YouTube has become our main income source while cruising. It has afforded us the ability to go cruising and stay cruising! When we left the marina for the first time, we had a few months budget saved up in the boat. As time went by, we slowly spent that money for necessities like food and for fun things like excursions on shore. This meant that our cruising kitty started to get a little thin as we weren’t working our old jobs anymore!
Our YouTube videos started to grow in popularity and this began paying us a very meager income. At first, we were earning around $100 per month. This might sound like nothing, but our monthly budget was only $500; meaning that our earnings from YouTube accounted for 1/5th of our monthly budget! Suddenly, that $100 became a chunk of money to us.
We worked on improving the videos, slowly learning what works and what doesn’t, as well as learning how to edit better and tell our story. With time, our channel grew larger and larger until it reached it’s current state of 16k subscribers. Still very small, but much larger than it was when we started!
It seemed that the videos had gotten as good as our equipment would allow them to get. We can edit all we want but when we are editing bad footage with bad sound, the end result is a bad episode. We were now earning enough money from YouTube that we decided to upgrade our equipment, and this included a new camera.
Our original vlogging camera was a GoPro Hero 5, which we have used everyday for the past 4 years! It is an incredible camera and a true workhorse! We upgraded to the GoPro Hero 8 and splurged for the Media Mod.
The Media Mod gives the GoPro better sound by using a better microphone on the camera. It also gives you the ability to connect an external microphone as well, giving you much more control over the sound you will collect. You are more likely to enjoy a bad video with great sound than you are to enjoy a great video with bad sound. Improving the sound quality is very important and we have high hopes for great sound with the Media Mod.
From my initial and very limited testing, it actually gives better sound than our Rode VidMicro! I am very excited to see how this little guy will play out in our future and to see the increase in video quality that we can create with these better tools!
