The 5-Year Rule: How Tom Calton Hit 250K Subs After Going All In
YouTube Creators Hub
Dusty Porter
4.7 • 551 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
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About Tom:
Tom Calton is a full-time content creator and photographer who recently hit the 5-year mark on his YouTube journey — a milestone he originally set as his make-or-break deadline. His main channel now has over 227,000 subscribers, more than 105 million views, and generated around $150,000 in revenue last year, with 4–5 million monthly views across both long- and short-form content.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I think it all fits under the same umbrella, which is I wasn't just happy just doing one thing and just settling with it. |
| 0:07.1 | I wasn't just making videos. |
| 0:08.5 | I've never just made a video for the sake of making a video and just kept my fingers crossed that it will go viral. |
| 0:13.9 | I've always studied other channels, studied other people, tried to figure out what it is that makes their videos more successful than mine. |
| 0:21.7 | Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. |
| 0:26.5 | This is the conversation portion of the show. I'm joined today by another wonderful |
| 0:31.3 | creator, Tom Coutton. He's a full-time content creator and photographer who recently |
| 0:36.6 | hit the five-year mark on his YouTube journey. |
| 0:39.3 | Congratulations on that. |
| 0:40.7 | A milestone he originally set as his make-or-break deadline. |
| 0:44.2 | His main channel now has over 227,000 subscribers, more than 105 million views, and generated around $150,000 in revenue just last year with 4 to 5 million monthly |
| 0:57.0 | views across both long and short form content. Tom, how you doing? |
| 1:01.5 | I'm good. Thank you, Dusty. How are you? Doing really well. Really excited to have you. |
| 1:06.0 | I've watched a good bit of your content. I love your style and just the things that you cover on your channel. |
| 1:13.6 | So before we get started, tell the audience a bit about the origin story five years ago. |
| 1:18.4 | You just celebrated the five year mark on YouTube. How did this whole thing start? |
| 1:22.9 | Like most life changes, it came with a global pandemic. So literally, I used to run a wedding photography |
| 1:30.1 | and videography company here in the UK. And COVID hit. Everything went completely upside down. |
| 1:36.7 | And I've always wanted to start a YouTube channel but never had the excuse to do it. So that was |
| 1:41.6 | the perfect excuse. I had plenty of spare time. I was obviously in lockdown in my own home and I decided just to give it a go and get started. So that's how it all took off. And I decided to go with the photography niches. It's something that I've been doing since I was 18, really. I've been a freelance photographer since then. I figured that was a subject that I knew the most about that I could get started with and yeah, it just |
| 2:01.0 | snowballed from there really. |
| 2:02.2 | So the tagline on your channel says snapping picks and making flicks. |
... |
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