🔴 Do they have YouTube in space?

ft. Swapna Krishna of Ad Astra

Author

Francis Zierer
October 25, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

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Today’s guest is Swapna Krishna, creator of Ad Astra, a YouTube channel and beehiiv newsletter about space. She’s a professional writer with over a decade of experience — everything from journalism to content marketing to authoring a book.

In this issue:

  • 🏗️ Insights from a creator working to build on unexpectedly early wins

  • ▶️ Unlocking YouTube AdSense revenue

  • 📧 Thoughts on repurposing YouTube scripts into a newsletter

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Swapna or watch it on YouTube.

“My first writing on the internet was book reviewing, because I was an avid reader. I started reviewing books, and that’s where I was like … I can write on the internet.”

Swapna Krishna did not go to journalism school. She formed a career in science and culture reporting out of pure passion, curiosity, and a drive to share those traits with the world.

Hobbyist book reviews led to freelance gigs and a career in writing for the internet. Swapna has written for outlets The Verge, Gizmodo, Fast Company, SYFY; she’s worked as an editor and content marketer for tech companies like 1Password and Stripe; she’s hosted a YouTube show for PBS.

Currently, she is one year into working full-time on Ad Astra, a YouTube show and “place to learn about the universe around us” she writes, produces, and hosts.

Engadget is the key publication in Swapna’s career, the place that provided her with an education in journalism. “They took a chance on me,” she says, teaching her how to work in a newsroom, how to write concisely, how to write about topics she lacked background in, how to be a reporter in a traditional sense.

The PBS-to-creator pipeline

Ad Astra was born from Swapna’s seven-episode stint hosting PBS’ YouTube show Far Out. “It taught me I have a natural affinity for being on camera, which I never knew,” she says.

The most-viewed episode from Swapna’s time working on Far Out

There was a year between her accepting the offer to work on the show and production beginning. To prepare, she started making TikToks, as she’d done writing and podcasting, but never video.

Ad Astra happened because Swapna never stopped making videos; she just switched from vertical to horizontal. Her break came one year after making that switch, on February 19, 2024, when she posted a video about the first private-company moon landing.

Swapna pegs the start of this year as when she started working on Ad Astra in earnest, when it moved from hobby to full-swing. Still, it took 59 videos (and 11 months) from her first for-YouTube horizontal to her first semi-viral video (32k views at time of writing), incidentally the same number of videos she’s produced since.

Creator craves company

Swapna still freelances, but Ad Astra has become her main gig. On the PBS show, she was just one member of a full production team; now, this career writer is doing everything herself, figuring out a totally different format.

Her current highest priority is to not do everything herself:

“My biggest weakness right now is I don't have an editor, and I need one. That's my next goal, to hire somebody to edit me.

[My time at Engadget] taught me how much I need an editor, what an editor can do, how to write, how to report ... it taught me so much.

Fast forward, last year I was a space editor at Inverse. It was a freelance position. Basically, I did the opposite — I took people who were writing these 300 to 500-word news articles about space and edited those. That gave me the other perspective.”

Finding an editorial point of view in a crowded niche

I asked Swapna about her goals for the business over the next year — her answer had nothing to do with subscriber or revenue numbers.

“By the end of 2025, I want to be at a place where I understand the types of stories I do. I know I cover space, but when I look at a story, I want to have a better intuitive understanding of [why I would or would not cover it].”

This goes back to her wanting to hire an editor soon; she’s having trouble sitting with the work and standing above it at the same time. For now, her public is her editorial thermometer:

“I actually get a lot of my ideas on social media. I take a news story, I talk about it on, like, Bluesky — ‘Look, this is what I think is cool about it.’ And I'll wait and see what people say.

I look at what are other people asking about this? What questions? I know a lot about this already; what questions do people who don't know a lot about this have?

I will also say this doesn't work for everybody; I love social media. I actually really enjoy being on these platforms.”

Recent Ad Astra videos

Revving up the revenue streams

Ad Astra generates revenue through YouTube’s AdSense, beehiiv’s native ad network, TikTok’s creator program, and one-off YouTube and vertical video partnerships.

Swapna “expected to be in the hole for two years” while building the project; if, by the end of 2025, she still wasn’t making any money, she’d know it was time to reconsider. Her semi-viral videos at the start of the year pushed her beyond her expectations ahead of schedule. There are a few requirements to access YouTube AdSense, including an audience of at least 1,000 subscribers and a video catalog boasting at least 4,000 hours of watch time over a 12-month period. She achieved that off of one video. Of course, she’d spent a year practicing, publishing dozens of videos beforehand.

Unlocking YouTube AdSense has changed her approach to creating videos:

“The thing I learned very quickly once I got into the revenue program is that you want to have a video that's about eight minutes long because then you get two ads, and you maximize revenue.”

She’s quick to clarify she’s able to make the project work because her husband has a full-time job.

“I have a partner who brings in a steady income and has health insurance. And honestly, that's how I'm able to do it.

There too many people who don't talk about that part of it. And it's like, I am lucky, I'm privileged because I have that.”

He’s also the sole other person currently involved in the project, if in a small way. He moderates the YouTube comments; she reads them only after he’s gone through.

Being a creator-journalist takes personality

I asked Swapna if she identifies with the creator-journalist label — the answer was an easy “yes,” probably helped along by the fact that she didn’t come up within the world of pure, J-School journalism.

“You can be both a journalist and a creator, but even if you kind of talk about newsy topics, that doesn't mean you're a journalist.

I feel like being a journalist means I'm very conscious of sponsors, where my money comes from. The reality of doing it independently means you either have to charge your subscribers or take sponsors or both. I am at a place where I do not want to charge subscribers.”

She’s certainly helped along by her time at Engadget and other publications, and she’s spent years building contacts at places like NASA; she can easily reach out to a few people there and get “well-researched responses” because she’s built that trust over many years, including when she did represent known publications.

While she’s not ready to share specific subscriber or revenue goals, it’s clear Swapna is on an upward trajectory. Her YouTube channel has added nearly 1,500 subscribers per month on average this year, and her YouTube instincts are only getting sharper. Most important, perhaps, is that being independent allows her to lean into her personality; the stage suits her.

“Multiple people have told me, ‘I follow you because I love your enthusiasm. Space isn't my thing, but I love how much you love this.’

That's something that I bring to the table where, yes, I'm a journalist. Yes, I try to abide by those principles, but also, one of the reasons I wanted to go independent is I didn't want to have to tamp that down in order to report.

When I'm reporting for a third-party organization, I try to keep the enthusiasm low in order to be a little more professional.

I don't have to be professional on my own newsletter. I can just be like, ‘This is coolest thing I've ever seen!’”

Connect with Swapna on Bluesky, her preferred social app.
Watch Ad Astra on YouTube or read the newsletter on beehiiv.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

How to launch an email course (step by step)

In this in comprehensive guide, Will Steiner (creator of Master the Email-Based Course) partnered with beehiiv to share everything he knows about email courses. It’s a master class in selling more online–by teaching through email.

Over 1,000 students have taken his course (but he’s sharing the best way to get started here).

🎙️ We covered a lot of ground in the podcast; the newsletter could only fit a few of the topics we touched on. In this episode of the pod:

  • 🎞️ Swapna walks through her full production process

  • 🦠 We discuss why specific videos went viral when others didn’t

  • 🤳 How Swapna leverages her arms-open relationship to social media

Accessibility is a good business plan

Swapna is a writer who became a YouTuber who made a newsletter purely as an accessibility service (as opposed to a tactical repurposing play).

“I didn't actually envision the newsletter when I first started. It was just YouTube. I'm lucky to have people who followed me through different projects. For example, they started following me when I reviewed books and have been following me for a long time.

They were all like, ‘Love the videos, but we don't love video, generally, do you have plans to publish this anywhere?’”

So she made a Patreon and posted cleaned-up transcripts there, but it wasn’t quite right.

“Having a written alternative is about accessibility. I have something called misophonia, where like unexpected noises, I find them overwhelming.

I just did [the newsletter] because I didn’t want to gatekeep accessibility, and now I realize it expands the potential for my audience so much, because a lot of older people don't want video, but a lot of younger people do.

A lot of people who started out as newsletter subscribers now watch the videos.”

The Ad Astra newsletter is a processed byproduct of the YouTube series, but it stands on its own.

“It is an incredibly low lift after I publish the video. I usually send out the newsletter at 11AM the day after the video is published. It's just copying and pasting the script, going through, cleaning it up.”

If the script has her talking about a graphic that appears in the video, she changes that to make sense in context. It’s also, crucially, a way for her to thoroughly reference her sources; her work relies on many sources, and hyperlinks in the newsletter are a much more effective way to credit them than are YouTube show notes.

The newsletter, Swapna says, is now pushing 2k subscribers (the YouTube channel is nearing 15k). She pushed hard for the first 1,000 subscribers, using beehiiv’s Boosts tool, but has relied on her social media posts and word-of-mouth since.

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we’re joined by Aliza Abarbanel, co-editor of indie print magazine Cake Zine. We cover the economics of running an indie magazine, community among media people vs. food people, potentially starting a wine bar off the back of the magazine, zine collectors, and more.

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