- Jake Tran's YouTube consists of documentary-style videos on controversial topics.
- It took years for him to come up with his signature style of storytelling.
- Last year, he earned almost a million dollars from YouTube ads and sponsorships.
Books, books, and more books. That's what creator Jake Tran attributes to his success on YouTube, where he's built an audience of 1.82 million subscribers by posting documentary-style videos in which he often leans into controversies or extreme viewpoints. His creator journey began in high school when he was inspired by YouTube explainer videos that dissected specific topics.
"I just got obsessed with the idea of becoming a YouTuber and making a living off of it," the 25-year-old told Business Insider.
After a hiatus from posting on YouTube while studying computer science in college, Tran dropped out to work as a web developer in 2018. Nine months later, he decided to give content creation another try after reading "Blue Ocean Strategy," which explained how to enter a crowded industry and carve out a niche.
"That book really changed my life," he said. "I applied the exercises to YouTube, and that's how I came up with the style of videos I have today."
Tran's channel consists solely of videos around 15-to-20-minutes long that focus on controversial topics or conspiracy theories, such as "sad lives of billionaires," "how Mark Zuckerberg repaired his public image," and why "feminism is literally a scam." He never appears in his videos, instead compiling clips of recent news or historical footage, and then recording voiceovers that explain his thought process.
Books have also influenced his content. For example, after reading about war profiteering, he became fascinated with the subject and posted a video about its history in 2020. It is one of his best-performing YouTube videos to date, with 1.5 million views, and it still earns him a significant chunk of money through ad-revenue sharing.
Sponsorships are another stream of income he's found lucrative.
"You can make just as much money, if not more money, than YouTube ads," he said of sponsorships.
Last year, Tran generated $820,246 in revenue from YouTube ads and sponsorships, which BI verified through documentation he provided. His success on his original YouTube channel prompted him to start another account last year called Evil Food Supply, which has 274,000 subscribers.
While the YouTuber has diversified his content strategies by posting to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, YouTube is his main priority because of its emphasis on longer videos.
"It serves as a nice outlet for me to get paid for learning how the world works," he said.
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YouTube ads and sponsor spots pay the bills
Tran started earning money from YouTube four years ago after his first viral video, "Why Graham Stephan is Killing the YouTube Algorithm." After posting it, he sent the video to Stephan, a creator, who shared it on his Instagram. Overnight, Tran's video racked up thousands of views. Not long after, he met YouTube's eligibility criteria for ad-revenue sharing: 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in a year.
YouTube pays eligible creators for ads it inserts before and during a video, which usually comes out to a few dollars per thousand views. Most, if not all, of Tran's videos have at least 100,000 views, meaning he earns hundreds of dollars from each video. In 2023, he earned $429,309 from YouTube ads.
After averaging 50,000 views, Tran got his first sponsor spot, which is when a creator works directly with a company to incorporate an ad into their video. After negotiating his pay rate, Tran typically scripts a 60-to-90-second ad that he records and edits in a similar style across his videos. He sends it to the company for review. Once approved, he'll insert the ad.
"We try to make a really clever segue so that it kind of ties into the topic of the video, and people don't immediately realize it's a sponsor," he said.
Last year, Tran earned $390,937 from sponsorships through his Jake Tran YouTube channel. Some of his top-performing YouTube videos that include sponsor spots are about scams: a video arguing Ozempic is a scam earned him $8,000, a video on why oat milk is a scam generated $2,500, and a video on why breakfast is a scam earned him $3,900.
Tran built a team of over 30 people to scale video production
A call from Arvid Ali, the president of Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort's corporation, persuaded Tran to hire people to help manage production. Ali had emailed the YouTuber in 2020 because he was a fan of Tran's work; at first, they discussed the topics covered in his videos, but the conversation shifted to how Tran needed to delegate his workload.
"He started telling me I was definitely working too hard and doing everything on my own and that if I kept it up, I would never make any money and get burned out eventually," he said.
Tran began by outsourcing small tasks, such as hiring a virtual assistant and an audio editor. The most daunting hire for him was a video editor since his videos are complex, and he had been editing every frame.
Hiring a staff allowed Tran to create more content. When he worked independently, he made one video a month, but with a team, he scaled up to 12 or 13 videos.
Today, he employs over 30 people, from assistants to writers to voiceover actors, producers, and video editors.
"If you imagine the process of making a video as an assembly line, kind of like for a car, that's how we operate," he said. "We have people in every position."