I watch YouTube videos on an almost daily basis. I love keeping up with vloggers and watching the lives of people like me, 20 to 25 years old and are either in college or have recently graduated. Lately, my favorite vloggers have fallen into the second category.

   Currently, I am in a transitionary period, as I am looking toward post-graduate life. I will take any and every opportunity to glean knowledge of what my life could be like in a few, short months. A great way to do that is by watching vloggers. Most work 9 to 5 jobs and upload to YouTube as their side hustles. They live in big cities like LA, DC and NYC. They are living the type of life I desire to live.

    Interestingly, out of the handful of vloggers I watch, many of them have recently chosen to quit their 9 to 5 jobs to pursue YouTube careers, plus whatever may be attached to that, such as selling merchandise and earning revenue through podcasts.

     Within the span of about three months, Natalie Barbu, Brooke Miccio, Katy Bellotte and several other YouTubers I watch have posted announcements about quitting their traditional jobs. These are people I looked up to because of their work ethic. They maintained a traditional job and found time to pursue an activity that brought them joy. They exemplified that people can hold a career while still having a social life and carving out time for hobbies. It gave me hope and made me optimistic about the future. Honestly, I watched them because I could relate to them.

     However, this trend of quitting a full-time, presumably decently paid job to pursue another avenue seems unwise to me. As a YouTube viewer, I know that videos that should be in my subscription box don’t always appear, and many YouTubers have said that their subscribers often complain about this problem. Also, videos can easily get demonetized for a variety of reasons, but one of the most common reasons is copyright infringement.

    For example, showing a 20-second clip from a concert will automatically destroy the potential earnings of any video. Morgan Yates, one of my favorite vloggers, tweeted a photo of her email inbox in which 14 of her recent videos were flagged for copyright issues. She even got flagged due to her outro music — one day the music was fine, the next it was an issue. These problems alone would probably dissuade me from taking on YouTube full-time. There are so many ways that YouTube has sabotaged its creators and cost them time, energy and money.

     I am not judging or shaming these vloggers for ditching a job where they are not fully happy in order to try out an unconventional path. Actually, most of these vloggers have emphasized their youth as a reason for choosing to pursue YouTube full-time. They are also branching out and starting businesses and additional side hustles to expand their forms of income.

   Miccio stated in her video about quitting her job, “I am completely nervous [that YouTube might not be a thing in the future], which is why I want to make a business that is sustainable offline.”