Well worth it… for the right type of person
In a survey a couple of years ago elementary school students in Japan chose YouTuber as the second most popular future career (number one was patissier, a choice I approve of, and number three was doctor).
But is it worth doing YouTube in Japan in 2025, and how is the RetireJapan channel getting on?
Getting started and getting monetized
We actually did a YouTube video about starting a channel in Japan and getting monetized in 2023. You can check it out here. That was in July 2023.
Just to recap, in order to get monetized on YouTube (the first big goal for many channels) you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last calendar year. This is a rolling 12 month period, so each month you lose the views from a year ago. For us, the watch hours was much more difficult to reach than the subscribers was.
How much can you make?
But we made it in the end, and since then we have made 214,828 yen from YouTube. You can see our monthly earnings from the beginning below, starting with May 2025 at the top and going all the way to July 2023 at the bottom (the month we got monetized).
As you can see the amounts are not life-changing, but they do contribute to covering some of our costs. One factor is that ad rates for viewers in Japan are much less than they are for viewers in North America or Europe, so if your channel appeals to an audience outside Japan you might be able to make considerably more money.
In terms of the amount of time it takes, it probably takes me about 3 hours per video now. This is much faster than it used to take me as I have streamlined the writing/shooting/editing process. In 2023 it was taking more like 10 hours per video.
Normally we try to publish one video a week, so in 2025 maybe 10-15 hours work per month yields an average of 10,000 yen or so, so just under minimum wage.
And this is for a personal finance channel (one of the best paid categories on YouTube) with an existing community, which certainly has helped us grow because we already have a community of people in RetireJapan.
We now have just over 9,000 subscribers on YouTube, which apparently puts us in the top 5% of channels worldwide.
Why bother doing YouTube then if it doesn’t pay very well?
I don’t think it is worth doing YouTube purely for the money. There are easier ways to make money that require a lot less work.
However, YouTube is an excellent way to reach an audience. I find YouTube is by far the best social media channel to help us find new viewers, because it is such an effective search and discovery tool.
Other social media like X or Facebook mainly want you to pay to increase your reach (even with your followers). YouTube on the other hand just wants people to watch YouTube videos, so if someone is interested in your content YouTube tries to show it to them. This means that their goals and my goals are aligned.
Also, I have really enjoyed being on YouTube. I like thinking about videos, I like shooting videos, I have come to enjoy editing videos (even though I am not very good at it), and I love our audience on YouTube. Somehow we have ended up with a friendly, supporting, interesting, and polite community on there, which is not what I was expecting.
So if you are thinking about doing YouTube for fun, as a hobby, or to share information, or maybe to promote an existing business or community, you might succeed.
On the other hand, if you are thinking that you might be able to make a lot of money from YouTube, I doubt that will work out well.
How about you? Do you have a YouTube channel? Any questions? Any advice, if you are further along the journey than we are?
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Check out the RetireJapan website for more information, the Forum for discussions about personal finance and investing in Japan, and our coaching page if you need more help.
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