Keith "ChoppA" Green doesn't like using his real name. "It sounds like an official police thing," the Gladesville man jokes; besides, everyone calls him ChoppA. It also fits nicely with his online persona - the cheery bloke who makes colourful cakes for children.
This is more than just a hobby or passing indulgence - it's how ChoppA, 35, makes his living. Eighteen months after posting his first masterclass on YouTube, the former preschool teacher swapped the blackboard for the baking tray.
"I'd rather make cakes than work in kindy," he reasoned. "I couldn't justify in my head working five days a week for somebody else when I could work one day for myself for the same amount of money."
The notion of making a motza from your bedroom was once the domain of pyramid schemes and Nigerian email scams. But it is a reality for YouTube's cream of the crop - the gamers, agony aunts and A-type personalities who have soared above regular vlogging (video blogging) and into the realm of stardom. Some review games, some perform sketches, others - like Perth's teen idol Troye Sivan - simply talk about life.
Several of the world's prominent YouTubers are in Sydney this weekend for Game ON, an exhibition for accomplished and aspiring internet sensations, and the marketers who seek to work with them. Held at Australian Technology Park in Eveleigh as part of the Vivid Festival, the gathering is about networking, collaborating and learning - and making money.
It can be difficult to know exactly how much YouTubers earn, and likeChoppaA they are often coy on the subject. Yousef Erakat, a Palestinian-American comedy vlogger who will also appear at Game ON, has more than 5.7 million subscribers and produces about four to five videos a month. Social media analyst Social Blade, which estimates earnings from advertising based on cost-per-thousand impressions, puts his annual income anywhere between $US143,000 and $US2.3 million.
ChoppA's most popular video - how to make a Spiderman cake - took one hour to make and earned $17,000 in its first year. It's still clocking up hits, having now been watched 27 million times.
 
"Once you get up into the millions of views you're earning a decent amount of money from that video," ChoppA tells the Herald. He has nine cake how-to films above the magic million mark and several more that are close. Among the most popular are Tinkerbell, Superman and a design based on the Disney film Frozen.
YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 for $US1.65 billion. YouTubers monetise their work by becoming a "partner" and associating their channel with Adsense, Google's platform for auctioning advertising space. Global advertising revenue from YouTube reportedly topped $US5.6 billion in 2013.
Gideon Shalwick, who spent five years working with YouTubers before starting his own firm Veeroll to assist advertisers, says some channels are more lucrative than others. For example, a magic channel watched by young children lacks a cashed-up audience, but a gaming channel targeted at men in their 20s and 30s would have greater appeal to advertisers, especially those in the gaming and electronics industries.
A channel that is optimised "really well" could make $50,000 a year from just 10,000 subscribers, Shalwick says. And while pay-per-view advertising is YouTube's bread-and-butter, he encourages users to leverage their audience and venture outside the platform to make real dough. That might involve driving fans to pages where they can buy T-shirts, gadgets or songs.
"If you do it right you can make substantially more money from other things outside of YouTube," Shalwick says.
Then there's product placement, where advertisers insert themselves into video content for a fee. ChoppA has done it, creating an aeroplane cake with a Turkish Airlines logo to support the company's "selfie shootout" campaign. But he rejected a similar offer from a sex toy company, which he didn't think would sit right with his audience of kids and mums.
