I mean, what do I loose? 2 to 3 hours per week, half of it for editing? Some $$ for equipment? If I get some 1k subscribers, it's already worth the ongoing effort. If not I can still drop it and look out for another hobby.
You're grossly underestimating the effort. There are many ballpark measurements, but a common one is one man-hour of work for one minute of video. It's an open market and you're literally competing with the world's best.
I tend to disagree on this one. It surely helps to enter the market with a top notch production team in the background or investing a lot of time into your videos.
However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.
> However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.
Sure, but for every channel like that with 10k subs there'll be another 100 with no subs. It's a reasonable starting assumption that you'll need to put some effort in to video production if you want to start a yt channel.
This is correct. If you're around the space long enough, you can see the hundreds (thousands) of tiny channels (per big channel that could conceivably grow into anything resembling a business) that are pulling in 50 views per video with 22 subscribers, languishing for 5+ years.
Unless you are extremely lucky or already have things set for you, building an audience is a very long-term grind, and typically a large percentage of those with some potential get burned out after 1, 2, or 5 years.
(None of this to say you shouldn't try, especially if you love the work... I enjoyed editing video since grade school when my Dad first bought an analog video capture card so I could dump a few minutes of VHS footage into a video editor and make dumb family videos.)
Those talking head vlog-style channels are more personality driven whereas big production channels are usually more content-driven. Big grain of salt here obviously, but IME the chips more or less do fall this way when you look at the bigger picture. If you're not going to put effort into standing out on the editing and production style, do you have a good enough on-screen personality to compete with the current top-dogs in whatever niche you'd enter? My guess would be that it would be much easier to stand out based on your knowledge you have to share and the effort you put into the presentation than on personality, because not everyone can be authentic and interesting enough on camera, or be a good enough actor.
Edit: on second read I realized the tone of this comment could be read as dissuasive. I wanna clarify that I mean the opposite, I do support you in trying to launch a YouTube channel, I know far too many people who I think would make for great YouTubers I'd watch! But I do feel like you're underestimating aspects of this just based on a figure estimated by a web-site which probably doesn't have fine-enough grained access to YouTube data anyway and I think it would be better to come into it with realistic expectations.
I'm sure success will heavily depend on my personality and the topics I choose. I may not ever reach 10 subscribers. But every shot you don't take is a missed shot.
Starting the channel is the easy bit. Gaining any sort of traction whatsoever is the difficult bit.