This is a YouTube channel case study of a very popular YouTube channel called Travel Thirsty. We will look at what they do, how they make money, and how you can potentially create a similar YouTube channel without showing your face and do it even better.
What Does Travel Thirsty Do?
This is a channel in the YouTube niches of travel as well as food. However, it’s different from many food and travel YouTube channels.
Out of all the YouTube channel ideas, The Travel Thirsty channel (see it here) added a twist to their videos by combining traveling with food. They travel to different places and show how various foods are prepared.
It’s unusual to watch many of their videos because the channel creator does not speak in the videos at all. In fact, there is no speaking in most of the videos.
It’s simply videos of unique international foods being made. The only sounds you here are from the environment and the chief or person making the dishes.
A great example of this is their most popular video “$600 GIANT RAINBOW LOBSTER Sashimi Japan Seafood“. This video has over 131 million views so it has proved that people like to watch this type of content.
Travel Thirsty Facts
This channel was started in January 2013. Since that time they have uploaded over 787 videos. They have uploaded around 6 to 7 videos per month.
At the time of this study they have over 7.86 million subscribers and growing steadily.
How Travel Thirsty Creates Videos
The types of videos featured in this channel are very easy to create. They simply shoot the videos of someone preparing the food.
All you need is a good camera for recording videos, a good microphone, and video editing software.
A good camera would be the Canon PowerShot and you may look at the Audio-Technica or the Sennheiser Professional as microphones.
To edit the videos to get ready for uploading to YouTube we suggest wevideo or Camtasia. While there are many video editors on the market, we like these.
How Much Does Travel Thirsty Make?
With over 3.5 billion video views since this channel began and over 20 million video view per month, Travel Thirsty does create some amazing ad revenue.
Currently, according to Social Blade, their revenue from ads showing on their videos is nearly $990,300 per year.
Although this is amazing revenue, there are many things this channel does wrong. They leave a lot of money on the table and could be earning so much more. We will cover this in the next section.
What Can Travel Thirsty Do Better?
Before we talk about what this YouTube channel could do better, let’s look at what they do right.
First, they shoot high-quality videos of content that people find interesting. This means they choose good topics to focus on.
They also produce videos over 15 minutes in length. This may be too long in some niches as we normally say between 10 to 12 minutes in length, but for this type of content, longer is juts fine.
With food content such as this, people tend to watch for longer periods than you might find for how-to or informational type videos.
So having videos in the 20 minute and more range can be beneficial to get longer watch time and then more ad revenue.
What They Do Wrong
It’s hard to say that a channel that makes $990,000 per year is doing anything wrong. However, the fact is, they could be making much more.
Affiliate Revenue
If you look at any of the videos on Travel Thirsty, they do not promote any affiliate products on their video description or the video itself.
With the amount of subscribers they have this could be an enormous loss of income possibilities.
All they would need to do is join various affiliate programs (there are thousands) and then promote them in the description of their videos.
They would receive a commission if a customer clicked on their affiliate link and bought something.
Many times these commissions can make the channel owner much more than ad revenue.
Besides adding the affiliate links in the description of the video they could also start the video with a short commercial that would say:
“This video is sponsored by” and then mention their partnership with the affiliate program and say the links can be found in the description below the video.
To gain access to hundreds of profitable affiliate programs, consider taking our favorite course or get our guide.
Sponsorships
The creator of this channel could also sponsor with various brands that would love to get their products in front of such a massive and loyal audience.
According to noxinfluencer, this channel could get over $5,600 per video for sponsorships.
Income Wrap Up
So as you can see this YouTube channel and creator could be making a lot more from their huge growing audience.
It may be that they have no desire to do this but with just a few other monetization methods, they may be able to increase revenue by 30% or more!
How To Create A Channel Like Travel Thirsty
Creating a channel like the Travel Thirsty is not difficult but will take time and dedication. You’re not going to create something like this overnight.
However, the videos for this type of content are very easy to create so in regard to the technical side, it’s fairly easy.
The main thing this channel requires is to pick very interesting topics. If people are not interested in the topic, they won’t watch it.
Fortunately, people seem to love to watch all types of food related content so this has the potential to be lucrative if you take some time to do it right.
Create a Channel
It doesn’t matter what type of niche you decide to enter, you will have to start with creating your YouTube channel.
This includes choosing the right name to use so that it’s relevant to your content but also brandable at the same time.
Choose a name carefully as this will be how your audience remembers you.
Once you choose a name, simply create your channel. We will not cover every step here on how to create a channel but go to the end of this study and click the button to get our YouTube courses.
These will guide you in the process to create a channel properly.
Optimize Channel
Creating a channel is not enough. Anyone can do that. After your channel is started it’s now time to make sure that everything is optimized.
Doing this will make sure that people will be able to find your content. Fail to do this properly and your videos and channel may get very few viewers and subscribers.
See our guide to how to make money without showing your face in videos.
Better, take the training we offer to make sure your channel gets optimized correctly.
Come Up With Your First 30 to 40 Topics
As it’s now time to start creating content for your YouTube channel, come up with the first 30 to 40 topics that you will cover.
You can go to the Travel Thirsty channel and look at their most popular videos and do something similar.
Try to make your videos better in some way.
Eventually you will learn what topics work but for now, stick with what you know works from looking at the successful videos of other similar channels.
Create Videos
Once you have your first topics ready, it’s time for you to hit the road and shoot the video content.
If you’re going to travel, this means you will need to factor that into your creation time.
However, you may be able to product a lot of content locally. Just approach restaurants and other locations and ask of you can shoot them making whatever food you want as your subject.
If you live in an area where there are many food vendors on the street, this is even easier as you can shoot them making various foods.
Edit Videos
As you complete each video, use your video editor of choice to get the video ready for upload.
If you don’t know how to do this on your own, you can easily outsource the video editing on Fiverr. They have freelancers who will do this for amazing prices.
If you can do it on your own, that’s fine as well. As stated above, we like certain video editors. You can see our favorite YouTube tools here.
Upload Videos to YouTube
After the editing process is done and your video is ready for upload, you can start uploading videos to YouTube.
Do this as you complete each video. Don’t wait to do them all at once.
The key when uploading videos is to make sure that each video is optimized correctly. There are over 10 items you need to think about to optimize a video.
See our favorite course and our guide to teach you all of the secrets to doing this properly.
Analyze Results
Whenever you have uploaded your first 30 to 40 videos, it’s now time to take a brief break and analyze your results.
Use the YouTube analytics to see how your videos are performing. These stats will help you to determine what to focus on for your next set of videos.
Do It All Again
Now, the process of choosing topics and going through each step in video production will begin again. This is after you have analyzed and determined what works from your first set of videos.
Considerations
There are not many things that you need to worry about for this type of content. You don’t need to think about having a script or even narration.
That being said, you do not to take time to come up with content people will really love to watch. Think carefully about this. What types of food could be unique that people would love to see prepared?
Conclusion
This channel is a great example of what can be done using YouTube and only using ad revenue alone.
We hope you can use the tips covered in this case study to create an even better channel than Travel Thirsty.
Would you like to build a channel like Travel Thirsty and profit from YouTube? Take our YouTube course and guide to learn how to make money from YouTube. This offers everything you require to build successful faceless YouTube channels.
Like this case study? You can see many more on our site. Check out this case study for kimgary which is in a very strange niche making $6,300 per month!