I think it goes without saying that 2020 was a doozy, but it was actually a really great
year for a lot of YouTubers. So that's why in today's video, I thought it would be fun to take
one last look at 2020 to do a YouTube year in review. I absolutely love these videos from my
favorite YouTubers. I love seeing how they grew. I love seeing what worked and what didn't work,
how much money they made. So I thought it would be really fun to do it on my channels.
I'm going to talk about my analytics. I'm going to talk about my money and my revenue. I'm
going to talk about what worked and what didn't work on my channel. All from the perspective of
a small YouTuber or someone who's just getting started out on YouTube in their very first year.
So that way you, as a fellow small YouTuber can learn from my mistakes,
learn from what works well and apply that to your channel going into the new year.
And for small YouTubers I asked my audience, I did a poll on what they consider a small YouTuber to
be. And there were a variety of answers, but the really the consensus was that 10,000 and below
that's a small YouTuber. So I consider myself in 2020 to be a small YouTuber. And now I am past
that small YouTuber stage. Going into 2020. I had about 400 subscribers. And at the end of the year,
I had just under 14,000 subscribers. And you can just see from a year in review,
the views that I was getting at the beginning of the year, while I was super pumped and happy about
those, because they were way better than in 2019. They were nothing compared to what I was getting
at the end of the year, where on average, I was getting anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 views a day.
At the beginning of the year, I was getting around 300 views per day. So I increased my views by 10
times. Now with subscribers, it more or less was the same thing. I was just getting a handful of
subscribers a day, anywhere from 5 to 10, 10 being a great day. But at the end of the year, I was
getting anywhere from 50 to 75 subscribers every single day. And now let's talk about money because
at the beginning of the year, I was not monetized. And once I did get monetized, I made a video all
about the entire monetization process. And that is actually one of the biggest videos on my channel.
You can see right here that this video had 137,000 views. So one of my top performers, and
it really helped to bring a lot of new eyes and new subscribers and new people into my channel.
So if you're one of the people who found me through that video,
let me know in the comments below. But going to the revenue, I was not making any money on ads,
obviously for the first few months. Now I did finally get monetized in April. So
for my very first day being monetized, I made a whopping $2 and 36 cents. And yes,
you better believe I texted all of my family members and I let them know because that was
a big deal going from zero zero zero zero zero zero zero to actually making money.
It was a big deal. And you can see that that grew and grew and grew over time. And it led to making
around $6,000 on my channel, which I am pumped for because now my videos and the work that I'm
putting into my, and all the time that I'm putting in my videos is finally paying off a little bit.
When you're back here and you're looking at your revenue, that is actually your take-home revenue.
So how much Google is going to pay you, that's how much you get. So it's taken, Google's cut
already out of it. You don't have to worry about that. So if you are just focused on the money,
that is the number you want to look at. So talking about money, I want to talk about CPM. So CPM
stands for cost per mille. Basically it's the amount that YouTube charges advertisers to put
an ad in front of your video for 1000 people. And so my CPM went up. And CPM is the overall amount
that YouTube charges advertisers. So it includes YouTube's portion of the money and your portion
of the money. And the way that it's broken down is you get 55% of that and YouTube gets 45% of that.
But if you want to see your cut specifically, that's where the new metric RPM comes in. So
we'll look at that in a second. But as soon as I was monetized, my average CPM for video
was around anywhere from eight to $11 per video. And then towards the end of the year,
it started to grow where it was anywhere from $10 to $15 a video,
and it has continued to grow. And this basically shows that advertisers are liking my channel
more. They're liking my content more. They're willing to pay more, to have ads
in front of my channel. And that's totally expected at the beginning. A new channel is
going to have a lower CPM because they're kind of an unknown entity at that point. And as those ads
convert better and do better, the CPM is going to go up. So if you wanted to break this into
RPM, you just go down here and in the revenue section, there's RPM, and this is just my portion.
So my RPM was anywhere from about $4 to $6. And at the end of the year, it was anywhere from $12
to 13. So that is my takeaway per video. Now my YouTube growth followed a very similar trajectory
to a lot of YouTubers growth in 2020. Once March and April hit. And we all know what happened
during that time, YouTube views just skyrocketed. So it wasn't on my channel. It was nearly every
single YouTuber that I follow. That's kind of in this space. They also just had an explosion
of views and subscribers. And so I was really grateful that I was actually able to be monetized
when that spike started to happen. So for me and my channel, it grew in April. It grew in may. It
grew in June. And July it really peaked. And from July on my views, my subscribers and my revenue
more or less was kind of the same every single month. So let's dive into that a little bit more.
So you can see in the analytics breakdown, what videos performed really, really well.
And this blue video is my monetization video. This green video was how to pick a winner on
Instagram that obviously did really, really well in December because so many small businesses
are running Instagram giveaways, but they don't actually know how to run Instagram giveaways or
how to pick a winner. They just think, "Hey a giveaway would be a great idea! Let's do that!"
And so naturally
When it came to pick a winner, they would go to YouTube to figure out how to do that. And so that
video did very, very well. And I had a whole bunch of other videos that obviously it did really,
really well. So what I want to do is I want to do this by month. So you can kind of get
a feel for each of these metrics monthly. My revenue for my channel peaked in October,
that was the first month that I hit $1,000. But the month after that, it was just a little less,
it was $990 for November and $913 for December. So my views also started to slightly taper a bit in
those months as well. Now, the drop in December, it totally makes sense because basically since
December, I have been heads down with the launch of my new YouTube course, VidBoss Academy™.
I launched it in December. I opened it to students in December. And so because of all
of that and just because it was the holiday season, I took the last two weeks of December
off. So I didn't post any videos. So I didn't really have any new content for people to come
and to consume. And so just going back to views, it's actually interesting because
you may not know this. I haven't really talked about it a lot on my channel,
but I have been pregnant since May and I'm due in two weeks. So yeah, that happened. Beginning
June 1st, I got super, super sick and it's horrible because you just feel like a zombie.
You go from being the most motivated, ambitious driven person to just laying in bed all day and
feeling like you want to die. Literally it's the worst. And so I was not consistent with
my uploads in June or July and even into August. I was again a zombie, but luckily,
because of that big YouTube wave, I was able to ride that even though I didn't have new content.
So that's just something to pay attention to is sometimes there's things that are totally
out of your control, like the algorithm or trends or increases in viewership
that you do not control at all. But if you have existing content, you will be able to
ride that wave while at the end of the year, that wave, those trends, weren't there. And so since I
wasn't producing content, my views went down and my revenue went down. Obviously you're a human,
you need to take care of you first. But having that upload schedule is really, really important.
And it really helps in those downtimes. You don't want to count on random events to hold
and take your channel. You want to take your channel by the horns and control it. So that's
something that I want to continue into 2021 is I want to be really on top of my upload schedule.
Once a week has worked really, really well for me. I did experiment in October doing
two videos a week and the juice wasn't really worth the squeeze. And so I stopped and I
still think that two videos a week would be really good, but as a whole, I just need to
reassess my video strategy, my content strategy, my upload strategy. And then once I revamped that,
I think I can do two videos a week, but let me know for your channel, what worked for you? Did
you have one video a week? Two videos a week? More than that? Did you just upload randomly?
I'm really interested what works for you and your channel in 2020. So overall I
thrilled with the progress of my channel in 2020, I went from less than 400 subscribers,
not being monetized to over 10,000 subscribers, nearly 14,000 subscribers within a year.
So if you are a small YouTuber and you are in that same situation, I hope this gives you
some motivation that if you just keep going at it and you are consistent and you are putting helpful
content out there, and you're doing SEO research for your videos. I know that you too will be able
to grow step by step by step because so many people first, they want to hit 100 subscribers.
Then 1000 is the big goal because that's when you're finally able to get monetized.
And then 10,000 is that next big milestone. So I'm just here to show you as a case study that you
absolutely can do it. And consistency is the key. I went from having maybe
five to six videos at the beginning of the year to over 50 videos on my channel now.
And 50 videos that's a lot of videos, but you're just doing it one step at a time.
So in my next video, I'm going to be reviewing my business. How did my business do not
necessarily on my YouTube channel, although that is a part of it, but how did my business do in
2020? And I'm gonna look back at my goals that I set for myself because...spoiler alert: I didn't
hit a lot of my goals. So what I want to do in the next video is to help you avoid setting goals like
this. And we're going to go through setting goals for 2021. So if you want to set amazing goals for
your channel for 2021, that you were actually going to hit, be sure to subscribe, hit that
notification bell. So, you know, right when my next video drops, because we're talking all about
YouTube goals. So in the meantime, check out this video right here, it's designed specifically for
small YouTubers to help you grow. So that's all I have for today and I'll see you next time.