I built a calculator showing the YouTube compound effect

I've been doing affiliate marketing through YouTube for over a decade now.

The number one thing people get wrong isn't the niche or the affiliate program they pick.

It's that they expect month 1 to look like month 12.

It doesn't work that way. YouTube is a compound effect game. Every video you publish doesn't just earn once and disappear. It sits there and keeps earning while you publish the next one, and the one after that.

Video 1 by itself doesn't do much. But video 1 plus video 50 plus video 100, all still live and still ranking, that's a completely different business than the one you started.

I built a little Claude calculator to actually show this instead of just talking about it. You plug in how many videos a week you're making and it shows you how the numbers stack over time instead of staying flat.

Here it is if you want to mess with your own numbers: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/de618343-27d6-4b11-b646-f50437b0fb72

Most people stop around the point where the curve is about to bend upward. That's the part nobody shows you. It looks like nothing is happening right up until it isn't nothing anymore.

If you're in the "I've made 10 videos and nothing's happening" phase, that's normal. That's not a sign to quit, that's the setup.