Well well well WELL well well - look at this! I pretty recently used to watch a bunch of
these ‘how much I make on YouTube’ videos - and now that I have been monetized for a
month, I get to make my own! I started this channel, well I dont know when
I registered it and everything, but I started making videos in earnest in March of 2020.
I generally work in the art world, doing lighting and truss for these large scale art fairs
all over the country.. But that gig stopped rather suddenly when it became clear this
pandemic was a bit of a problem for big events. Im also a photographer, and the only person
who oversees the actual warehouse for the company I produced events with, I could hardly
let such a large, open space go unused for what turned out to be an entire year!
Im ALSO in this incredibly fortunate position of owning a second house that I bought super
cheap in 2010 and rent out room by room which covers a majority of my living expenses; all
of this converged in a way that gave me plenty of time to work on YouTube videos.
Ok enough back story - a guy could say TOO much back story - on to the stats! The current
requirements to meet before YouTube will start paying you is 1000 subscribers and 4000 publicly
watched hours of your videos. A few months in I made a video about pouring my own concrete
planters which randomly made its way to the top of the DIY page on reddit, and that video
got 10,000 views over the course of a day and a half, and then very quickly flattened
out. It also led to I think it was 135 subscribers all at once!
Because of that video, I hit my watch hours requirement way before my subscribers requirement.
It was April of 2021 when I got the email from YouTube admitting me into the YouTube
Partner Program, which meant from then on my videos were making money.
A lot of the advice you read when youre starting out and trying to figure out how to get a
foot hold on youtube is to niche down into whatever you make your videos about. Im going
to go against that advice, at least until AFTER youre established, and here’s why.
I had 62 videos up when I finally got to 1000 subscribers. And if we scroll through those
videos, new and old, you can see that they perform VERY differently from each other.
Some of my videos are over 10,000 views, and some are stuck under a hundred! It wasn’t
until after making a bunch of them before I was able to confirm the trends, though..
Like if I had decided I was only going to make these story telling videos (ones I really
enjoy researching for and talking about) like this, turtles breathing out of their butts,
or do we actually have two brains - the totally real history of pool.. I may have ended up
with 60 videos that all performed horribly, I may have figured this just wasn’t for
me, and eventually quit. But, since instead I made some videos about
pouring concrete, some about my side hustle money making schemes, some reviews about technology
and camera stuff, and more recently stock market stuff Ive been diving into - Its clear
that for instance, 2 of my top 4 videos are about Uship! And that theres a huge difference
between news-type subjects like what MVIS stock is doing, where I will get a thousand
views all in one day VS reviewing a popular camera gimbal where the video gets a little
more than 100 views a day, but has been doing so consistently for 130 days now!
Now were going to talk about money. This is just the last 28 days, the length of time
I have had monetization turned on. Something really interesting to look at, and
another reason to possibly wait to decide on your niche that you want to focus harder
on.. This video about the Nikon D850 got 4600 views in the last 28 days and from this video
I am going to make 23 bucks. However this Uship Booking Process video has HALF has many
views, just 2300 - and is making MORE than DOUBLE the money!
You may have seen the term RPM, this is the dollars per thousand views you’ll receive
on any given video based on how much the advertisers are willing to pay for that particular subject
matter. Evidently camera videos only make $5 per thousand views, here’s another one
I made about a camera gimbal, 3200 views but only 15 bucks. But the Uship video, which
is a video about making money pays out $22 per thousand views! 5 times as much as the
camera stuff. Thats nuts! If you want more confirmation of that trend, here is a conference
call for a stock Im following, $19 dollars 42 cents per thousand views.. But steam distilling
essential oils in the she shed? 5 bucks. This older video about Uship is making less than
the booking one, but still double the camera and DIY ones. Its interesting.
Of course if youre super passionate about something you should stick to that, so you
stick to it at all - but clearly YouTube charges their advertisers a very wide range per view
based at least in part by the subject of the video. I originally thought you as a creator
pretty much received a value and you were paid based on your popularity, and from YouTuber
to YouTuber their pay would be different, but it looks like thats only true because
of the subjects they make videos about. ANYWAY, here we are in the whole channel analytics
page - and for my first month I am going to pull in 176 dollars and 86 cents with an average
of 8.23 per thousand views as an average overall. Thats WAY more than I thought I would get
in the first month, thats great motivation! I really expected to make like 20 bucks the
first month and just see it grow forever, but out of the gate its paying my phone, utilities
and internet bills! Hot damn.. That pay is based on 22 thousand views, most
of my videos are less than ten minutes long - I have 1265 subscribers - it looks like
I add somewhere between 3 and 15 new subscribers per day, with a spike over here at 33, dang
people liked that video! I have 67 videos up - only 17 of them have
more than 1000 views.. Looks like in total Im getting 1517 views every 2 days, and that
number, for me, seems to creep up all the time.
This graph looks pretty flat, but when you look at the numbers, 90 days ago I was averaging
in the 400’s per day and now in the last couple weeks its never less than 700 a day!!
If Im getting 200 bucks a month with 1000 subscribers and no sponsors, I cant even imagine
how much the big guys with a million subscribers are making!!! Thats just bonkers that this
can turn into a high paying gig. Ok I think that does it for this one.. Thats
my money data. Im Nicholas Johnson and this is the Space Warehouse.