He's the 3rd highest Patron channel with over 13000 patron.
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators
Even with everyone on the $2 level that's over $300k a year income from Patreon alone, probably another $100k-$150k a year from Adsense.
So if he's not pulling in $400k a year (before tax) from this Youtube gig I'll eat my hat. If he's not doing it full time with that sort of money then he's crazy.
Unless he's lying through his teeth, the latter seems to be true. As far as I can tell he still has his day job, which appears to be some kind of field engineer type of deal. His story is that he doesn't want to pander to money, in which case it makes sense to keep your regular job. If your livelihood is dependent on content, the content is inevitably influenced by that fact.
But most of his money comes in direct donations. No commercial influence at all.
It's a fact that he earns over $300k a year on those donations alone.
That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but there's plenty of examples on the intertube that show us it can be a bad thing. He says he doesn't take sponsored or "free" equipment for the same reason. Besides, why go fulltime when you can do it on the side and still make a mint?
Freedom?
Why work for the man when you make a lot more on Youtube and have the freedom to do whatever you whenever you want?
Of course there could be many reasons, like having access to lots of tools or facilities or projects at work you couldn't hope to access even earning $400k+ a year.
Just liking it perhaps, or maintaining your "career" and skill set keeping it up etc.
Some people like lotto winners often go back to work after winning because they really don't know what else to do with themselves otherwise.
Mrs EEVblog for example continues to work even though there is no need for her to do so financially, we'd get along fine if she decided not to work. But she does it because she wants to maintain her career, and if I'm honest, that's at the expense of the EEVblog in terms of time I have to devote to the business.
i.e. from a purely current and future financial point of view it would make much more sense for her to quit her job and work for the EEVblog and help build the business
Just like the plan was when he had our first child, she was earning more than me, so I was going to look after the kids while she worked full time because I had several side businesses I could do some from.
But then the blog grew and grew and the circumstances changed.
Is Adsense advertisement money? AvE actively steers people away from watching ads on his behalf, though it's possible many people still do.
The majority still do. If he has adsense enabled then he's going to get a majority watching the ads, it's inevitable when you have a large audience. My estimate would be at least $100k a year from that. A good lot would come from random search views, recommended video views etc.