If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language specifically Chinese, then you may have stumbled upon Xiaomanyc. In this article, we’re going to be digging into how Xiaomanyc has taken his love for learning different languages and turned it into his full-time job. By the end of this article, you’re going to have a better understanding of how you too can use the creator economy to your advantage when it comes to monetizing your passions.
What we’ll do is we’ll explore all about his channel, his origin story a little bit more, and then take a look at exactly how he’s monetizing his channel to make a full-time living.
How Xiaomanyc started
Before we dig into Xiaoma’s channel today, we need to have a better understanding of where he really started.
He started on YouTube a decade ago. In fact, on a different channel than the Xiaoma channel. Xiaoma, also known as Ari actually had a YouTube channel called Ari in Beijing. And even today it’s got 82,000 subscribers. But if you actually look and sort by the oldest date video, you would find that Ari actually started posting on YouTube 10 years ago.
Taking a step back with this should really tell you is that good things take time. And the great thing about Ari’s story here is they use consistently published content for the last decade to reach the point of success that he has today. So what you can tell here is that he had to release tons of videos in order to get better and better at his craft.
And you can see specifically his earliest videos were very similar to what he does today in terms of the core concepts being something related to his love for languages. In this situation, he’s talking all about how he talks in Chinese as a white guy. And this is the sort of same theme that he plays into over the last few years when he was creating his early-stage content.
What’s also interesting to look at is how his content changed over time. So when he started this channel years ago, he didn’t really have too clear of a direction. However, a few years later, maybe five years or so, he started to really talk about some key question phrases in terms of what is Chinese, how to learn any language, and so he was trying to teach people how to learn particular languages, even in his earliest days on YouTube.
Digging into Ari in Beijing YouTube
What’s also interesting to look at is how his content changed over time. So when he started this channel years ago, he didn’t really have too clear of a direction. However, a few years later, maybe five years or so, he started to really talk about some key question phrases in terms of what is Chinese, how to learn any language, and so he was trying to teach people how to learn particular languages, even in his earliest days on YouTube.
Over time, he started to create more and more diverse content, but at the basis, this channel Ari in Beijing reflects his time in Beijing in which he was teaching all the different things that he was learning and how exactly he was approaching memorizing these different things.
So another interesting thing that I find in terms of Ari’s journey is that there’s actually this video four years ago of him asking you to support him on Patreon. So it was clear that Ari had a passion for learning Chinese along with other languages, but that he also is struggling to figure out exactly how he might monetize his passion. And that’s really when the magic of Xiaoma’s channel comes to life.
Digging into Xiaomanyc YouTube videos
At this point in time, Ari has had his channel for a few years and he hasn’t had necessarily a big monumental success. But he’s had a few breakthroughs on YouTube. In fact, if we sort things based off of his most popular videos, you can actually see, he had one video that had 5 million views, what languages sound like to foreigners, as well as some other videos of how to things that seem to do really well.
But from here, he really started to hone in on his content style. And this is when he created the Xiaomanyc channel and we see that in his journey into his now mainstream channel. This channel has 4.3 million subscribers and you can see the sorts of stylists of changes that Ari made in order to be more successful with this particular channel.
Just scrolling through the homepage, what you can see is that he switched segments things with a much more clear angle in terms of his content and its relevancy to the mainstream media. In this situation, his first thing is about language challenges, where he’s challenging himself to learn different languages really quickly, and then use them in the wild while speaking to fluent and native speakers.
In the second section, he’s digging into things around K-pop because that has grown in popularity in the last decade in terms of the Western culture side of things. And then you’ll see other sections in terms of the different geographic areas that he’s focused his content in both the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and other places as well.
So from this, what you can learn is that Ari realized that in order for him to sustain his viewership on YouTube, he had to branch out beyond just his Ari in Beijing line, and actually expand out to cover some more mainstream topics that would get a lot broader of viewership in terms of potential. And you can tell that this has clearly worked for him over the years.
Digging into his video sections
When we dig into his video section, we can really start to see some of the tweaks that he made in his content strategy when he started to create this channel. So if we go ahead and sort this by the oldest video, we can see that he started this a little bit overlapping with his Ari in Beijing channel, but it was four years ago. So he already had some background experience in creating YouTube videos. And at this point he’s clearly targeting the Chinese market in which all of his videos are actually in Chinese. But when he probably realized soon after that was that the viewership in terms of the ad revenue was not as high in terms of other countries outside of the United States.
And that’s when you start to see him introduce some more English-based content coupled with Chinese too. So as we start scrolling through, he’s still doing a lot of the core Chinese content. But as you start to get into a few years down the line, what you will notice is that he starts to do things like getting a stranger eat Chinese food for the first time, as well as things like trading all my clothes with NYC strangers.
So he’s clearly trying to branch out of this market that he started in, and then what you can see is that as of about two years or so ago, Xiaoma has pretty much been creating a lot more global content with a specific focus on US-based audiences, as you can tell in all of these different videos.
What’s also interesting though, is that if you dig into the sort of content that he’s doing at this time, you can see how he’s taking adaptations of what he did in the early days in terms of how to learn languages, but he’s doing it in a much more catchy way. For example, this video is called how I learned fluent Spanish and 20 days from my apartment. That’s way more catchy than just the broader topic of how to learn a new language. So Ari was mastering specifically what was working and what was not working in his prior content style in order to create a popular video.
How much Xiaomanyc makes from his YouTube ad revenue
We don’t know exactly how much Xiaoma was making from his YouTube ad revenue, but we can get a sense from sites the Social Blade. Now Social Blade is by no means always accurate because it’s such a wide range for their CPM estimates but what you can see here is that they have estimated that on a yearly basis, Xiaoma is making at least between 50 grand and 794 pay in ad revenue.
Based off just this channel, I can probably imagine that this lower range is on the lower bound. And now he’s actually making somewhere in the middle to the higher end of the boundary that has been shared here. So what that should tell you is that just from his channel alone, it’s pretty profitable for him to be creating different videos on YouTube, but where he really gets leveraged from his business is through his new courses.
How Xiaomanyc monetizes his channel
Well, the first way that he’s doing this without ad revenue is through sponsorships, and you can tell that when you go into his videos. If we go ahead and look at this video, when we start playing it, you can see that it includes a paid promotion. And so he’s doing sponsorships where he’s getting paid to integrate different products into his videos. But aside from that, the other way that you can tell how he’s monetizing things is through his video description section. He’s got affiliate programs that he’s working with in order to drive people to these different programs.
So in this situation, what you can see is that Babbel was the sponsor, and he’s probably getting a kickback with respect to every single subscription that signs up on Babbel. But also what you can see is that in the footer section, there is a new section that he’s recently introduce in the last year as a new revenue stream for his channel.
But the other new revenue stream that he’s introduced to this year has been his courses. And so what you can see is that he is selling a Chinese course here, and we’d go ahead and click into that course, what you will see is that he is selling a course on how to have a conversation in Chinese on the street within 10 weeks.
Why is this a really powerful course? Because there’s a clear outcome of what exactly you’re going to learn in a certain period of time. So when there are clear outcomes, it makes you way more compelled to actually want to buy that course than say, for example, buying the Rosetta Stone course on Chinese one. This is a much more clear outcome, and from here you have a standard landing page he’s talking about all the different things that you’re going to learn in this particular course. And what’s really important to me though, is to just figure out how exactly is he pricing this. So if we go ahead and click that we can see that this course is $147.
The numbers get really crazy though when you remember that he has 4.34 million subscribers. Even if you just were to take the case of .001% of his subscribers buying this course, or 4,340 people, that would mean that he’s making around 64 grand from his course alone. That said that’s a really low conversion rate. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Xiaoma actually has even more people sigup for his course. So if, instead we just speculate that it’s half a percentage point. So in other words, .005%, that would mean that there are 21,700 people that have bought this course. And in that situation, what that means is that Xiaoma made around $3.2 million from his course.
Now there’s no clear way to know the exact numbers for Xiaoma, but this should just give you a good example of the power of having an audience in today’s day and age. With this 4.34 million subscribers, even the smallest of percentage points means a substantial outcome in terms of the monetization abilities for Xiaoma.
And the reason why I know this is working for him is because a few weeks ago I saw a community post on his channel in which what he was advertising was the pitch for his next course, which is that he’s going to be launching a Spanish course, which I’m imagining is going to be very similar to his Chinese course.
Big Takeaway
What you hopefully take away from Xiaoma’s inspiring story is that sometimes it takes time to really figure out exactly how to monetize your passions, but there always is a way to do so, especially in today’s creator economy.
So it’s really impressive to see that Xiaoma has been able to monetize so successfully with this Chinese course. He’s now making a second one, and over time, I can only imagine that he’ll be able to continue diversifying his course offerings so that there are 5, 10, 15 courses out there. And from there there’s going to be a global total addressable market for him to be buying his courses.
This is really just scratching the surface of Xiaoma and the ways that he monetizes. He has other opportunities in terms of the channels that he runs aside from the two that I showed you today.
But it goes to show you the power of having distribution and leverage in the creator economy. If you can create something once and then use it thousands of thousands of times over, it essentially becomes free marketing for your leads to then become members of your particular course or whatever product and service you are selling.
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