What do YouTuber's net worth mean?

December 20, 2023 5:28 PM

I am wondering, I am looking over StarStat on specific YouTubers, and does networth mean how much they have now or does that mean in total of what they made since the beginning of their channel? For instance, Flo Lum's net worth is over $200k (an Asian cooking channel). Does that mean she has that much in her bank right now, or that is how much she had made since the beginning of her Channel?
posted by RearWindow to Work & Money (8 answers total)

Do you know what "net worth" means generally? It is not the amount in a person's bank account. A basic understanding of what "net worth" means will help you answer this question.

Now to complicate that, these internet net worth assumptions made about celebrities and especially influencers are entirely speculative. These websites make a lot of assumptions about presumed value of sponsorship deals, property ownership, etc, and probably are making only a broad guess as to how leveraged (i.e. in debt) these people are, if they're even considering that at all. You should consider these website net worth calculations as a source of entertainment, not anything close to fact.
posted by phunniemee at 5:35 PM on December 20, 2023 [20 favorites]

What phunniemee said. I’ve known influencers where people have speculated about how much they were making gross, never mind taking home, and they were usually so far off it wasn’t even funny.

Most influencers can’t even be honest - not just because ego is involved but because if they said how much they were really getting from Company A, Company B’s offer might be worse. Also, unless you’re in the very top tier, influencers tend to get sponsorships in waves - as the new kid on the block they’ll get some deals buy afterwards some companies and agencies will often move on to the next thing, because conversion rates will go down. So you might get one price the first time and a lower one later.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:54 PM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

These numbers are totally made up.
posted by potrzebie at 8:21 PM on December 20, 2023 [10 favorites]

Yeah, I don't know anything about StarStat specifically, but in general, there are a lot of sites out there that claim "net worths" of people based on pulling a number out of their ass. Like, if you google some actor who had a bit part in a Yugoslavian movie from 1963 and was never heard of again, it's not terribly uncommon to see a link to some such site that confidently proclaims them to have a net worth of $18 million.

After all, they're an actor (goes the apparent logic).
posted by Flunkie at 8:21 PM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

The site people tend to use for this is SocialBlade, and I would take its revenue estimates with a huge grain of salt too.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:40 PM on December 20, 2023

This is about bigger celebrities but it demonstrates that even if you have reasonably accurate information about a person's cash (including savings and investments), income, assets, etc, you can come up with very different figures for their "net worth".

From Matt Levine's Money Stuff of 30 October (paywall) is a bit further down:

There are two ways to measure anyone’s wealth:

1. Your wealth is based on your past earnings. Your wealth is the money that you have. You have worked for however many years at your job, you got paid some money each year, you spent some of it on expenses, and what’s left over is your wealth. This is how most people measure their wealth. It’s how I measure my wealth, for instance. I look at my bank account and my investments and add them all up and subtract my debts and that’s my net worth.
2. Your wealth is based on your future earnings. You have some expected stream of future income, and you can estimate the present value of that income (by doing a discounted cash flow analysis, or just by multiplying it by some reasonable multiple), and that is your wealth today. This is, classically, how startup founders measure their wealth. If you start a company, and you give 75% of the stock to cofounders and investors and employees and keep 25% for yourself, and the expected future earnings of the company are worth $20 billion today, then your net worth is $5 billion. Even if the company has not made a penny yet, even if it loses money every year, even if you take no salary. Your net worth comes from people’s expectations of your future earnings.

Also with celebrities like musicians, their "net worth" can be based on their hypothetical future worth. He links to an article about Taylor Swift being called a billionaire by Bloomberg (also paywalled) and says this about it:

A lot of the accounting is realized cash earnings (from concerts, streaming, etc.), but $400 million of it is “the estimated value of her music catalog,” based on “a conservative multiple of future royalties.” Also based on comparisons to other artists who have sold their catalogues for nine-digit sums. Swift has not sold her catalogue, but that doesn’t change how the math works. The math is that she has a few hundred million dollars, so she’s a billionaire.

Obviously, few YouTubers have "content" that is potentially that valuable, but it does show that even authoritative places like Bloomberg, discussing the net worth of celebrities whose earnings and assets are potentially better known, can come up with figures that bear no relation to how much money, investments, or property a person has right now, which is what we might initially think of as "net worth".

posted by fabius at 4:50 AM on December 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Sorry, just noticed the HTML in that comment got a bit messed up. The paragraphs starting "Also…" and "Obviously…" are my words, not Matt Levine.

One day MeFi will have a text input field from the 2010s and I won't have to type HTML tags manually like a Neanderthal from the 1990s.)
posted by fabius at 8:09 AM on December 21, 2023

Projecting net worth into the future even for middle class people is also very common, but it's all just projections until it's actually sold. No different than estimating your home's current value as a part of your net worth. If you've owned it for a while, the price you purchased it for vs the current value is probably quite different.

Same as with Taylor Swift's future catalogue value or other tangible assets an actual star can sell.

That doesn't change the fact that all these values are probably completely made up.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:23 PM on December 21, 2023