Ester, I have a lot of feelings about this Fusion piece, in part because I spent two years trying to make it as a YouTuber and nerd-folk musician. (Did I just write that sentence aloud? DID I JUST… you know what, Brené Brown and vulnerability, I can own this.)

I knew from about VidCon 2011 that I was pretty much doomed, in terms of “this isn’t going to be a sustainable thing, YouTube is changing and I don’t have the face/brand/personality that is going to be successful here,” and yet I kept at the music thing for another couple of years because I had invested so much time in it and because I was making money. At one point I did the math and I had earned, like $20,000 from CD and merch sales. That’s a lot of merch that I pressed into my tiny fanbase’s hands!

Anyway. I was struck by the public visibility does not equal financial sustainability thing, and I wasn’t even that publicly visible. One of the reasons I started sharing my income on my Tumblr every week was to de-link that connection, and to say “look, I’m playing a lot of gigs every month, I have a residency at a bar, and I am also earning $200 a week.” (It wasn’t a very popular bar.)

And then sharing my income on my Tumblr prompted me to seek out new ways of earning money in order to present a “success story” of “continuously increasing income,” and I got into freelance writing, and dropped my guitar like it was a hot tray full of non-financially-sustainable cookies.

There are a handful of parallels between freelance writing and professional YouTubing, of course. Both of them involve creating a lot of original work on a set schedule in a short amount of time. There is definitely personality involved, and responding to your audience, and building connections. I still do the convention circuit, this time as a writer instead of a musician.

And there’s also the question of “how much branded work am I going to take on,” which in my case means ecommerce and advertorial writing. That line Dunn writes, about how the only people who are earning middle-class incomes are also doing branded work, rang very true for me. At this point—and I haven’t done the exact math, so read it as an estimate—a little under half of my freelancing income comes from ecommerce and advertorial work. Which I think is great! I love writing advertorial and imagining myself as a modern-day Peggy Olson. I don’t feel like “selling out” is the right term to use for “making a living.”

Do I wonder, all the time, about how to sustain a long-term freelancing career? Do I wonder whether my current personal/professional role as a visible freelance writer who shares nearly every detail of her life and her finances online will make it harder to transition into another type of career, should something happen in the next five years? ABSOLUTELY.

So, yeah, I totally have a lot of feelings about this Fusion article! I’m so glad you wrote about it.