How to Make Money on YouTube

I few days ago one of my work colleagues saw a very simple video on YouTube that had something like 7  million views. It shows someone cutting open a Black Widow spider egg sack. While very educational, the video didn't take very much time to create. My coworker wondered how the two of us could make sensational videos to get a lot of views.

For those that don't read my blog, I have created 2 YouTube videos and I use my colleague at work to review them. He knows the ones I have created are just to help me improve my video creating skills and I have to say I have learned a lot. Unfortunately I have not gotten a lot of views. Today my total is only 204 combined for both videos. Even if I received a dollar for each video, I spent more making them that I would have been paid. But what if I didn't have a job and needed money quickly? How could I make money from YouTube?

Doing a quick Internet search and you will discover there are 5 basic ways to make money with YouTube and some of these strategies work well with other social media platforms like Instagram. The ways to make money are:

1. Advertising revenue
2. Affiliate marketing programs
3. Selling products
4. Sponsors
5. Crowdfunding

Let's look at each of these individually to get a better idea of what each means.

Advertising Revenue
Once you have enough views of your videos, you can add advertisements to them. YouTube has specific guidelines to make sure you have a large enough audience before they will allow you to start putting ads in your videos. The number you want to shoot for is about 4000 view hours within a year period (you also need 1000 subscribers). As I only have about 200 views (which translates to 26 view hours) over 8 months, I can't even think about putting ads on mine. This brings up an important point: to make money off YouTube, you need to get a lot of eyeballs watching your stuff. That will hold true for any of the 5 ways of making money.

Let's say you do manage to hit that million view milestone. How much is that going to earn you in just advertising revenue? After spending a few hours looking through numerous posts, the average seems to be about $1000 per million views. Some people make significantly less and others make more. There are a number of factors that go into how much you will make but $1000 is an easy number to play with and so we will run with that.

While the Black Widow video seems to have a lot of viewers, they have only made around $7000. If it only took them a day to create the video then that is not bad for a day of work. However think about someone who only has 1000 views. That amounts to only  $1. There must be better ways of making money with YouTube.

Affiliate Marketing Programs
There are a number of companies like Amazon that have affiliate marketing programs. The way they work is that you sign up and they provide you the equivalent of a coupon code. When you create the description of your video, you can add a link to a website where someone can purchase something that they might have seen in your video. If they actually buy the product, then you get a cut of the sale.


I'm not sure what purchase you could make from the Black Widow video. Perhaps tweezers or the razor-blade knife. In my Goblin Valley video I mention a company that will help you rappel into the Goblin's Lair. If they offered an affiliate marketing program and I provided the proper link in my video description, I might be able to get a few buck here or there should anyone buy their services. Furthermore I don't even have to hit the 4000 view hour mark before I start making money. Of course, as I have stated, if you want to make more money you need to get more people viewing your videos.

Selling Products
Affiliate marketing programs are great but you only get a small percentage of the sale you helped make. Another idea is to actually sell products from your video. If I wanted to sell "Aid Station 6" t-shirts from my Salt Flats Endurance run video, I could add a link to the description where viewers could purchase them. There are a number of companies that I could use to create the product and drop-ship them to customers so I didn't have to worry about inventory. T-shirts are just the beginning. I could do coffee mugs, shot glasses, or any other type of souvenir I think people might be interested in buying.


Sponsors
If your videos get enough views there is the chance that you can attract companies to pay you to create videos. Unfortunately I don't think that is going to happen with my paltry 204 views. Perhaps if I work and get that number up to a respectable few hundred thousands, the Utah State Parks department might come and ask me to create videos for some of the other amazing parks they administer. I don't think that will be the case and it is not something I am looking to do. I actually plan to do a few more Utah state parks in the future simply because they are great places to visit. There is no need to pay me.

There are a number of websites that can help you find sponsors for videos but they require that you have several thousand followers and a significant number of views.

Crowdfunding
If your number of views is too small to qualify you for sponsors, there is always the crowdfunding route. You can always ask people to donate to you through something like Patreon. With this you can ask for support for the work you have already done or even ask people to help with your next project.

When my colleague and I started looking at how to make money through YouTube, we saw how much work it required and how many views are needed if advertising is the only revenue source. It made us rather depressed. There are other sources of income though and the successful YouTube stars leverage many of them.

For the moment I don't have visions of dollar signs in my eyes as I begin creating my next video. My goal remains the same: to get better at making videos. Should I start getting noticed, that will just be icing on the cake. Until then, I am happy with what I have created.