People who don't create will never understand how much time and effort goes into even a 10-minute video essay.
I feel like the overwhelming majority of people who just passively and casually watch YouTube and never create anything of their own will never truly understand how much time and effort goes into even a short video essay. As a small creator with slightly over 460 subscribers, I don't have the luxury of having a whole team of people helping me on videos.
I am responsible for absolutely everything, and that includes all of the researching, scriptwriting, voiceover work, recording footage and gathering clips, creating graphics and animations, and organizing it all in the timeline in a way that's cohesive and pleasant to watch. With how brain-rotted everyone's brains are these days due to TikTok, it has made editing even more difficult. All it takes is a viewer to lose attention for one second and they'll get bored and click off the video. This has been a big struggle of mine, but I've gotten much better at retaining viewership over my last few videos.
I'm currently in the end stages of editing my current video project; having edited 10 minutes and 24 seconds of a video that will be 12 minutes long. The current project folder is over 140GB in storage space, and I have placed over 300 video assets in the editing timeline — this number will likely exceed 350 by the time I get to the end of the timeline. In one of my past video documentaries, I ended up placing over 2,000 video elements by the time I reached the end of that video's hour-long editing timeline. The editing process is by far the most time consuming; taking me between two and four months depending on the length and complexity of the video.
The video editing alone easily consumes anywhere between 50 and 150 hours of my life, then there's the researching, scriptwriting, voiceover recording, thumbnail creation, publishing, and promotion, and all that stuff easily adds another 10 to 15 hours. My most viewed video is sitting at 13,000 views, with most of my videos sitting somewhere between 800 and 2,000 views. To some, it may seem a little ridiculous to put in this much time and effort given the disproportionate number of views my videos get relative to how much time is put into each video, but I'm a perfectionist and will spend however long it takes to create the best video I can muster. Unfortunately, due to the niche-nature of the content I make, my videos don't have the greatest view-potential since they're not about broadly popular and trendy topics, but I'm never going to make a video about a topic just because it's popular and trendy.
I would absolutely love to someday reach a point where I can quit my job and do YouTube as a living, but I know this is incredibly difficult to achieve and something only a small number of lucky individuals have the luxury of doing. I do YouTube firstly because I enjoy it, and that's the most important thing. Starting a YouTube channel only for the desire of getting rich is a path that's basically guaranteed to end in failure.