Web chef: Eddy Siswanto demonstrates cooking pempek (fish cake) on his YouTube channel. (JP/Musthofid)

Eddy Siswanto began vlogging about his passion for food only a year ago and his pitch has begun to bear fruit.

He has now uploaded more than 300 items onto YouTube with subscribers totaling nearly 800,000.

“My friends say I am lucky to get such a number of subscribers in just a year,” Eddy said.

“I heard that YouTubers can make billions so I was keen to try it,” he told The Jakarta Post.

“In the beginning I made videos about water pumps including a tutorial on how to fix a broken one,” said the 50-year-old, who sells water pumps among other wares in his shop.

After some time, he said, as he was running out of ideas about what to present next after the water-pump content he turned to food, about which he has been fascinated since he was a teenager.

His first food content on YouTube was a demo on cooking pempek (fish cake) and it appeared to draw a great deal of interest from his audience.

“Requests later came in asking for other recipes,” he said, adding that he had learned a lot about food from his mother.

He has found that responses are not always encouraging. Some mock his presentations.

“How on earth can you call that Padang food? What the hell is it?” he said, recalling a few critical comments from viewers.

He said he was not at all bothered by such comments, being aware that YouTubers are after viewers regardless of the nature of their comments.

“You do not need to feel offended because bad comments are also good for building the channel,” he said.

Complaints about the duration of his videos have also prompted him to cut them from between 20 and 30 minutes to between 12 and 15 minutes.

Video shooting has not always run smoothly either.

“The other day while I was negotiating an angle shot on the cooking process of vegetables the camera battery suddenly dropped low. I fetched the new battery, but on coming back I found the vegetables were over-cooked and I had to redo the cooking from the start,” Eddy said.

Right angles: Haryo Sutanto gets footage for his YouTube channel. (Courtesy of Kenya Studio)

Money-spinning machine

Eddy is among the video-shooting enthusiasts who are looking to solicit as many viewers as possible in order that they can get a small share of the huge money YouTube earns from the video industry.

He now receives between Rp 1.5 million (US$100.63) and Rp 15 million a month, excluding rewards for the occasional endorsement of products.

Established YouTubers are already making billions. Atta Halilintar, who tops the Indonesian YouTubers’ rankings, has 22.6 million viewers with monthly earnings estimated at between US$93,000 and $327,000.

According to a variety of sources, YouTubers can make anywhere between 1 and 3 US cents per view with AdSense -- advertisements administered, sorted, and maintained by Google -- with an average of 18 cents per view.

However, the amount of money YouTube will pay depends on a variety of factors, such as the number of views the video receives, the number of clicks an ad receives, ad quality, ad blockers and video length.

With the average YouTube pay rate, a YouTuber can make around $18 per 1,000 ad views, which comes out at $3 to $5 per 1,000 video views.

YouTube does not pay partners based on the number of subscribers on their channel, but they are integral to the number of views the videos receive.

Promotional showcase

While Eddy is concerned about the number of viewers, Haryo Sutanto has joined YouTube to promote his work in photography and video editing.

“I have been doing video editing since 2007. I would show them to my friends and upload to YouTube,” he said.

He has two playlists BillyRocks and Kenya Studio, with the latter being dedicated to commercial purposes.

From the viewing perspective, his content is not yet financially successful but Haryo does not seem to be bothered, saying that he expects money from elsewhere through partnerships.

One of his clients is the East Jakarta administration, which got Haryo to document the local pageant known as Abang and None.

“I showed a series of artistic clips of video editing with the story. So, YouTube is just a media to showcase my portfolio,” he said.

Other sources are turbo.intuit.com, noxinfluencer.com