The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that successful content creators are usually brilliantly multi-talented and hard-working. I'm never surprised to find the ones I like have had whole careers in media (or media-adjacent) fields.
I like food youtubers - Binging with Babish was formerly a video fx artist, Adam Ragusea was formerly a journalism professor and musician and Alex (French Guy Cooking) was an electrical engineer, filmmaker, and marketing manager. These people are basically one-man production armies, the food part is basically secondary. They have a killer mix of good-ideas and charisma, production quality (cinematography and sound design), marketing and community savviness, and ridiculous hard work.
This is true, and although they don't tell you this, they also have a team. Sometimes it is just an intern or camera person but some creators have surprisingly large teams.
And what I don't understand is how they can afford these teams off YouTube wages. My only guess is they've figured out how to make non-platform money off their brand (like musicians playing concerts), but for many of them it's quite non-obvious. You can only sell so many t-shirts...
I like food youtubers - Binging with Babish was formerly a video fx artist, Adam Ragusea was formerly a journalism professor and musician and Alex (French Guy Cooking) was an electrical engineer, filmmaker, and marketing manager. These people are basically one-man production armies, the food part is basically secondary. They have a killer mix of good-ideas and charisma, production quality (cinematography and sound design), marketing and community savviness, and ridiculous hard work.