Gabby Wallace. Gabby Wallace is a former teacher who now runs a YouTube channel and several rental properties.
She makes money from online ads, sponsorships, and courses, as well as bookings on Airbnb.
She says she only works 10 to 15 hours a week, and she makes on average $60,000 a month in revenue.
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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gabby Wallace, a 38-year-old former teacher turned YouTuber and Airbnb host based in Kansas City, Missouri. Insider has verified her past and current monthly income streams with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve always enjoyed teaching and pursued that path in college. After graduating with my master’s degree in 2010, I got an opportunity to teach English in Japan. The salary offer wasn’t much, but I craved an adventure, so I excitedly accepted.
I enjoyed teaching English, and being in Japan helped me comprehend the need. I wanted to teach in a way that could reach a wider audience, so I started a YouTube channel called Go Natural English and uploaded my first video in April 2011.
Today, Go Natural English has 2.25 million subscribers and averages $15,000 a month in revenue from Google AdSense, sponsorships, and course sales.
I also own 12 properties. Within those, I make $20,000 a month in revenue from my 26 long-term rental units that I funded with my online income and a home-equity line of credit, or HELOC . I also average $25,000 a month in revenue from my 11 Airbnb units. Units can be rooms, apartments, or a full house. I rent out rooms for one of my properties because there’s more demand for them in the Kansas City market. The other properties are for renters to have a home or apartment to themselves.
My average monthly revenue is $60,000 a month. I stopped teaching full time in 2014, and now I’m the only employee of my rental and online businesses — I work with contractors on a part-time basis. I work 10 to 15 hours a week and only spend time doing what I enjoy, which is educating on YouTube and managing my properties. My YouTube channel grew slowly at first
It took a year after starting my channel to reach 1,000 subscribers. By year two, I got a feel for YouTube and my style. I learned that my videos about grammar points didn’t perform as well as videos about how to speak confidently, and my videos about hard skills didn’t perform as well as soft skills .
With this knowledge, I was able to grow the channel to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2012. Despite that growth, I was only making around $1 a month from YouTube AdSense .
In 2013, I moved back to the US to teach at Boston University and ran my YouTube channel as a side hustle. After starting to post consistently twice a month, it grew to 100,000 subscribers by end of year.
Around this time, a friend suggested I start an online course to diversify my revenue. I created and launched a course called ” ESL Troubleshooting ” on Udemy in February 2013, which I advertised on YouTube and my social-media channels. I made it myself after researching courses, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos from entrepreneurs such as Pat Flynn and Natalie Sisson who had done the same thing.I loved Boston, but I wasn’t making enough to live on my own, so I moved back to Japan in 2014. I landed a full-time job teaching English at Toyo University in Tokyo with health insurance, a pension, and housing subsidies. While looking for ways to make more money in Tokyo, one idea that came to mind was to sublet one of the rooms in my apartment on Airbnb I’d heard about Airbnb through the website CouchSurfing and from other travelers. I listed my spare room in December 2014, but I quickly faced a major problem: The contract I’d signed to teach English stated we weren’t allowed to make money from outside jobs. Because there were other foreign teachers living in the […]
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