How do we have so much stuff? How much is this even worth? And all of this is cheap compared to employing everyone.
Sir? Don't call me sir.
Sir, I know I've been here a short time, but how do we pay for all of this?
Obviously this helps, but there's got to be more. Is there something you're hiding?
No, but it has been a while since we've done one of these, and a lot has changed in that time.
There's been good times, some of them very good, and bad times, some of them very bad.
And through all of that, we have more than doubled the size of our team.
How do we make money now then? Like this.
That right there is 2024's finalized revenue split. So, uh, video done then.
Oh, right. You guys probably want a bit more context, but here's the thing.
As we've grown, I have stepped back from some of the day-to-day leadership, so I might need some help getting you guys the full story.
That's why I was tasked to go to the accounting department as well as talk to the other executives to find out all the juicy little details for you guys and have them presented to you.
Our first stop is Colton. Oh, I wouldn't go over there. At least, not until you've told these fine folks about our sponsor for this video. Oh, do.
We're actually going to start with the biggest change on our chart, lttstore.com.
When Linus covered LTT Store in the 2020 breakdown, it was 15% of our total.
Now, we've shipped over a million orders and it's ballooned to a staggering 55%.
The biggest reason for this is that back then, two of our biggest product families didn't exist yet.
Hand tools and bags, which now make up about half the revenue with the rest coming from everything else.
That includes apparel, cable management, thermal pads, pet accessories, baby stuff. It's a pretty broad mix.
Yeah, the lttstore.com.
Callouts can be a little cringy, but they get people's attention.
And when you combine that with quality products, it clearly works.
So much so that we recently flipped the script and went from Sponsoree to Sponsorer,
choosing some of our favorite creators to show off all of our products.
The team has been killing it.
Black Friday grew 45% year over year. But in my opinion, the best part of that event was that the orders were also fulfilled 60% faster than they were in 2023.
I'm sure you appreciated that. It doesn't mean we never have problems though.
Near the end of 2023, we found out live on the WAN Show that a manufacturer screw up on our OG backpack meant it didn't have the dual layer bottom that we promised.
But our motto has always been to make it right with our customers.
So we retroactively modified our warranty to provide extra coverage on that bottom layer,
and our amazing InHo Support team offered gift cards as an apology.
And if that wasn't enough, we offered outright refunds to anyone who wanted one,
even those folks who had been using the bag for over a year.
I could go on all day, but that's enough about lttstore for today.
So let's throw this sleek and stylish commuter backpack, lttstore.com,
to the writing department to talk about AdSense.
Oh my goodness. Thanks.
From 2016 to 2020, AdSense actually grew from 18% to 26% of LMG's overall revenue.
And I'm happy to report that in 2024, it went down.
Not gonna lie, I was actually super confused when they told me this was a good thing.
We literally call ourselves YouTubers.
How can it be good to make less money from YouTube?
Well, for starters, just because it's a smaller percentage does not mean that it's less money.
And second, it means that LMG is far less reliant on our Google overlords than we used to be.
Let's say YouTube's ad business just collapsed. For most channels, that would probably mean game over.
But thanks to our diversified revenue streams, we can actually carry on through challenging times.
Of course, we don't mind, it had money.
So let's break it down here. 61.5% comes from ads.
So if you're someone who sits through the ads before watching the video,
we thank you for your service. As for the folks who can't stand ads and opt for YouTube Premium, you guys make up 37.3%.
Hold on a minute. How can 29% of our views make up 37% of our YouTube money?
It's funny because I've had a lot of people ask me over the years.
Oh, Linus, I've got premiums, so I'm watching without ads.
Does that harm creators? But no, it's the complete opposite.
The way that premium works is it takes 45% of your subscription fee.
That goes to YouTube to maintain the platform and pay for YouTube music.
And the rest, so 55%, gets divided up according to your total watch time
over the course of the month across all the channels that you watched.
So if you watched 50% LTT and 50% other channels,
you would actually be contributing many times more than an ad-supported viewer.
Shorts are a little bit different. Because Google allocates part of their revenue to music licensing for shorts,
the creator share, both for ads and for premium, is just 45%.
Frankly, though, I don't really blame them.
Shorts get lots of views and, therefore, are a significant burden on the platform's infrastructure,
but it's clear that Google has a lot of work to do figuring out how to monetize those views.
Our biggest short in 2024 got 13 million views and made $1,300.
That's about one-hundredth of a cent per view for me,
and once everything is accounted for, probably even less for Google.
For comparison, our biggest VOD last year did over 20 times that amount,
over two-tenths of a cent per view.
Then, there's longer livestream archives and the numbers completely change again.
Here, we're looking at about 1.8 cents per view.
Now, again, this is just looking at our top performing in each category for the year,
but it gives you an idea of how watch time contributes to revenue,
especially for premium viewers. Not every channel performs the same, though.
Out of our active channels, the main LTT channel brings in about 76% of our adsense,
with ShortCircuit and Techlinked finishing off the podium.
Now, I want to clear something up that I'm sure will be a point of discussion in the comments.
LMG's numbers are not and will never be directly comparable to other creators.
If you're a moist critical fan, you probably saw his video which broke down YouTube revenue
versus Twitch revenue and saw that he pulled in a whopping $84,000 for a 4-hour stream.
But if you look closely here, that's because he was making over 17 RPM,
or $17 per 1,000 views.
If you took that number and multiplied it by our roughly 850 million views last year,
holy f**k, we should ask for raises! I keyed because we don't make nearly the same RPM on our channel,
and he might not either. Even on the same channel, RPM can change dramatically depending on how desirable your content is to high-roller advertisers.
On our channel, we've seen as high as $11, but as low as $3.
Though, of course, that's before we bake in our own sponsors.
Speaking of sponsors, this seems like a good time to segue to our Colton.
That's right, I still work here, and if you watch regularly, you'll know we have a wide variety of partners that we deal with.
How wide? We manage to break it down into about 13 different categories, ranging from PC parts, to gaming, to lifestyle, and even software as a service.
This is a breakdown of our 13 categories. SaaS companies like Odu make up 25.5%, lifestyle is 13.6%, and PC parts is 34.6%.
PC parts are actually up from 2020, which is both good and bad.
It's good because it clearly shows that you guys are closely engaged with the brands you see featured on our channel, allowing them to outbid our other partners.
But it's bad because Business 101 says to diversify your income and not put all of your eggs in one basket.
And tech has a risk of becoming a heavy basket for us since our audience demographics are so obviously appealing to tech companies.
With that said, while three of our top tech partners do make up about 15% of our sponsor revenue, none of them are over 5%,
meaning that none of them can have a major impact on our business.
Another way we avoid over-reliance on individual partners is to have a wide variety of partners within our categories.
In the PC parts category, we work with 26 partners, and across all categories, we have over 150.
To add some additional context, our sponsors made up 21% of our 2024 revenue,
with in-video reads accounting for 9%, and dedicated sponsored videos accounting for 12%.
We also provide production value to companies like Dbrand and MSI.
We just released a video where Ploof and Sherrod take you through how it's done and give a little bit more insight into how LMG works,
down in the gears and the guts. Head over to LMG.GG slash Flowplane to check it out.
Sponsored videos come about in one of two ways.
The ideal way is when we integrate a sponsor's product into an already existing idea.
For example, we had the idea for me to make an outdoor pool gaming setup.
So when someone reached out looking for a cool project to show off their projector, that was a perfect fit.
The same goes for the time we wanted to make a video on cleaning out a water cooling loop and an ultrasonic toothbrush brand stepped up,
naturally integrated and, more importantly, highly relevant to the project.
The second way these videos come about is a sponsor will bring us a product, let's say a robot lawnmower or pool cleaner,
and then we will go out in search of a lawn or a pool to maintain.
These videos tend to rely more on unscripted shenanigans and the personalities of our hosts to drive viewer enjoyment while we
tick off all of the key points the sponsor wants communicated about their product.
Now these videos are always clearly disclosed, both verbally and visually,
and while they do often include candid footage of us using the product and even providing commentary on it,
a sponsor can buy airtime on our channel, but they can never buy our opinion.
FTC guidelines clearly state that if you say it, you have to believe it,
and no vendor talking point should ever be disguised as an opinion unless you happen to agree,
let's say for instance, that the design of this product is minimalistic or what have you.
We also go out of our way to validate manufacturer claims when possible, even in sponsored videos.
One area that this has been really useful is when evaluating displays for phones,
which sometimes do not reach the brightness levels that are specified by the manufacturer.
This kind of scrutiny is just part of the process of working with us,
and if a sponsor doesn't like it, we'll just drop them like we've dropped so many others in the past.
Sometimes we also drop sponsors because of you guys.
We maintain an open line of communication for sponsor issues or concerns through our community forum,
and we have a long track record of leveraging user reported issues to affect change at the companies we partner with.
Speaking of forums, Odo also has a dedicated forum app in case you want to add it to your website
so people can complain if your discounted affiliate links aren't working.
Speaking of affiliate links made up about 3% of our 2024 revenue.
Those are the links that you'll often see in the description, like our referral code for private internet access.
Those can be a pretty good deal for all sides. PIA gets a new subscriber, you get a discount, and we get a kickback.
All in, the business team lands at about 24% of the total pie.
Now you can see why we keep bringing Colton back into the fold.
Now we're almost done, but first let's take a quick ride on a...
Floplane! Floplane.com is our paid membership website where we offer exclusive content and sometimes early access to our videos.
We offer two subscription tiers, $5 or $10, with the difference being that the higher tier gives you 4K video
and sometimes access to extra exclusive content like the digital pass to our last LTX expo.
In 2024, Floplane was 7% of our pie.
It's a humble slice, but it's also up 1%.
And I think it's pretty cool that with in-video sponsor spots coming down and Floplane going up,
we are contributing almost as much as every in-video sponsor combined.
Linus often talks about how the audience is the real boss of the company,
and this is a prime example of how easy it is for you guys to show us when you support our direction
and to show us when you don't. Elephant to the room, we lost a ton of Floplane subscribers after the great reset in August of 2023,
but thanks to the hard work of our team, shout out to Sammy for the great exclusives,
we had three major pushes to help bring us back to just about where we left off.
Thanks again for supporting us at Floplane. Now let's get back to Linus for some closing thoughts.
There you go. The last under 1% is miscellaneous things like random reimbursements,
which I think underscores the point that Luke mentioned about you guys being the boss.
When you break it down, every single piece of the chart still boils down to you.
You are the boss when it comes to choosing to engage with our content ideas on YouTube.
You are the boss when it comes to what sponsors we work with.
You're the boss when you evaluate the quality of our products,
and you're the boss when you choose to directly support us on Floplane.
And just like any boss, if we're not living up to your expectations,
you have the power to give us a good old-fashioned dressing down to dock our pay
or even sack us out, right? Which is kind of a scary way to live if I can be real for a minute,
but it's also super cool because not only do we have this massive community to share our passions with,
but a massive community that can help guide us toward what you guys want to see in the future.
As for our second larger elephant in the room,
you'll notice that we never gave you guys any specific dollar amounts.
I am sorry about that, and I understand that in trying to be as transparent as possible with you guys over the years,
we have created an environment where the one thing we can't talk about can trigger a vigorous pitchforking.
But the reality of it is, whether it's channels pausing production
or employees leaving the company or the exact dollar amounts that we made on a specific deal,
there really are some things we just can't talk about, both for our protection and for our team.
Say you were canned, for instance. Would you want your former boss or colleagues talking about it on a podcast?
Of course not. And for fairness sake, we have the same processes so that everyone is treated the same.
As for the final chart, you can see there is even more detail under each slice that we didn't really get into,
and it can get pretty complicated. This is a big part of the reason that I hire to see EO back in early 2023
and have asked the rest of the leadership team to step up.
My strength is being a bottomless pit of creativity,
and I found that while I could spend my time on the details,
it wasn't necessarily the best thing for the company and the team.
Thanks for watching, guys. I don't actually sit in annual business reviews anymore,
so when I reviewed this script with Elijah, that was legitimately my first look at these numbers for 2024.
Hopefully it was as fun for you guys to go through as it was for me.
If you want to see in more detail what's changed over the years,
go check out the two previous editions we've done with this back in 2016 and in 2020.