YouTube provides young Hongkongers with alternative careers

Auman Yick, 18, a Chinese University law student, has been making videos for Google as a part of its video sharing site’s YouTube Partner Program since it launched in Hong Kong last year.

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Published: 4:09pm, 28 Feb 2013Updated: 12:15pm, 1 Mar 2013

Struggling as a young person to find that dream career? No don’t write a book - make a video. And if it sells, you might find yourself making money from it.

Auman Yick, 18, a Chinese University law student, has been making videos for Google as a part of its video sharing site’s YouTube Partner Program since it launched in Hong Kong last year.

“It’s hard to put a finger on what the audience wants nowadays, but I do it as a hobby,” Yick told the South China Morning Post on Thursday.

The partner programme shares advertising revenue with its “partners” in exchange for producing proprietary content that helps the site generate traffic and views - a process it calls monetisation.

The Hong Kong programme was launched last July, but its US counterpart has been around since 2007. Whole careers have since been built around YouTube. Channels such as Epic Meal Time and RealAnnoyingOrange, have gone on to become franchises in their own right.

According to YouTube, there are now more than a million creators from over 30 countries creating original content for them.

Yick applied and was accepted to the partner programme last year while studying in the United Kingdom after churning out a steady stream of “original, quality and advertiser-friendly content” approved by Google for monetisation.