A lot of people I know are trying to make money creating videos on social media. I want to give it a shot too, but I'm not sure if it's actually viable as a main income right now or just a side gig? What would you recommend?
The main thing is don't ditch your current income for an uncertain future. Yeah, people do make money from content, but it doesn't happen fast and it's often nothing like how it looks from the outside. YouTube only pays out monetization if you have a certain number of subscribers and views, and TikTok didn't even give its creators decent money for a long time. Even if you build an audience, those first months or years will likely be a hobby, not a job. The people I know who actually make money from this either were already famous or put a huge amount of time into experimenting and had a cushion from their main job to fall back on.
Try it as a side gig while keeping your main income - film regularly, learn how the algorithms work, experiment with different formats. See what niches people actually want to watch, and how much competition there is. Start YouTube Shorts or TikTok, but don't set a goal to make quick money - set a goal to figure out if you even enjoy doing this and whether you can actually grow an audience.
If after six months or a year you're seeing real progress, monetization is working, and your income is slowly growing - then you can think about making some moves. But right now, content creation as your main job is a gamble, especially without already having proof that you can pull people in.
Financially it works, but with a huge delay - monetization on YouTube requires an audience that takes months to build, and TikTok pays basically nothing at first. Better to start it alongside a regular job and actually see, after like six months to a year, whether the income grows to a level where it makes sense to switch to content full-time. And here's an important thing people often miss: track which platforms your content performs best on, because growing an audience on YouTube is completely different from TikTok - so there's no point just uploading the same thing everywhere thinking one of them will blow up. What format of content are you planning to make - that affects how fast you'll grow?
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