My dear wife has spent quite a bit of lockdown pursuing her hobbies - which, hopefully, many of us have been able to do. This has involved watching quite a lot of Youtube videos about various craft types. One of her favourites is a woman named Kate Jackson. Kate lives in Northumberland and makes some really quite cozy videos about quilt-making, other crafts, taking her goose for a swim, generally about the quiet rural life of a lady of a certain age, who nearly always seems to have a cat in the video somewhere. All very nice - a bit twee, but great comfort-watching.
Kate has a Patreon channel with a number of levels at which to sign up and Jan was thinking about signing up, so she asked me what I thought. I've signed up to a couple of Patreon channels and I find them quite informative so I had no objection at all.
Then we started to look at Kate's channels a little more closely and we noticed that she was VAT registered. Very few people want to register for VAT - it's one of the penalties of running a company that gets a bit big. There are usually only two reasons in my experience (and I used to work for HMCE, COBOL programming for the VAT computer system) for registering for VAT: if a lot of your trade means that you can claim the VAT back from your suppliers, or if your turnover exceeds £85000, and that's when you have to. Having noticed that Kate Jackson was VAT registered, we then had a look at some of her other statistics: 35k Youtube followers!
Don't get me wrong: I've nothing whatever against this sort of success. It seems to me that Kate Jackson spreads quite a bit of comfort and joy amongst her followers and I'm all for that sort of thing. But I suggested to Jan that perhaps her money might be better spent giving to charity.
https://www.thelasthomelyhouse.co.uk/