YouTube has always positioned itself as a platform for realizing people’s creativity. But in addition to this, on YouTube you can not only share your interests and inner world with people, but also earn good money on content creation.
The main income can be obtained from the monetization of views, but due to the lack of a fixed amount of remuneration, income from advertising, sponsorship and donations of viewers often comes to the forefront. In this article we will tell you in detail how much YouTube pays content creators and what kind of income you can get by third-party methods.
Does having 1,000 subscribers guarantee YouTube payments?
In the rules of the YouTube platform it is clearly stated that in order to connect video monetization you need to gain 1000 subscribers on your channel. However, even if you have gained the required number of subscribers, it does not guarantee that you will receive monetization.
To start monetizing your videos, the annual watch time of your videos must exceed 4,000 hours. In other words, if your audience is not engaged and active, you can forget about monetization revenue.
But such a number of hours of viewing will not be able to dial not every channel, even with several tens of thousands of subscribers. Therefore, there are other, more promising ways to generate income from YouTube channels, such as advertising, sponsorship, affiliate marketing, subscriber support and much more.
Ways to monetize YouTube
If you’ve decided to make a full-time income on youtube, you have five ways to monetize your creativity:
YouTube partner program
YouTube has its own monetization program designed for video content creators that allows them to earn money by creating their videos. To join the affiliate program, you must meet two main criteria: gain at least 1,000 subscribers and get at least 4,000 hours of views in the last 12 months.
Internal advertising
This method involves placing advertisements inside the video. Among the ad formats are display ads, pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls. Ad revenue depends on the number of impressions and clicks. Rate per click and rate per thousand impressions (CPM) are the main ways to generate revenue.
Paid subscriptions
With this method, viewers can become paid subscribers to your channel, gaining access to the creator’s exclusive content, exclusive badges, emoji and other unusual perks. This provides creators with an additional source of youtube revenue per view and increases their audience engagement.
Selling merchandise
Content creators can sell their own products or services through their YouTube channel, using links in video descriptions or third-party platforms such as online stores. This method allows you to monetize your audience through direct sales.
Sponsorship
Partnering with brands to promote products or create sponsored videos is also an effective way to earn money. Sponsorship involves paying to publish promotional content or use a brand’s products in their videos. This method allows content creators to earn additional and, most importantly, stable income, as well as increase audience reach by collaborating with well-known brands.
How much do youtubers make?
There are a lot of myths on the web about how much Youtubers earn. However, it is impossible to give an exact figure, as the amount of payments depends on many factors ranging from the number of subscribers to the country of residence. Let’s analyze each of these factors:
- Number of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, who actively watch all your videos, the higher will be the cost of advertising, so you can earn more;
- Total number of videos. The more videos you have on your channel, the more views you will have in total and the more people will see your ads, for which you will be rewarded;
- Regular appearance of new content. It is very important that your videos come out on a regular basis. The minimum is once weekly, but ideally they should come out every 2-3 days;
- Viewing time. Since very often unscrupulous channel owners are scoring a large number of views under their videos, YouTube has started to pay more attention not to the views themselves, but to their duration, which allows you to distinguish bot traffic from real traffic. The longer viewers watch your videos, the more you will earn;
- Number of views. Despite the possibility of baiting views, YouTube still takes them into account when calculating youtube channel earnings from videos;
- Engagement. Viewer engagement is one of the most important factors in ranking videos on YouTube. If a visitor views a video and then continues to click through to other videos in your channel, the algorithms will increase the monetization income;
- Topic. A factor that is not important to YouTube, but to advertisers. If you make videos in a very narrow niche, you are unlikely to collect many views, so advertisers will not buy ads from you or will do it for cheap. Conversely, if you shoot in a popular niche, advertisers will pay many times more;
- Country. Different countries have different rates per 1000 views on YouTube. The richer the country, the more solvent the audience and the higher the payment for views. In the USA the rate is $11, in Norway it is $15, in the UK it is $9. The lowest rates for 1000 views are in Taiwan, Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan.
You can use a YouTube money calculator to calculate your potential income.
It is very difficult to calculate the exact earnings of popular YouTube creators, but there are rough figures of how much income they earn:
- T-series. A channel owned by an Indian recording studio that posts trailers of Indian cinema and local music videos. The channel became popular due to the dramatic spread of the internet in India, the second most populous country in the world. T-series has 264 million subscribers and earns over $8 million dollars;
- Mr. Beast. Jimmy Donaldson has an audience of 252 million subscribers. He makes entertaining videos and regularly posts them several times a week. Each of his videos collects a hundred million views, making him the most popular youtuber after the T-series channel. His estimated income is between three and five million dollars monthly;
- PewDiePie. PewDiePie has long since ceased to take the lead in terms of subscribers on YouTube. This was largely due to the fact that the heyday of yearsplays is gone and its target audience has grown, and today’s kids need more sophisticated content. Nevertheless, it is still one of the top ten largest YouTube channels with 111 million subscribers and approximately five million dollars in revenue.
If you want to learn more about YouTube author earnings, we have a great article with the earnings of the most popular channels.
Optimizing your YouTube earnings: strategies for success
To optimize your youtube income per views, you need to follow these tips:
- Update content regularly. Audiences won’t wait for you to release a new video – they’ll leave to watch a channel that releases content regularly. Constantly updating your content will help retain your audience and attract new subscribers. A stable video release schedule will help keep viewers interested and minimize audience churn;
- Make a variety of content. Experiment with content formats to see what type of video resonates most with your audience. Take an interest in your viewers’ opinions, ask them about their preferences, and suggest new video ideas;
- Paid subscriptions and donations: When your channel becomes popular, consider introducing paid subscriptions or the possibility of receiving donations from viewers. Not only can this be an effective method of generating additional revenue, but it will also increase your audience’s engagement as they will receive exclusive content or know that they contributed to the video;
- Utilize social media. Expand your audience and increase the influx of subscribers on YouTube by promoting your content through your social media profiles like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest;
- Improve the quality of your videos. Invest your hard earned money in equipment and software to improve the quality of your videos. The more professional your content looks, the more likely you are to attract subscribers, sponsors and increase revenue, as well as increase engagement with your audience;
- Choose the right niche. You won’t find a truly engaged audience in all niches. In very narrow areas you’ll find an engaged but small audience, and in broader areas you’ll gain more subscribers but most of them are unlikely to engage with your content. It’s worth choosing a field you really know about first, so you don’t make a fool of yourself in front of your audience. At the same time, do not forget that the topic should not be very narrow, so that the influx of new audience will be felt;
- SEO optimization. Optimizing your content for search engines also plays an important role. Insert the most high-frequency keys in the video titles, descriptions, and popular tags. It is important that the keywords and phrases were popular with your audience in search engines, so that the influx of subscribers was targeted;
- Test and improve regularly. Use YouTube Analytics to track views, audience engagement and other useful data such as the age, geo-position and gender of your target audience. This will help you better understand your audience, learn about your most successful videos, and tailor your content to your viewers’ interests.
Conclusion
Earnings on YouTube depend on many factors, from the number of views to the country of residence. However, most factors can be influenced by any creator creating interesting, quality content in popular niches, getting lots of views and earning income from YouTube’s affiliate program and advertising contracts with brands.
Experiment regularly with your content and look for trending topics to collect lots of views and build an engaged audience on your channel to achieve long-term success. If you need a guide on how to run a successful YouTube channel, you can check it out at YouTube Creator Academy. We also recommend that you read our article on how to use SMM marketing to promote your products and services.
