Last year I did about 1.5 million views on the TAR YouTube channel. YouTube TOS forbids partners from discussing payments but I can tell you that 1.5 million views will not buy you a SouthWest cue or a Diamond Table.
To make any real money requires many millions of views.
I am big into guns and custom knives as well and have spent a lot of time researching the successful YouTube channels in those industries. One thing stands out in particular. The most prolific channels in the guns and knives genre are "review" channels.
A guy shows a gun, maybe shoots it a little and talks about how awesome it is. For the most part they are all industry shills in one way or another. One driving factor to the success of the channels is the unprecedented boom in gun sales and interest in all things tactical, zombie and prepper. Some one who is thinking about buying a Glock 19 googles it and up come twenty videos of guys "reviewing' it.
You get the outliers like FPS Russia who merges guns and the video game culture as well as a few of the training based channels but for the most part its review based channels that draw the most eyeballs.
The guys with the most views get the best placement in search results and the sidebar videos. So the snowball just keeps getting bigger with that channel getting more and more subscribers and views. The industry capitalizes on this buy sending new products to these guys for "review". At SHOT show every year there is a media range day that used to be predominately magazine writers. Now its filled with YouTube guys and other new media types.
Just to give you an idea of the scope of this boom in the gun world there were 21 million NICS background checks ran in 2013. Multiple guns can be purchased on one background check. Figure an average price of $500 per gun. In one year. This does not include law enforcement or gov't sales. Now figure in that retail brick and mortar gun stores make the vast majority of their money not off of the guns themselves but all the supporting paraphernalia that go with them. This gives you an idea of the type of money we are talking about in the industry. Pool is so small as to be nothing compared to the firearms industry.
If there were 21 million people a year buying $500 Predator cues you would see a lot of people on YouTube talking about them.
As usual Justin puts it into perspective.
Simply put the elusive 30 million "people who play pool" just don't exist and the ones who really do exist don't really care.
Here is a pool stuff review page,
https://www.youtube.com/user/BrandonBilliardGuy
He has 11,500 subscribers and 2.7 million views spread out over 100+ videos.
In contrast,
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCraftyGemini/about
She has 147,000 subscribers and 14 million views.
The problem is that we are preaching to a really small audience. Having said that, I think that to the active go the spoils.
I have sold a bunch of cases based off my YouTube activity. Both the videos on CTE and the ones about our cases. Mine are crude and off the cuff, not well planned, bad lighting, bad audio and I tend to ramble.
So, imagine how much someone can do with better planning and presentation.
I would send my product to anyone who was SERIOUSLY doing a decent review channel. I think that there are many who could do it. Some of them don't have a conflict of interest even
So the answer to the OP's question is SORT OF. There are those who are doing pool channels in various flavors, some with a lot of instruction, some with matches, some with analysis. You just have to find them and subscribe.
Someone ought to do a weekly video highlighting the best in pool video on YouTube. Wouldn't that be great if some day a JB Cases rant vid got featured?
For the good information of course.......
