How much YouTube paid me for pretty much reaching 50,000 subscribers but much more than that, how much they’re paying me based on views? You will discover what it is that I did after a decade in order to have this spike in growth, and what mistakes I made for the longest time when it comes to earning and monetizing on YouTube.
What if I told you that YouTube is actually one of the worst ways to actually monetize? Do millions of views actually equal to earning thousands of dollars? The answer is no. The reason for that is because how much you get paid largely depends on these different factors.
- The topic or your niche or the industry that you serve
You’ll see that if your topic is on broad audiences, for example, pranks or just viral and generic content, it is very possible that one million views equals to about $500, maybe even less sometimes. This is measured by this terminology called CPM (Cost Per 1,000 impressions), which is how much they pay you per 1,000 views. The question is how do you drive this number up? You drive this number up based on what it is that you talk about. If your market is naturally about money, finance, real estate, or anything to do with ROI, advertisers who are running ads that are willing to pay more and because they’re willing to pay more, YouTube is able to share more of that ad revenue with you. The first thing you wanna talk about if you are thinking about starting a YouTube channel, think about the advertisers. What type of ad or product would they be able to promote on your channel for them to make money?
- Switch on monetization
If you follow me, you’ll know that I don’t make my money off YouTube. The only reason why I switched on monetization a couple of months back is because I was doing an interview with my friend Dan Lok and in this interview, he said this, “Even though there’s no real evidence, once I switched on monetization, I’m on YouTube and making money through showing ads. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be in their best interest if my monetization was switched on?”
For me, I’m more about product sales, getting a bigger reach, funnels, sales processes, etc, so why did I have monetization switched on? It is because I wanted YouTube to incentivize them to push it further. Understanding that concept means I allow them the opportunity to run ads. How can you give them more opportunity to run ads? If you have videos that are over 10 minutes long, that’s when YouTube would allow you to run and produce ads in between the videos. However, I don’t switch those ads on. Instead, I chose the default, which is to have an ad running before the video plays.
- Have a good retention rate
Retention is based on how long your videos are. Social media platforms today want you to stay on that platform for as long as possible. If you can help them get audiences to stay on YouTube watching videos, that is when they reward your videos further and run more ads. Good retention would be around 50%.
When I’m building a following, my number one priority is to grow the channel. But because I know that YouTube wants to make money, so I’m giving them the opportunity to make more money by switching on ads. So what I wish I knew was switching on ad monetization way earlier because I didn’t do it until this year. Videos that are directly related to money and marketing and social media means that advertisers would pay a lot of money for that kind of spot to place their ad. Keep your YouTube channel to a specific theme. Avoid talking about nine different things, keep it specific to one thing instead. So like you’ll notice that the thing that I always talk about now is entrepreneurship, marketing, sales processes, social media, and others that are under the umbrella of building a business. I might even talk about what I’m doing behind the scenes, or my different hobbies, for example collecting watches. I might decide to do that because it’s still under my umbrella of my main niche.
What is attributed to this growth? It’s about optimizing my videos so that it’s discoverable. But that’s a topic for another day, as now I’ve mainly focused on how much YouTube is paying me and the things that I learned along the way. To summarise, when it comes to monetization, understand that YouTube views are absolutely the worst way to actually make money. Out of all of my different income streams, this one is the least of my priority. Why? Because if you understand how to promote and create and sell your own product or even sell somebody’s else’s product as an affiliate, that income stream is gonna be way bigger than just monetizing through views on YouTube.
Discover the exact numbers and money I’ve earned through YouTube by watching my YouTube video here. Check out my other videos on Affiliate Marketing by clicking here as well. Let me know what you think in the comments!
