YouTube poster girl on how to earn a living from something you love

A YouTube star who started off “making silly little videos” as a teenager has become a real-life poster girl for the company – and now makes a living on the site. Scola Dondo, who has 244,000 subscribers, is being celebrated in a YouTube campaign marked by several posters across Birmingham – including on Coventry Road and Kings Heath High Street.

Alongside several photos from her content, wall art advertising the video platform says: “Make what you love. Make more doing it.” The Brum-based content creator, who has amassed 21 million views, makes enough money to sustain her lifestyle and said bills were “not so much a worry” after several years of doing what she loves.

For 28-year-old Scola, YouTube was a huge part of her childhood as she grew up watching videos with her older sister. Initially, it started as a passion for creating short clips and ‘mini movies’ with her friends, but now, after spending ’24/7′ on the channel and qualifying as a personal trainer, she earns a living from posting fitness and lifestyle content.

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Her content, largely filmed in her Birmingham city centre home, ranges from ‘what I eat in a day’ and dance workouts, to mental health advice and body positivity videos. Scola told BirminghamLive she began her first channel in 2010 and started her health account when she was around 14 – a decade-long journey to get to where she is now.

She said: “I would just make silly little videos with my friends. I started off doing silly stuff like skits and making mini movies was all the rage so that’s what I did a lot of. Fast forward a few years, I embarked on a health and fitness journey and I made a separate channel for that; the main channel I have now.

“It grew and grew and grew. I was making content in response to questions, like ‘how do you exercise’ and ‘how do you eat’ and it snowballed from there.” But views and subscribers really started to “explode” when she began filming dance workouts to Afrobeats, she said. “I’m Zimbabwean so I love music from the African continent. That’s when my channel started to explode.”

At college, Scola applied for part-time jobs for extra money but “never seemed to get them”, she said. “I was lucky my channel started growing at a rate where I was making enough for my age that I could go to the cinema and stuff,” she explained, adding the money from the channel grew according to her needs over time.

“Once I left school, I couldn’t go to university as I couldn’t get student finance. So I put everything I had into qualifying as a personal trainer and kept working on my channel. I was lucky I was still living at home so I didn’t need a lot of money, but I was making just about enough to do what I could at the time.

“I was filming every day, seven days a week, 24/7, it didn’t feel like 24/7 because it was something I loved, it was my life so it’s one of those things that was non-stop for me. There were not many days where I wasn’t thinking of videos or thinking of an idea or filming something.”

Asked how much she earned from YouTube, she replied: “It fluctuates so much it’s hard to even say a set amount.” But she added: “One thing you have to prepare yourself for is the instability of how much you make monthly, it is still an amount you can live off and that’s amazing as a creative because there’s a lot of creative industries where you can’t always sustain yourself.

“This is definitely one where you can sustain it and do what you love and make money from it.” Asked if, with the instability of it, she worried about bills or money, she explained: “It’s enough to sustain you and it’s something you can make a living off of, it’s not so much a worry, especially because I’ve been doing it for so long.”

She continued: “I’m probably from the generation of creators that didn’t know what was possible [in terms of making money], it was purely for the love of being creative and it still is. It was the love of making video, I’d grown up watching it, it was something I was passionate about, it wasn’t until years later that money even factored in.

“In the beginning it’s like you don’t want to jump the gun and say ‘I’m going to do this full-time’, you wait and see how it’s working for you and how you can manage it. From then on, it’s not something you have to be consistently concerned about all the time. It’s just like any other freelance work.”

Asked her advice for others, she said: “I didn’t set out to be a business. Every day I wake up and do it because it’s a passion of mine, rather than a strategic thing. When you love something, it doesn’t feel like work.

“Whatever you choose to create or choose to do, make sure you genuinely love it and you’re passionate about it – and that you can see yourself doing it for a long time because I’m over a decade-deep doing it and I still want to create, I still love it, I still want to do all of that but it doesn’t feel like work.

“I know money is one of those big things people talk about when it comes to creating and it’s like, the money will come, you will end up being able to do what you love while making money, and that’s an amazing feeling, but it doesn’t always happen overnight.”

Do you have a niche way of making money? We would like to hear from you. You can contact us by emailing stephanie.balloo@reachplc.com