*YOUTUBE - YOUTURN* - 1

ALMOST NO ONE is making a living on YouTube.

ONE of the main attractions of YouTube is that anyone can become a star, writes Todd C. Frankel. There are no gatekeepers. No talent agents or television executives need to be won over.

Stars can come from anywhere. And they do.

Forbes' recent list of of the richest YouTubers is proof. It's filled with people who post clips about playing video games or kids playing with toys.

The top spot went to Daniel Middleton, known as DanTDM. He's a 26-year old British gamer - and he earned $16.5 million last year.

But a new study finds that the odds of striking it rich on Google-owned YouTube - or even making a modest living - are vanishingly small.

Reaching the top 3.5 percent of YouTube's most-viewed channels = which means at least 1 million video views a month - is worth only about $12,000 to $16,000 a year in advertising revenue, according to-

Mathias Bartl - A professor at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, whose study is one of the first to probe YouTube data for clues about how it works for creators.

Bartl found that it's gotten harder for new creators to reach the top as YouTube alone adds 300 hours of video every minute and the biggest stars become more successful.

The median views per video has plummeted to 89 in 2016 from 10,262 a decade earlier. At the same time, YouTube's biggest channels are gobbling up more eyeballs.

The top three percent of channels got 64 percent of all views views in 2006. A decade later, the top channels took 90 percent.

YouTube did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the study.

What's happening on YouTube is occurring across the Internet, where creators are finding that long odds of success in the online world are not so different from IRL. [Internet speak for ''in real life''.]

In fact, they might be worse.

The research continues to Part 2.