I’m an amateur when it comes to video production but I’ve created enough of them over the years to have a sense of how much time and effort even a simple video requires. While the overall quality and professionalism of YouTube videos seems to be going up, few rise to the level of Maxinomics. I don’t recall how I happened on the channel but was immediately impressed by the presenter, Phil Andrews. Some background from Claude:
He’s an entrepreneur and engineer turned digital storyteller, breaking down the data behind major stories in business and geopolitics through maps, data visualization, and rich visuals.
On the production side, Maxinomics started with Phil having a strong TikTok presence, and in 2023 he partnered with Morning Brew Inc., which gave him access to production resources and collaboration opportunities. The decision to go all-in on YouTube came in 2025. The channel is very much a team effort — the crew behind it includes a video producer, senior motion designer, multiple motion designers, and video editors, all at Morning Brew Inc.
His personal background is a little thin in public sources — his X profile tags him as a data enthusiast and surfer/hiker, and early writing credits show him covering fintech and markets for outlets like TheStreet going back to 2021. The “engineer turned storyteller” framing is the clearest window into his arc.
The channel currently sits at around 332K subscribers with 46M views across 86 videos — pretty remarkable growth for a channel that only committed to YouTube in 2025.
The production values are so high I asked Claude about how long it took to produce one of these videos.
The Uber video — “What Happens When Uber Doesn’t Have to Pay Drivers?” — is 10 minutes long and took the team 10 weeks to research and produce, with over 44 million rows of data analyzed.
Phil spends weeks building each story, carefully planning every beat of the viewer’s experience, and the channel publishes a new video every three weeks. So roughly a 1:1 ratio of screen minutes to production weeks on at least one video, with a new longform piece dropping about every three weeks. Given that there’s a full team of motion designers and editors behind each one, that tracks — the visual density alone would be labor-intensive. It’s essentially short documentary production economics, not typical YouTube creator output.
So, is the channel making any money? That info is not publicly available:
Maxinomics generated 15 million longform views in 2025, a 2,807% increase over 2024, and YouTube Shorts views tripled to over 33 million. For a business/finance channel with that kind of engaged, high-income demographic, the CPM rates (what advertisers pay per thousand views) tend to be among the highest on YouTube — often $15–$30+ versus $3–5 for general entertainment.