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.

Too Much Snow

Is there such a thing as too much snow for a skier? The answer is YES. Today happened to be one of those days where we got too much snow in a single day.

This morning it started snowing at around 6 am. By the time my daughter got in the car to head up to Alta where they needed her to teach ski lessons, we had over an inch in the front yard. I got up and got ready to go with my wife and son and had to clean the driveway again. That means the snow was falling at around 2 inches per hour. We got close to the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon when the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) closed it because of avalanche danger. With no expected opening time, we turned around and came home.

I got rather grumpy because I didn't get to go skiing today. My son, wife, and I did take the chance to practice with our avalanche beacons and probes so that we will be ready to use them should that become necessary (I sure hope not). Little did I know that my adventure with the snow had only just begun.

While I had made it home safely I still had my daughter up at Alta and I worried about her safe return. The avalanche danger got so bad that the resorts closed just after noon. That means there is a serious problem as ski resorts never close because of too much snow. While the road closed to all uphill traffic, they opened it to those headed down. Then a natural avalanche let loose and came across the road closing it to everyone. My daughter had made it from Alta down to Snowbird before being diverted off the road and into a parking lot. She then got directed into a concrete structure built to withstand an avalanche direct hit. There she waited for 4 hours.

The whole time my daughter waited to get down from the ski resort, I kept checking all of the technology available to me. UDOT actively tweeted about road conditions around the state and every once and a while would mention Little Cottonwood Canyon. They also have a great website where you can click on video cameras located on a map to get a picture of the traffic at that location. When my daughter would text me with information about where she was in the canyon, I could look at the video cameras and at least see cars on the road. If there weren't any, then the road was still closed.

Over 12 hours after leaving home this morning, my daughter finally pulled our trusty Jeep into the garage. The storm total for that 12-hour period? 23 inches, which turns out to be about 2 inches an hour. Yes, there can be such a thing as too much snow for a skier . . . but it is very rare.

Don't Hack a Hacker

This morning I got done skiing and had to work from my home office. I sat down at my desk and got an e-mail that began with the following:

   Hello!
   My nickname in darknet is HckD4*.

The poor grammar indicates that the person does not speak English as his/her native language. Already I am preparing for a SPAM e-mail, however I am intrigued. It goes on:

   I hacked this mailbox more than six 
   months ago, through it I infected your 
   operating system with a virus (trojan) 
   created by me and have been monitoring 
   you for a long time.

Interesting. I wonder if HckD4* is as tired of all the SPAM I get or if he/she thinks I get a lot of important e-mails? The message goes on:

   If you don't belive me please check 
  'from address' in your header, you will 
   see that I sent you an email from your 
   mailbox.

Well that's not that hard to do. If you know anything about Simple Mail Transport Protocol or SMTP, then you know that is a fairly simple task. Any hacker with about an hour of experience can fake a message to look like it came from your own server. The trick is to look at the headers for the e-mail to see if that is actually the case. In my e-mail client, I selected the box to show all of the header information and see that the message came from a server named z3.hck7.pro, which is located in the country of Panama. Needless to say that is not even remotely close to where my e-mail server is located. My original hunch is correct and this is just a SPAM e-mail.

For your enjoyment and mine, the message continues:

   I have access to all your accounts, 
   social networks, email, browsing 
   history. Accordingly, I have the data 
   of all your contacts, files from your 
   computer, photos and videos.

Even if I believed this person, there is nothing of value there. I don't do a lot of social networking. I don't visit questionable or incriminating websites. All of my photos on my computer are tasteful and probably boring to most people besides me. So at this point, there is nothing compelling me to be to afraid. Now we get to the point of the message:

   I was most struck by the intimate 
   content sites that you occasionally 
   visit. You have a very wild imagination, 
   I tell you!

Wow! If I didn't know this was a fake before now, I do now. Sure I visit a lot of video game sites but that shouldn't be embarrassing. What else would make me embarrassed?

   During your pastime and entertainment 
   there, I took screenshot through the 
   camera of your device, synchronizing 
   with what you are watching. Oh my god! 
   You are so funny and excited!

Oh if this was real, he/she must have a picture of me picking my nose or something. That really isn't that embarrassing. Furthermore my e-mail computer doesn't have a camera connected. My laptop does, but it is from work and so locked down with security software, there is not a chance in the world that someone has hacked into it. Trust me, our IT department takes a lot of crap because we have so much anti-virus software. For once I am glad it is there. Oh, my laptop is also a Mac and there are significantly fewer virus programs written for the Mac.

Finally, the hacker tells me what he/she is really after:

   I think that you do not want all your 
   contacts to get these files, right? If 
   you are of the same opinion, then I 
   think that $1000 is quite a fair price 
   to destroy the dirt I created.

The message then goes on to give me a bitcoin wallet and where to send the money.

Messages like this really make me angry. I have been using computers for a long time and know how to verify if the message is real or not. What about other people that don't? Hopefully you don't fall for such an obvious fake. How can you tell if it is a fake message? Well think about legitimate e-mails from people like your credit card company. An extortion e-mail should include some of the following:

1. Your actual name - This e-mail did not contain my name at all. It had my e-mail but that is necessary to contact me in the first place. If the hacker had really been spying on me, he/she would at least know my real name.
2. Some other information about you - Credit card companies always tell you the message is from your account ending in 4 specific digits. If those digits don't match any of your credit cards, you know it is a fake, unless someone has opened a credit card in your name without you knowing about it (but that is a topic for another time). This e-mail had nothing like that.
3. Some sort of proof - If you are going to try and extort $1000 from me, you better have some sort of proof that I have done something worth hiding from all of my contacts. How hard is it to send an image with proof? If you have the images claimed in the e-mail, it isn't. If you don't, it is impossible.

The more I thought about this e-mail, the more I realized how fake it actually is. Let's assume I have spent some of my computer time doing something I want to hide from my wife or contacts. Is it actually worth $1000 to keep hidden? Most of the people I know that cruise the Internet for pornography don't try to hide it. They may not brag about it in mixed company, but they are also not ashamed of it. Sure some people will be embarrassed but it might start a conversation that needed to take place anyways.

Hopefully none of you fall for such a scam. If you would like another source talking about this same e-mail in more detail, here is a good article.