Making Money in Fitness Online

In this video, I wanted to explore, with specific numbers and examples, how someone might be able to make fitness their full time career by using YouTube.  I’m intrigued by the potential of YouTube to reach a broad and growing audience of people interested and passionate about fitness like me.

The contrast to what I’ve experienced in my own career working in a sector that’s facing secular decline (more on that in a bit) is part of what excites me about fitness.

Growth in access to great fitness content online combined with the ramp up in affordable home gym equipment continues. The online fitness community is at the forefront of several high growth trends. At the same time, fitness YouTube seems like a very crowded scene.

The basic idea of this video was me exploring what it would take to replace enough of my income to make “doing fitness” a viable full-time job.   For the sake of simplicity, the number I was shooting for is $100,000 annually. In other words, what would it take, how popular would you have to be as a YouTuber to consistently produce $100,000 using traditional fitness avenues.  In trying to figure this out, I run through a few examples and try to figure out their business models from the outside looking in.

Fitness Business Economics

In any business, you look for things that are scalable, preferring business that are not capital intensive.  Selling basic, generic strength programs is a good example of such a product in the fitness world, even though it’s not a repeatable source of income like monthly coaching. 

But many parts of the fitness world are time intensive, which then becomes self limiting by the number of hours per day. Online coaching is an example.  

In addition, this can be a very competitive industry, where building a defensible business is very hard. Breaking in and building enough of an audience or credibility is a real challenge, especially if you don’t have credentials as a trainer or much knowledge that someone couldn’t find on their own on the internet.

Contrast that to my declining profession…

I work as a stock picker, a portfolio manager who helps decide which stocks various mutual funds own.  Stock picking is facing challenges from the passive investing movement towards more ETFs. What’s worse, I am a stock picker focused on energy stocks.  The energy sector has been the worst performing group among all sectors in the stock market for a decade now.

• So, I pick stocks when picking stocks is in secular decline
• Focused on a sector that’s in secular decline
• With many competitors

Ideally, you want to find a growing niche of growing market, with limited competition, an area where you can establish barriers to entry. 

• Examples of different fitness business models with barriers to entry and scalability:
• Unique equipment items: Slingshot for bench press is one I can think of, but not much else comes to mind

Most everything is not unique in fitness

• Squat racks, barbells, whey protein, creatine, apparel is all pretty generic and therefore very competitive
• Anything new that can be copied gets copied quickly, like the MB Stone of Steel that Titan ripped off last year

Training programs, coaching services, even weekend seminars seem like pretty interesting business lines that can produce steady income for a person with a large enough YouTube following. 

How can I make $100,000 in practice?

So, how would this work in practice? If I wanted to get to $100k of income from fitness, I would have to develop a few complementary businesses, then promote the hell out of them with some entertaining content on YouTube that strikes enough of a chord with the community such that I would amass a few hundred thousand dedicated subscribers.  

To make things simple, I’ve tried to look at the economics of 4 different businesses and then figure out how successful each of those businesses would need to be to each get to roughly $25,000 in revenue.  The numbers are pretty daunting, but let’s run through them.

First, if I started an online coaching business, let’s say it was as a strength coach, but it could also be nutrition coaching, in theory.  I’m not qualified for either one at the moment.

• But, let’s say I charged $150/month for my services
• To get to $25,000 a year in revenue for that business, I’d need 14 clients
• 14 clients seems do-able and perhaps the most realistic of any of these options

Second up would be selling excel-based strength programs, maybe accompanied by some kind of e-book.  

• If I was able to develop such products and sell them for $60/program
• I would need to sell 35 programs a month, or 420 per year, to reach $25,000
• That seems like a lot and much more far fetched than the coaching piece

Third, merchandise.  I’ve kept this category vague, but I am assuming it is some kind of apparel or small equipment item.  But, it could also be BCAAs or pre-workout or something.

• If my margin on whatever widget I am selling was around $7/unit
• I would need to sell 300 per month or 3,600 items per year to reach $25,000
• Those numbers seem even more unachievable than the program sales figure

Fourth and finally, YouTube.

• To achieve $25,000 a month, assuming $3 per thousand views
• I would need to get 700,000 views per month

To put that number in context, it is more than these YouTubers got in the last month:

• Alan Thrall
• Vitruvian Physique
• Brian Alsruhe

To achieve that level of YouTube revenue, I’d need to become at least as popular as Remington James, who has more than 450,000 subscribers and has posted more than 500 videos.

In each potential revenue stream, I have a ton of work to do, and it would take a long time to get to the point with all the businesses where I would have enough income to do it as a job.

• I have never coached anyone in strength training, but I like the idea of it
• I have bought many excel-based training programs, and am certainly a capable excel jockey given my finance background
• Selling other items would require me to get a much more impressive physique or personality to attract customers
• And, even though this youtube channel is the one thing on the list that exists today, getting that up to 700,000 views a month is maybe the most far fetched of all these items.

Basically, the economics of YouTube aren’t great, but the exposure potential is incredible and it can be combined with other things to create a real business.