Giraffe Stapler wrote: ↑Fri Oct 20, 2023 3:48 pm
I'm sure there are people that do that, but what makes you think they are making any money?
Well now, that's a good question. I actually don't know really, but maybe some speculation on my part will inspire others to come forward with more specific info on this.
The three Youtube channels that pop up near the top of Youtube's search results for terms like "wiki articles read aloud" or "wikipedia article audio versions" (at least when I try it) are
wikipedia tts (~3,000 subscribers, ~7,000 videos),
Wiki Audio (529, 206), and
Audio Wikipedia (52, 40). Those aren't good numbers, to begin with, and most of these videos have very few views (fewer than 10 is quite common, and some have only 1 view, presumably representing the uploader checking to see if it worked, meaning no views at all).
But let's be super-charitable and say that each video gets an average of 100 views, and that nobody is using Ad Blockers. Let's also use nice ballpark figures too, for clarity. Youtube says it pays 1.8¢ per view, but since they keep 45% of that they're actually only paying about 1¢ per view. So that's $1 in revenue per video, in this example. Obviously, that's not enough to make it worth doing, even if you're a computer whiz who can automate the creation/uploading process in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd have to guess that one of the main reasons it's hard to make money on this (aside from the fact that WP articles are usually written to satisfy the primary authors' sense of personal vanity, not to be read or listened to) is
podcasting — there are literally millions of podcasts now, and for every Youtube channel that reads WP articles aloud, there are probably at least 10 podcasts doing it, and in a way that makes a lot more sense for smartphone users. But they probably aren't making any money either, which is why most of them last about two weeks before giving up — still, you've got to get your start somewhere, I guess.
The podcasts that
do make money by covering historical/cultural topics are shows like The Dollop and Last Podcast on the Left, who actually do the research (using real books and news articles, not just WP), write their own scripts, and inject some humor
or even suspense into the proceedings to keep listeners from falling asleep. They mostly make their money via some combination of Youtube monetization,
Patreon, and "use the code!" track-back advertising, the latter two of which might seem dicey, but they're both probably just as lucrative as Youtube at the low end. So... as long as the subject you're interested in isn't totally obscure, by now there's probably a podcast episode (if not an entire series) devoted to it somewhere that's a helluva lot more entertaining than an audio transcription of the WP article, and subject coverage will only get more thorough and saturated as time goes on.
