This always creates an interesting dynamic in discussions on this forum because I can often tell who is looking at it from each perspective. In the past year I've made a mentality switch from hobby to business. I do think taking a more serious approach has some advantages. For me it has been several things that would have happened a lot slower if I had been in hobby mode. How I plan my content and what I do has changed from what do I want to do, to what do I need to do. Which is still actually a lot of what I want to do but I spend more time figuring out what videos are going to be worth my time and identify which ones are most likely to have success and make those. Last spring I was still just making any old idea I came up with and that meant I wasn't using my skills to their full potential. Understanding what ideas have potential and people want to watch has been a constant strength of mine and I need to play on that more and not be lazy about it.
So putting more effort into topic creation, research, and data analysis has made an impact on what I was able to do this past fall and currently. I've also sat down and actually figured out how much income I would need to support myself from YouTube and which sources I could realistically get that from. That includes looking beyond ad revenue towards other avenues such as affiliate marketing, investigating sponsored content from famebit, patreon, and a few other things. Trying to figure out what split from each source could cover the amount that I would need to make... There are channels who make most of their income from sources other than ad revenue but I do think it takes a degree of planning that isn't always present with a hobby mentality. There are relatively small channels who make a lot of money from YouTube, more than many larger ones and they didn't just get lucky in a lot of cases there was active effort and planning.
I've just reached this point where I'm looking at my content and I have 60+ videos with over 10,000 views and almost 17,000 hours watched per month and I really feel like I have the skills to take it to the next level. I kind of got the feeling that maybe my passive mentality about it was holding me back and I've been trying to be more aggressive in moving towards concrete goals to make this a reality rather than a vision. I've spent a lot of time with it as a hobby, and I don't think it did as much to advance the channel as I've done in the last 6 months taking a more serious approach even when I uploaded less.
Also, I don't have a regular upload schedule, I put out as much content as I possibly have time to create. A lot of the top mobile channels can average more than 1 video per day so the audience is usually accepting of a lot of content. I'm not stuck doing a series but I try not to go too far off brand. I don't put random projects on this channel normally. I do check what did well and what didn't and make adjustments like they might do on TV.