After getting her first pet rabbit at age 12, Haley Elmhorst started a YouTube channel to share what she was learning about bunny care.
More than a decade and 217,000 subscribers later, the 101Rabbits channel — and a thriving online rabbit supply business of the same name — bring in nearly a half-million dollars annually, according to a report released Wednesday by YouTube, part of Google LLC, and Oxford Economics about the economic, societal and cultural impacts of the video streaming platform.
Elmhorst, now age 24, began making money from her channel when she was in high school. She launched her retail business in 2017 on Etsy and shifted to 101Rabbits.com in 2019. Earlier this year, Elmhorst opened a brick-and-mortar store at 2917 Post Road in Stevens Point, but closed it in August because she needed to use the space as storage for online inventory.
"This will NOT affect our online store, which is very much alive and running!" Elmhorst wrote in an Aug. 26 announcement on the business's Facebook page.
More than a third of the 101Rabbits website traffic and 60% of its in-store revenue is directly or indirectly from YouTube, according to the report. Elmhorst manages five part-time employees and partners with local rabbit rescues to take in foster bunnies at the Stevens Point location.
Making videos is also an outlet for Elmhorst, who has several physical and mental health conditions that have made it difficult to make friends and work a traditional job.
"On YouTube, I could be myself. No one made fun of me. No one cared about my nerdiness," Elmhorst wrote in a March 9 Instagram post on the 101Rabbits account. "I could say what I wanted to say and had an audience that wanted to listen. ...To the therapist(s) who told me being an entrepreneur would never be sustainable, look at me now."
101Rabbits is among more than 38,000 U.S. YouTube channels that had at least 100,000 subscribers as of December 2020, according to the report.
Members of YouTube's Partner Program, which requires at least 1,000 subscribers, can make money on the platform through advertising revenue, channel memberships, merchandise sales, YouTube Premium revenue and fees that viewers can pay to highlight their messages in live chat streams.
The report's online landing page features three other Wisconsin YouTube stars: Ryan Kuster of How Farms Work, based in Potosi, with 287,000 subscribers; Green Bay's Nick Ferry, whose eponymous YouTube channel about woodworking has 246,000 subscribers; and Madison's Beatrice Naujalyte of The Bliss Bean, a productivity and self-improvement channel that has 249,000 subscribers.
