How Artists Actually Make Money on Social Media

Most posts about making money as an artist online list ten revenue streams and give you numbers for none of them. LP Lucas does the opposite. In his Social Media for Artists course on Twotap, the Brazilian illustrator, who has roughly 800,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, opens his own analytics and his own income breakdown on camera. The picture that comes out is more useful than any listicle, because it shows which levers actually pay and which ones only look like they should.

His real income breakdown

In the lesson NUMBERS, ANALYTICS and MONETIZATION, Lucas walks through every source of income he has:

• Memberships and merch: about 5%. Patreon, YouTube memberships and his t-shirt store, combined, are the smallest slice.
• Illustration work and royalties: about 15%. Brands commissioning new illustrations or licensing existing ones, plus his courses.
• YouTube ad revenue: about 35%. The platform's monetization program, mostly from Shorts and long-form videos.
• Brand deals: the largest share. Sponsored videos for partners he has worked with for years are where most of his money comes from.

He is careful to say these percentages are his, not a law. He names artists with completely different mixes: Steven Rhodes and the studio Ilustrata make around half their income from merch, and the Argentinian illustrator Sebacuri lives on royalties and brand illustration work. The point is not to copy his ratios. It is to test several streams and find out which one fits your art and your audience.

Follower count is not the number that pays

The most striking numbers in the whole course are about memberships. Lucas has around 800,000 followers on his art channels. He also runs a Portuguese-language literature podcast with his wife that has about 13,000 followers.

"I have 800,000 followers and can you guess how many members I have? Two. No, three. That's crazy. On the other hand, with my literature podcast, with only 13,000 followers, we have 60 members."
LP Lucas, in the lesson NUMBERS, ANALYTICS and MONETIZATION from Social Media for Artists

Twenty times the members from a following sixty times smaller. His explanation is fit, not size. The podcast audience is older, 35 to 60, passionate about a narrow subject, and hears about the membership in every episode. His art audience is huge, young, and mostly there to be entertained for thirty seconds. If you are counting on memberships or a paid community, a small audience that cares intensely beats a large one that scrolls past.

What actually moves ad revenue

Lucas is unusually blunt about how platform money works. Views are not equal. Three things change what a view is worth:

• Audience age. Advertisers overwhelmingly want viewers around 25 to 35. When your channel grows with that bracket, brand deals and ad rates both get easier.
• Audience country. Views from the United States and Europe pay more than views from lower purchase-power countries, because those viewers can buy what the ads sell. He calls this unfair and real at the same time.
• Your field. Tech channels earn more per view than art channels, because tech viewers buy tech.

He also shares the retention benchmarks he works to: 60% or more for long-form video, a figure he says came from a YouTube employee, and around 70% or more for short-form, since keeping someone for thirty seconds is easier than keeping them for ten minutes. The video he builds live in the course held 77% of viewers to the end and brought in about 500 subscribers from 600,000 views.

And then there is the outlier: his most viral video, a compilation he assembled quickly on a Friday because he had nothing planned for the weekend, sits at 78.4 million views and brought in 50,000 subscribers on its own. His conclusion is not a formula. You cannot plan virality; you can only keep posting and treat every video that outperforms the last one as a win.

Brand deals start smaller than you think

Lucas got his first brand deal, with Wacom, when he had about 2,000 subscribers. Not two hundred thousand. Two thousand. He says it changed his life, and it came in the phase when he was still sending cold emails to brands himself.

For that phase, he recommends keeping a media kit ready: your follower numbers, your audience demographics (age, countries and gender are what brands always ask for), examples of your work, and any past clients or credentials that build trust. One caution from experience: send it only when asked. Unsolicited attachments from strangers mostly go unopened.

Today the flow has reversed. Proposals arrive daily, most of them bad; out of a month of inbound offers he might find two worth doing. But the durable money, he says, comes from partners who return year after year because the work delivered, and because a creator's video costs a brand less and reaches further than traditional advertising.

Merch pays only if the design is built for it

In the SELLING your STUFF lesson, Lucas shows his print-on-demand store on Threadless. The model costs nothing upfront: you upload designs, the platform prints and ships when someone orders, and you split the sale. Opening a store takes a day. Selling from it is the hard part.

His first mistake is instructive. He assumed any illustration could become a t-shirt. It cannot. An image that works on a screen often fails on fabric, so he redesigns each piece for the product: the joke gets shortened, the text gets big and readable from across a room, the layout changes entirely. His "dumb questions for artists" series went through exactly that adaptation before it sold.

He is also honest about who his merch is for: people who already follow him. Designs that only land with your existing audience will not become a main income stream, and his have not. Artists like Steven Rhodes sell broadly because the designs stand alone, and because they promote them constantly.

The rule underneath all of it

Every stream Lucas describes rests on owning your material. He pays for a licensed music bank for his videos, builds his own reference photos instead of tracing other artists, and avoids low-effort reaction content. He tells the story of a famous Instagram guitarist who spent years replaying smaller musicians' solos as his own, until someone put the clips side by side. Followers, brand deals, career: all gone at once. Original work is slower. It is also the only foundation that holds weight.

Where this comes from

Everything above is drawn from three lessons of Social Media for Artists by LP Lucas on twotap.art. The full course covers the rest of the system: choosing platforms, finding a sustainable posting frequency, recording and editing process videos, and the exact cold email he used to reach brands before they came to him. If the numbers in this post felt more honest than what you usually read, the course is fourteen modules of the same.