A 2019 Harris Poll/LEGO survey of the US, UK, and China, with 86% of respondents aged 8-12, found that 29% of kids aspire to be a YouTuber.
There was also a 2017 survey by a travel firm First Choice that found that 34.2% of kids want to be a YouTuber, making it the most popular career path among young people. Let’s talk about what that survey said (and what it didn’t say).
First: Debunking some bad reporting
Some news outlets have reported numbers much higher, and their reporting is bad and wrong:
The Sun incorrectly reports that “three-quarters of children say they would consider some sort of career in online videos.” The Daily Mail repeats the incorrect “three quarters” claim. CNBC also erroneously claims that “52.3%” of surveyed kids “wanted to become either a vlogger, a blogger or a YouTuber.”
All three of these pieces are based on the same survey, and all of these articles are written by people who do not understand the survey they are reporting on.
Let’s begin with The Sun and The Daily Mail’s claim that ~75% of kids want an online video career. They looked at a survey of 1000 children by First Choice, which found that the jobs that kids most desire are (copying The Sun’s reporting/formatting):
Youtuber - 34.2%
Blogger/Vlogger - 18.1%
Musician/Singer - 16%
Actor - 15.7%
Film maker - 13.65
Doctur/Nurse - 13.45
TV Presenter - 12.45
Athlete/Teacher - 11.9%
Writer - 8.4%
Lawyer - 6.4%
First, I have copy editing notes for The Sun: “Doctur,” as best I can tell, is not the accepted spelling for doctor even in the UK. Second, note that some of these numbers like “13.65” and “13.45” and “12.45” indicate a level of precision that is impossible for a survey with 1000 respondents, and I am all but certain that this is a typo resulting from the underpaid writer of this article mistyping a “5” which is located on the same keyboard key as “%.” So that is the level of editorial rigor we are dealing with here in The Sun’s reporting.
My best guess for how they (and The Daily Mail) arrived at “three quarters” is that they summed the numbers for YouTuber (34.2%) + Blogger/Vlogger (18.1%) + Filmmaker (13.6%) + TV presenter (12.4$) = 78.3%.
The problem is that the survey wasn’t structured in a way that made these options mutually exclusive: just looking at the 10 professions listed here, we can see that the numbers sum up to ~150%, which is more than 100%, meaning that kids were allowed to select multiple professions on the survey. There is undoubtedly overlap between “Vlogger” and “YouTuber,” so you can’t just sum those two numbers. You can’t say “60% of kids say they would like a hamburger, 50% of kids say they would like a cheeseburger, therefore 110% of kids want a beef patty on a bun.”
(Let us also appreciate that according to The Sun and The Daily Mail’s reporting, the 8th-most popular profession is “Athlete/Teacher.” Unless 11.9% of kids are specifically saying that they want to be PE teachers, or a striker who moonlights as a substitute teacher, this looks to me like there was a two-way tie for 8th place, with both Athlete and Teacher getting a 11.9% favorability rating with kids, and the reporter didn’t know how to report a two-way tie for 8th place in their ranking, so they decided to combine them into a single line.)
CNBC makes the same error in their reporting, where they see 34.2% of kids say they want to be a YouTuber, and 18.1% of kids say they want to be a Blogger/Vlogger, and sum these to come up with the false claim that “52.3% of 1,000 surveyed kids…wanted to become either a vlogger, a blogger or a YouTuber.”
So, if the survey results are to be believed, the percentage of kids who want to be professional online video content creator is not 52.3% (CNBC), or 78.4% (The Sun, The Daily Mail). The most we can say, if we believe the survey data, is that 34.2% of kids say they want to be a YouTuber in a survey that allowed them to select multiple options. This 34.2% number includes, for example, a kid who wants to be a doctor but is willing to consider being a YouTuber as a backup option: this is not 34.2% of kids describing YouTuber as their “dream job,” they’re just naming it as an acceptable career path.
What the numbers actually tell us
Still, it is interesting that out of all the professions on this survey, YouTube is the most popular.
The number seems to go down when you do make the poll options exclusive, but YouTube remains in first place: a 2021 YouGov survey of US teens 13-17 found that when you force kids to choose one option for their “dream job,” the top picks are:
Vlogger / YouTuber / Professional streamer: 9%
Doctor/Nurse: 8%
Professional Athlete: 7%
Musician: 7%
Actor / Actress: 7%
Artist: 5%
Entrepreneur: 4%
Lawyer: 4%
Esports star / Professional gamer: 3%
Veterinarian: 3%
So it seems safe to say that regardless of how you ask the question, the most-desired profession among young people is approximately “YouTuber.”
Should we be worried about YouTubers being oversupplied?
Whenever I meet a young person who says that their dream job is “YouTube,” I ask them what they mean by that.
For 8 years, I have made a living on YouTube. But during that time, I haven’t had my own YouTube channel where I generate revenue; all of my income has come from working for bigger YouTube channels. Scroll down to the bottom of the video description for a Food Theory video, and you’ll see something like this:
That’s 7 names in the credits, for a 14-minute video. And Theorist has 3 other channels that also upload 1 video per week. If you look up the company on LinkedIn, you’ll see 43 employees listed.
On-screen talent is oversupplied: the number of people who want to be a famous YouTuber is much greater than the number of people who get to make a living as a famous YouTuber. But there is enormous demand for people who can edit videos, write scripts, and design video thumbnails. That is why big YouTubers regularly go on to sites like YTjobs.co to hire for those roles (or, alternatively, they announce opening for these roles via Twitter, Discord, or YouTube’s own community tab).
I previously talked about how, if you teach yourself to use Adobe Premiere and start uploading videos to YouTube, and get good at it, the most likely outcome is not that you become a famous YouTuber; the most likely outcome is that you get noticed by a bigger YouTuber who says “hey, I see you over there making $20 per video in AdSense revenue; why don’t you come over to my channel, where my videos are making thousands of dollars in revenue, which I can then use to pay an entire team of people who work under me?”
And in that sense, “YouTube” seems a lot healthier as a “career ambition” when I compare it to the other top “dream jobs” like professional athlete, musician, actor/actress, or artist. Not everybody can be a big YouTuber, but a lot of people can get a job working for one.
Kids don’t understand YouTube, or the world
Let’s talk about the fear that these careers are going to be “oversupplied.”
In this dream job survey, 4% of teens say that their number one “dream job” is to be a lawyer. Surely that’s a much more realistic and attainable goal that many of them will be able to achieve, right?
But lawyers only make up 0.45% of all employed adults. ~90% of the aspiring lawyers are going to be very disappointed to wind up in some other profession.
Things are even worse for the 3% of teens who aspire to be veterinarians. Fewer than 0.05% of the adult workforce winds up in this profession, meaning that over 98% of aspiring veterinarians will not end up in their chosen profession.
Except this whole thing is silly, because kids do not actually want to work these jobs more than other jobs. Stated preferences are not revealed preferences, and stated preferences matter even less when you are talking to 13-year-olds. Look at all of of the top professions listed on these surveys: what do they all have in common? They’re highly legible to kids.
I say “legible,” and not “prestigious,” because consider the fact that in the First Choice survey, the 8th-most popular response, tied with professional athlete, is “teacher.”
Teachers are one of the adult professions that kids interact with most often, and so when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they say “teacher.” Or they say “musician,” because they listen to music, and maybe they or their peers have had music lessons, and so they’re aware that “musician” is a profession that exists in the world. Ditto for professional athletes, and actors, and doctors, and veterinarians, and marine biologists. (Remember when you were 8 years old and ready to pursue a career in marine biology?)
Kids give answers like “doctor” and “lawyer” and “writer,” and don’t give answers like “actuary” or “auditor” or “product designer.” And it’s not because they see theose latter professions as undesirable, but because they do not know that these professions exist.
Still learning
Much of the process of “growing up” consists of learning that the world exists at a much higher level of fidelity than the model that existed in your head as a child. You eventually learn that not everyone gets to be a doctor, but that’s okay, because you can still see the inside of a hospital every day working as a radiologist or a dosimetrist. Or you realize that the broader YouTube ecosystem has a great appetite for video editors, and you find fiddling around in Premiere to be more fun than speaking into a microphone anyway.
So, while “YouTuber” does rank highest on kids’ list of “most desired jobs,” and I don’t think that most of them will end up being famous YouTubers, I find it hard to react to these numbers with shock and horror. I do not think that kids’ stated career preferences are going to cause “YouTubers” to be oversupplied in the job market to a significantly greater degree than, say, doctors, or lawyers, or veterinarians, or astronauts.
(If anything, I think that it may be possible that among the existing adult population, YouTubers are undersupplied, in the sense that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as a “book editor” or “audiologist,” and have yet to realize that their area of expertise may intersect with what people want to see on YouTube, and while the platform may not make them famous, it doesn’t take a very large audience on YouTube to turn a viewer into a new client.)