How much money does Scooby make?

There were a few months back when YouTube started ad revenue sharing that I was probably making a higher hourly wage than anyone in America. I was making $15,000 a month for doing four, 3 minute videos – thats $60,000 per hour. So there is your answer, $60,000 per hour. Let me share a little secret with you, something that those in the sciences learn very early on – the secret to success is in asking the right question. Asking how much money I make is the WRONG QUESTION. Who cares how much I made, that is a meaningless number. The secret to life is in asking the right questions! Here is the question you should be asking:

How did a goofy, painfully introverted engineer without any formal fitness training become such a popular YouTube fitness celebrity without even trying when there were 10,000 other guys who were younger, hotter, funnier, more muscular, better actors, and more determined to be successful?

Now THAT is a very interesting question and unlike the question of how much money did I make, the answer to this question can reveal a lot of very important information that you can apply to your own life to help you succeed at your passions. The secret to success is in asking the right questions!

This is a trite phrase but it is true – “follow your passion and the money will come”. Well, that phrase needs a little work because its not true. If your passion is gaming and you do that 16hrs a day, there will be no money. Scoobys modified version would be this: “Follow your passion and use it to help others and the money will come.”

History of Scoobysworkshop

Let me give you a little history to illustrate how this worked for me. I quit my engineering W2 job and retired in 2002 when I was 41 because it wasnt fun anymore. Because I had saved and built rental properties, I technically did not have enough to retire but the rental properties provided enough income that I could take a break from working (read “Is Scooby Rich?“).

Bodybuilding had been such a positive influence in my life by giving me self confidence and improving my health that I really wanted to help spread the fitness gospel. This was 2002, the era of AOL, and Netscape had just died. To get information about working out, you had to go to the library and then, the only modern book there was Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. The muscle mags catered to the steroid users and were of no use either. Other than one Christian based fitness website, there was no free information about working out, bodybuilding, or home workouts online. I was certainly no expert unless you call two decades of making every mistake in the book being an expert. What I did have is a burning desire to help people. If nobody else was going to help people workout at home to gain muscle, lose fat, and get healthy with free home workouts then I decided that I would have to do it. The home workout part was important because I felt strongly that fitness and health were a basic human right regardless of economic status and a lot of people didnt have the money or time to go to the gym.

In making my website, I included a lot of photos to show people how to do various exercises properly but found it really difficult. When the first digital cameras came out, I was really excited that little video clips would make it a LOT easier to understand than photos. My first digital camera was 640×480 and had no sound which is why a lot of my early videos have voiceovers rather than me actually talking in the video. The real problem was that viewing videos over the internet was not easy. Its hard to imagine this now but there were no videos on the internet nor any way to stream them in a webpage or show them. What I ended up doing was just uploading the video files to my server. When people clicked on the video on my page, they had to wait 30s – two minutes for the complete video to download before it started playing. Not only was this cumbersome but it was really expensive for me because I had to pay bandwidth charges for every megabyte downloaded (this was long before DSL with un-metered service).

Then YouTube came along and would host videos for free! Not only that, they allowed you to embed them in your webpages and they would start playing right when you clicked on the play button! Coolbeans! Because there was no money in it, there were just two of us doing fitness videos on YouTube. Imagine that, just TWO trainers on YouTube, me and Doug Jones, but now there literally tens of thousands. As an aside, people ask why I am less popular now than I was in 2006, its because back then I was the ONLY ONE on YouTube – people had no choice and HAD to watch me :) In any case I was REALLY excited about YouTube hosting my videos because not only would I save money but I would be able to help more people get fit and healthy! I cant remember the exact timing but I think it was about a year after I started using YouTube an amazing thing happened, YouTube sent me a big check. Thinking it was a mistake, I just put it in my drawer and did not cash it. Next month, another even bigger check – again, just put it in the drawer. Third month, again! What is it with these crazy YouTube people? I decide to figure out what was going on so I log into my account and find out that I was part of something called a “partner program” and the checks were something called “revenue sharing”. Could have knocked me over with a feather. THEY were saving ME money by hosting my videos and then they send me MORE money – truly crazy!

Was I being rewarded by Karma? Dont know. Was it sheer luck that I was in the right place at the right time to make 60k/hr, not really – no luck was involved. It was a true example of “follow your passion to help people and the money that can follow”. People who were only interested in fitness as a big fat paycheck were not interested in YouTube because there was no money to be had. I on the other hand was simply interested in helping people and was grateful for the ability to reach a wider audience. When ad revenue was announced, I was three full laps ahead of the other horses before they even left the gate. Even though I was retired and not even trying, I was making $15,000/month for doing 12 minutes “work” a month – thats $60,000 per hour. When others saw this easy money, the goldrush started and thousands of “trainers” rushed in. It was easy money for a number of years till the market became saturated with trainers. Really how many thousands of bicep curl videos do we really need? Simple supply and demand caused the income of those on YouTube to decline to a fraction of what it once was. Its fashionable to call this demonitization” and make Google/YouTube out to be the evil grinch but its just supply and demand.

If I were to start my YouTube channel today, I would be no-one with no following. There are literally tens of thousands of fitness trainers on YouTube who are stronger, more muscular, hotter, funnier, and better actors than I am. The one thing that does give me an edge is that I am not trying to make money off people and this resonates with some. Because I dont want people to buy anything and I dont sell anything, people trust me more. They might think I am an idiot but at least they concede that I am an honest idiot with good intentions :). Simply because I was seeking out new technology to help others get fit for free, I was in the right place at the right time. The thousands of “me too!” trainers who came to YouTube for later trying to make easy money were sorely disappointed. There is always someone new who is hotter, funnier, and more charming.

Personalized Nutrition and Meal Kits

So am I saying I was lucky? No! Because I would not waste my time starting YouTube channel today because there is no need – there are already a kazillion free videos out there and most of them better than what I could do. I would not bother with Facebook nor Instagram either as those places are saturated with hundreds of thousands of people with great physiques. What I would be doing is trying to figure out what I can do that these 100,000 trainers cant. I dont want to waste my time doing what others have already done, life is too short. What I WOULD do is actually exactly what I AM doing, and that is combining my talent of software engineering with fitness. Nutrition is the biggest obstacle to most people achieving their fitness success and my CustomMealPlanner.Com free meal planning tool is the best in the industry. THAT is what I would be doing, promoting CustomMealPlanner so that people can learn what “good nutrition” really means!!! Just like my early days at YouTube, I am the only person doing this but the goldrush is about to start. How many laps is everyone going to give me this time? “Personalized Nutrition” is the term that agribusiness, Amazon, HelloFresh, Home Chef, Blue Apron, Freshly, PepsiCo, Kraft, McDonalds use to describe what I am doing except they want to use personalized nutrition is to tell you which combination of their yummy nutrition-less foods you can eat in a day and still not get fat. They want to feed you from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed to lock up all your food dollars. I am David fighting Goliath, and guess what? I am winning! 2.5 million meal plans! I take the opposite approach, rather than recommending highly profitable, highly processed, nutritioness foods, all my meal plans use raw ingredients or minimally processed ingredients but still require hardly any kitchen time to prepare – most can be made in under 7 minutes. Not only that, the meal plans at CustomMealPlanner are optimal for bodybuilding, fat loss, and health! CustomMealPlanner will not mail an expensive meal kit to your doorstep BUT it will give you a shopping list and allow you to buy everything except the meat and produce from Amazon if you want.

How can you apply my success to YOUR life?

Lets go back to the “secret” of my financial success in fitness:

“Follow your passion and use it to help others and the money will come.”

We need to examine this closely because a lot of people dont understand what this means or how to make it work for them:

Follow your passion. You have a 9-5 job that pays the bills and you are dead tired at the end of the day. Rather than to relax by watching TV, gaming, or getting on Facebook you follow your passion! You read. You do research. You practice. You write. Every day, every weekend, month after month and year after year. Become an expert at your little niche.
Use it to help others. As you become proficient in your niche you will get all kinds of awesome ideas of ways you can help people. Think of ways to share your expertise with others. Think of ways to share your excitement. How can you help people achieve what you have? Build a website. Start a blog. Start a club. Start a forum.
And the money will come. It will come but I can almost guarantee you that it will not come in the way you expect it to. If your desire to help people is genuine and you are really good at what you do the money will find you, you will not have to look. Remember though that you need to have patience. Read about the 10,000 hour rule in the book “Outliers”.

How much money does Scooby make?

$60,000 per hour but that is the wrong question to ask. The right question is how did someone who was old and retired make so much money at fitness without even trying where there were literally hundreds of thousands of young guys who were more attractive, funnier, and had better physiques than I did. The answer is that I was following my passion and trying to help people – and the money followed.

Related Pages on Fitness Careers

How did Scooby make $60,000 per hour? Read How much money does Scooby make?

Can you still make legitimate fitness money on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook today? Read Making a legitimate fitness income on YouTube.

Do you love fitness and want to find a way to earn a living doing it? Read How to turn fitness into a career.

Do you want to be truly rich or do you want a lot of money? There is a big difference. Chase the wrong one and you will be very unhappy. Read Is Scooby Rich?

How can you become rich so that you can follow your passions every day? Read How to get rich.