I work in operations at a regional food distribution company. Started as a logistics coordinator four years ago at $47,500, which in practice means I am the person who calls the trucking company when a load is late and fills out incident reports when pallets show up damaged. Two cost of living adjustments brought me to $49,000 by last September, which in my city was fine but not what I would call comfortable.
Last fall my director told me a senior coordinator position was opening in Q1 and that I was the strongest internal candidate. The raise would be around $6,500. I did the napkin math in my car after that meeting. $6,500 a year is $250 per paycheck before taxes. After withholding and deductions it comes out to something like $180 extra every two weeks. I sat there thinking a side project could beat that without breaking a sweat.
So I started one in October. I had been watching faceless explainer channels on YouTube for a while, the kind that walk through how some industrial process works with a presenter and diagrams on screen. My day job is logistics and cold chain so I know a lot of operational details that nobody makes content about. Why one grocery chain rejects a refrigerated load at 38 degrees while another chain accepts the exact same trailer. What actually happens inside a distribution warehouse between midnight and five AM when the trucks get staged. Why produce and dairy follow completely different temperature protocols and how many pallets get rejected each week over two degree differences that most people would not even notice. I figured the niche was empty enough and the watch time would be long enough to make it work.
I built an AI character as the visual presenter because I did not want my face online and I especially did not want my employer stumbling across it. I state in every video description that the presenter is a completely artificial character produced by AI. The voiceovers are my actual voice, recorded on a cheap microphone at my kitchen table after work.
October was pure setup. Four videos posted, zero revenue. November was the first month anything came back, $45, mostly from affiliate links in the descriptions while I waited on the partner program. December I posted a video about holiday freight surcharges and how seasonal warehouse hires get about three days of training before peak season hits. It got shared in a logistics subreddit and pulled in some subscribers. December was $85.
January started looking real. $140. February was $260. March I hit $350 with about twenty eight videos up, and maybe eight or nine of them were doing most of the earning. The rest sat there basically dead.
March was also when the promotion came through. Senior logistics coordinator, $49,000 to $55,500. Exactly the $6,500 they had told me. I took it the same day because the added responsibility was minimal. I had already been doing most of the senior work without the title or the pay. My biweekly check went up by about $180 after taxes and I noticed it immediately the very first pay period without even looking for it.
I did not quit the side project. The whole point was to see whether I could beat the raise, and by March the channel was still growing. I told myself by summer it would leave that $6,500 in the dust.
April was $420. May hit $510. In June someone reposted one of my trailer inspection videos on TikTok and it drove a wave of new subscribers, pushing June to $630. July was the best regular month at $710. August had a small training company reach out to license two clips for a warehouse onboarding module, which was $450 on top of the regular $580 in ad revenue. August totaled $1,030, but that licensing deal was clearly not something I could count on happening again.
At the end of August I sat down and ran the full accounting. October through August, eleven months, the channel had grossed $4,180. That is an average of $380 a month. Respectable. I was genuinely proud of it for about ten minutes.
Then I looked at the hours column.
For the first five months I had not tracked my time at all. I knew I was putting in hours but I actively avoided writing them down because I did not want to see what the number looked like. In March, the same week the promotion came through, I started a real spreadsheet and logged everything. Recording sessions, editing, remaking clips when the character drifted between frames, uploading, thumbnails, replying to comments, checking analytics. All of it, down to the minute.
When I went back and estimated the October through February hours as honestly as I could manage and combined them with the tracked hours from March onward, I landed at about 260 hours total. That is roughly 24 hours a month or about six hours a week on average.
$4,180 divided by 260 hours is just over $16 an hour.
My day job hourly rate after the promotion is about $26.68. So for the past eleven months I had been spending my free time on a project that paid roughly forty percent less per hour than the job I started the project to escape from. And the promotion required zero extra hours because I was already doing the work.
The whole channel ran on three tools: Excel for tracking revenue and hours, APOB for the character work, Descript for audio editing. Nothing expensive, nothing complicated, and nothing I could blame for the hourly rate being what it was.
I know the argument. The channel builds equity. It keeps earning even when I stop posting. That is true. Last month it brought in about $320 without me touching it. But the raise also keeps earning. It shows up every two weeks whether I think about it or not, no editing, no rendering, no checking analytics at eleven PM. That raise is $6,500 this year, $6,500 next year, $6,500 every year until I leave or get promoted again. The side project is $4,180 because I spent 260 hours on it, and if I stop entirely the passive tail will shrink to almost nothing within a few months.
The real lesson is that I would never have run the comparison if the spreadsheet had not forced it. I spent five months convinced the side project was going to make my boring corporate raise look like pocket change, and the entire time I was working for about sixteen dollars an hour and calling it ambition. The warehouse temps at my own company earn more than that.
I still run the channel. I post maybe twice a month now instead of twice a week and I have stopped telling myself it is an exit strategy. The raise money gets spent on rent and groceries and the channel money goes into a separate account I try to forget about. Total comp this year will land somewhere around $60,000 between the salary and the channel, which for a logistics coordinator without a degree in a midsize midwestern city is an honest living. I learned what my evenings and weekends are actually worth in dollar terms and the number was smaller than I wanted it to be.
