Hamiltonian named Canada’s top YouTube creator for her popular MadFit channel
Remember when a million dollars meant you'd made it? Now it barely pays for a Florida hospital stay.
But a million subscribers on YouTube? Now there's a truer measure of success.
And so in August of 2019, Maddie Lymburner became a millionaire of sorts, achieving the million-subscriber milestone with the surging popularity of her workout videos, which combine a clean-lined simplicity (music added) with a rare and refreshing ease of manner.
She was astounded. Until that summer, her food and nutrition YouTube presence was actually taking up more of her time than the fitness plank.
Astounded then? Astounded now. In one year, Maddie's subscriptions to her MadFit YouTube channel had quintupled to five million.
It gets better. On Dec. 1, YouTube Canada named Maddie the Top Canadian Creator" on YouTube for 2020 and also the Top Breakout Canadian Creator."
I was surprised and excited and honoured," says the 25-year-old who grew up in Waterdown and now lives on Hamilton Mountain.
The COVID crisis and the closing of many gyms have had much to do with her channel's huge uptick in 2020 (enter MadFit in the YouTube command bar). People have really been looking to exercise and work out at home," she says; and her varied and versatile menu of ab, arm, leg, and full body fitness sessions and booty burns, some as short as five minutes, have an understandably wide appeal.
She sees the numbers and sometimes they don't seem quite real; they're abstract - some of her videos get 10 million or more hits - but then she goes out and gets recognized.
A woman came up to me and said, Thank you. You're the reason my legs are toned.'"
Maddie takes it all in humbly and gratefully. I'm actually able to make a living at what I love."
The origins of it all could hardly have been more casual and organic. It started in earnest when she and her then-boyfriend travelled around the world, mostly to Asia and Australia, in 2016, spending most of a year abroad. To chronicle their adventures, Maddie started vlogging, mostly daily travel content and food and recipe video posts.
She had been uploading on Instagram and YouTube as early as 2015 when she was working at Goodness Me, the health food store, and had become vegan. She vlogged about nutrition and diet and what she was eating. She actually got up to 1,000 subscribers and started making some ad revenue.
But when she and her boyfriend started crafting their travel and recipe videos while abroad, the subscriptions shot up to 50,000.
By the time they returned to Canada in 2017, they devoted themselves full-time to their YouTube channel. They were able to pay their rent with the income.
Then they branched out into workout videos. This was a natural for Maddie as she had been involved in competitive dancing since the age of three. Having given it up at 18, she wanted another outlet for her athleticism. She separated the workouts and the food videos into two different channels.
I didn't go to college or university and I didn't know what I was going to do. I never drew up a specific goal but I've always been obsessed with movement, performance and healthy living.
I had a feeling that I was going to do something different."
She sure has. The fitness channel was sluggish at first but then she had the idea to set her workouts to popular songs. That's when she started rolling up the numbers.
Her workout featuring Billie Eilish's Bad Guy" has more than 11 million hits.
She films her own videos with a camera on a tripod in her apartment which she has turned into a studio. The videos all have a similar simple attractive look - wood floor with mat, and planters with bush trees. Spartan but light-filled, clean and inviting.
During the first COVID spike, she was producing at least one video a day, sometimes more. Now she does about three a week.
Like most YouTube creators, Maddie earns money directly on her platform through advertising, merchandise sales and subscriptions, advertising generally being the chief of these and the creator generally getting 55 per cent of the ad revenue and Google getting 45 per cent. Ads cost between five and 30 cents a minute and can cost as little as a dollar a day.
The longer visitors spend on her channel, the more Maddie makes. She doesn't discuss how much that is but it's enough that her YouTube work is her full-time job. It's a thriving business.
Most YouTubers make only a few thousand dollars a year. The very top ones, with millions of subscribers and tens of millions of hits, can make tens of millions of dollars. Canadian YouTuber and comedian Lilly Singh, for example, made $10 million on YouTube in one year and has a net worth of $18 million, according to some reports, not that that is any point of comparison but it might be a gauge of what is possible on the platform.
I try not to put too much pressure on myself but I also care about the importance of showing up for my community" even if it's only to put up a five-minute ab video, says Maddie.
The key thing? It has to be fun."
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com