Machinima never pays higher than adsense, they're getting a cut from what you make in exchange for some security (contracted stable CPM, exclusive ads, referrals, ads on related channels, etc). Networks wouldnt exist if they didn't make a profit.

Specially machinima, seems to be the most hated network of all, with payouts half the CPM of google directly and in some cases ridiculous clauses like lifetime contracts and network exclusivity clauses.

Don't take my word as gospel, I am talking from a couple of years experience I had in internet marketing but specifically youtube marketing was never my focus. Feel free to search around, but the perception I get from the experience I have and the things I have read is that networks have a much lower payout and very often screw the content producers. Especially machinima.

Here are some links I have come across online that might be of use to you: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, etc, etc...

Also what was the case before is that networks were mainly used by gaming content channels due to these networks being able to handle the channels copyright claims and also because many countries or people couldn't get easily partnered with youtube, for example if you had 200k subs but you lived in a non partner supported country you had to partner through a network. Nowadays thats less and less the case, youtube partner program has extended a lot and the application process to be a partner is much easier.

is this real life.

tbh the tf2 community isn't big enough for you to pull it off, you won't get the viewer base to earn a decent amount unless you upload consistently for a very long time like extv did. I think under most contracts machinima takes a 30% cut from your earnings at least that is how my 3 year contract with them was set up, that rate probably changed because there was another pay cut at the beginning of this year.

For those who don't know, all machinima does is own rights to upload and monetize content from a large library of video games and they use that to hook up growing channels that have a shot at making it big but will never actually get partnership on their own because they don't own rights to upload content from video games. That is why all of these call of duty commentators split with machinima once their channels get big enough to be recognized by Youtube as potential partnership material. Youtube has raised the bar quite a bit when it comes to partnerships especially with gaming channels. You will make pennies from adsense if you don't have a full partnership, I'm quite sure that just adsense alone gives you little to nothing for ads in comparison to full yt partnership but if you're partnered under machinima they're going to take most of your shit anyway. All the ad earnings go to them and they send you a direct deposit of your earnings after they take their cut. According to the higher-up admin I'm not allowed to share this info with anyone but whatever, I plan on cancelling my contract with macinima anyway. As for the guy saying they put you on long term or life contracts, its not like that maybe it is for the bigger channels but the usual contract is for 3 years and you can cancel whenever you want but I'm sure they trap channels that are growing rapidly. They're leeching off of the hard work of all these small channels, one channel alone probably doesn't make a difference but when you have hundreds of thousands of these yt channels you're getting a 30% cut from... it adds up.

That's what I was thinking of, YouTube partnership. I am pretty sure I can nab that without the Machinima deal - and no, Machinima doesn't take 30% from me, they pay me a flat $2 per 1000 views. The difference works out to about 50% if my analysis is correct.

You're somewhat correct about the TF2 market - I would need to get a lot more views per video to make it work. Comp TF2 is certainly a fairly small subset, but folks like Stabby and STAR have shown that the pub tf2 market is much larger. Shoutcasts really only appeal to comp TF2 most of the time, so I will have to find a way to appeal to that pub market. MVM vids, for example, seem like they could work... but I'll keep throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I just don't want to spend hours on the editing process - shoot, render, upload is all I want to be doing.

verizon throttles youtube in my area, my friend can't even watch 360p but downloads off FTPs at like 8mb/s

You know what might also help in this case? Patreon. http://www.patreon.com/

I know a really decent network (it is one of the best networks as of right now). Feel free to contact me and I will give you more information on it.

once you get stuff in order with your new job try making a few videos and doing scheduled uploads and maybe letting your subs know which day(s) of the week they can expect a video from you. You could also try hiring a slave worker to do all the hard work for you like extine does with luckyluke. Without luke the extv channel wouldn't even be half as big as it is.

Schedule is going to be key. But also, I'm thinking Patreon will be key. Gonna set that up tonight. The TLDR of Patreon is, people can donate/tip to me directly for each video produced (with monthly maximum to avoid me shitting out 30 videos a month and eating their wallets). It'd be a way of guaranteeing earnings above and beyond ads. I bet if it works for me, it can work for TFTV and any of the other TF2 content creators too.