of the existing exabytes of videos, plus the terabytes of new videos being uploaded every day?
I found an estimate of annual expenditures of 3.25 billion, without content payouts, but with engineering/legal/moderation costs. As 2024 revenue I found back 36 billion from advertising & 14.5 billion from subscriptions. Forbes had an article where Google claimed to have paid out $70bn in 2021-2023 to content creators, this number probably includes subscriptions. In those 3 years youtube had an ad revenue of 89.5 billion, but I have no number for subscriptions. These are all very opaque numbers. Based on these opaque numbers, I’d guesstimate youtube’s profit margin at 42%, which I find excessive.
$36bn ad revenue + $14.5bn subscriptions: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
$3.25bn annual expenditures: https://www.clrn.org/how-much-does-youtube-cost-to-run/
$70bn payed out to creators from 2021 to 2023: https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/youtube-70-billion-creator-payments/
Edit, how I got to my guesstimate of 42%:
36bn ad revenue in 2024. An average of 30bn ad revenue in the 3 years prior. Estimation for the subscription income in those 3 years: 30/36 x 14.5 x 3=36 billion. 73bn expenditures & 126bn income = 53bn profit. 53/126 = 42%.
If they’ve never paid taxes then they must never have turned a profit.
Checkmate.
I know there are gamer girls on sites like Fansly and OnlyFans that stream their gaming sessions in the same way they would on Twitch. I wonder what the engagement and income is for them on those sites versus Twitch or YouTube.
EDIT: I just watched Zara Dar’s PornHub video on Loss Functions. Her delivery is a tad robotic but the content is informative.
Hence articles like this bother me:
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/13/joy-reid-leaving-corporate-media
YouTube, Instagram and TikTok…
That’s the trap. These mega platforms feel like “liberating” creative outlets, but they take basically all the ad revenue and hand out scraps; the absolute bare minimum to keep creators around. And that ratio shrinks as the monopoly grows.
Yet creators, even journalists trained to sniff out profiteering, go in blind to that.
And yes, I get it. “Just don’t use them,” is much harder said than done.
…But they could be a little more critical of their platform, like this lady.
There is a word for it: enshittification
It’s just hype. They parade around people that “made it” with their revenue programs. The 99 or so % that never make any, or even lose, money in the process are never shown.
A close friend of mine invested a 4-figure amount into travels, gadgets and all sorts of stuff to show off… while being unemployed. Had a huge, organic crowd of followers, too, on several platforms. Tried everything, but never saw a single cent in return.Yeah.
Hence most that “make it” do it through external links, like sponsors, OnlyFans, merch, blog/newsletter subscriptions and such.
Yet the platforms are trying to squash that. Just the other day, I witnessed the official YouTube Android TV app skip a video’s sponsor.
“Just don’t use them,” is much harder said than done.
I agree… but somehow I don’t think you meant to say this
They are liberating creative outlets in the sense that they offer a platform and tools for creative expression (barring some ToS rules) for free. You can post a creative video that may be seen by thousands without needing to sell ownership to some company. They play ads to pay for its associated costs and yes, to turn a profit, while giving a small portion to the creators as an additional incentive. But they are not intended to replace regular income in a meaningful way. I have never heard of anyone suggesting that trying to do so is a good idea, including the big name content creators that by exception do manage to earn a living from it.
If you think it should be a reliable way to make money, I would say you have the unfair expectation for it. I would compare it to complaining that a service that teaches you how to knit is only sufficient for hobbyists and rarely allows one to build a successful company selling clothes. That’s just beyond the scope of what it’s there for.
See, this is technically true. But that is not how (say) YouTube presents itself.
They market professional creators, and algorithmically prioritize them. They set up extensive systems for them. They divert away from external linking, and create systems to explicity keep people withing their ad ecosystem. To regulators, YouTube argues that it’s still that same site to post “creative videos” to, like the cat video site it was a long time ago. Yet in the same breath, they turn around and do everything they can to crowd out professional journalism and media, to promite it across services, even viewing it as their “attention competition.”
They’re having their cake and eating it.
Discord’s the same. They depict it as private chat for gamers and friend groups, when it’s really host to larger interest communities, and eating similar sources alive.
Hence I disagree.
YouTube is setting the expectation for creators to make money, while arguing exactly what you’re arguing in court. And this:
I would compare it to complaining that a service that teaches you how to knit is only sufficient for hobbyists and rarely allows one to build a successful company selling clothes.
This is true! Yet YouTube wouldn’t be caught dead saying it, as it would cost them attention.
And that’s not okay.
Where then? What’s free with a shot at getting views/revenue?
That’s what I’m saying.
You have to use YouTube, Tiktok, whatever. But at least be a little more self aware and vocal of the platform’s pitfalls.
And to be clear, some content creators already are. But it needs to be the majority. They need to remind every single viewer “this place is a trap, a bloodsucking leech, and we’re here because we have no choice.” Just subtly enough to avoid deranking, of course.
