Although I got paid $70,000 in ad sense revenue in 2020,
I actually made more than $2.5 million as a whole,
as a content creator.
What's up, everyone.
Welcome back to my channel, the best place for new coaches, content, creators,
and entrepreneurs in today's video.
I want to share with you guys exactly to the T how much YouTube paid me last
year in 2020 with 400,000 subscribers.
And I had mentioned in this video right here, where I share with you guys,
my social media strategy in general, for 2021,
I mentioned that I had noticed that there are a few YouTubers that are in a
similar niche who have less subscribers than me,
and maybe even less views than me that are actually getting paid more than me on
YouTube, specifically with ad sense.
And I'm making it my personal mission to kind of learn more about how this works
and make it a little goal of mine to see my CPM,
my cost per thousand and my RPM,
my revenue per thousand increased by the end of the year.
Not necessarily because I want to make more money,
but more so as a social media marketer,
I just want to learn more and experiment with how I can get that up.
And so that's why I'm making this video so that we have a benchmark of what I
did last year in 2021. So in this video, number one,
I'm going to share with you guys how much I made when,
including my cost per thousand and my revenue per thousand and all of that.
And then I'm also going to share with you guys what contributes to why different
YouTubers get paid differently.
Not every single person on YouTube gets paid the same.
It really depends on your channel. And so many other factors.
So I'm going to share that with you guys. And lastly,
I'm also going to share with you guys other ways that you can make money as a
content creator beyond just YouTube AdSense revenue. And that's why for me,
I hadn't really paid attention to my ad sense revenue for the last two years
that I've had this channel because I have other sources of income that just,
I pay attention to more. And it's just this year where I'm like, huh,
I kind of want to make it my mission to like,
see how I can get my revenue on YouTube here to be higher.
And so if you're interested in all three of these things, then keep on watching,
right? So I'm just at my desk right now.
And we're going to pull up my YouTube ad sense from last year.
So let me just flip over this camera so you guys can see what I'm doing.
All right. So right now we're on channel analytics and I've gotten it to 2020.
And as you can see, I got 11.2 million views in 2020, which is insane.
And my estimated revenue is $70,000.
So this is how much YouTube has paid me for ad sense revenue.
I gained 233,000 subscribers last year at, which is so incredible.
And I'm so grateful for that.
So let me go to revenue and you'll notice that my cost per thousand,
and we're going to talk about what that means later is $13 and 78 cents.
This is how much basically it costs the advertisers for every thousand views
that they get on my videos.
And then this is how much I'm getting after YouTube takes that cut.
So I get $6 and 20 cents. Now, as you can see,
I'm up from 2019, which is great,
but obviously my goal for 2021 is to do better than this and make it my personal
mission to get these numbers up. Now,
I also want to show you guys how much I make every single month,
at least in 2020. So let me share my screen and show you guys all the details.
So back to this screen right here in 2020, we're still in,
I filtered it to all the months from last year. So as you can see,
these are the monthly revenue that I have been making on YouTube last year.
$70,000 is really awesome. I'm super grateful for this.
This is way more than I made in my corporate job.
So I'm very happy to have this as a revenue stream for myself and for
my business. You'll notice that during this period right here,
you can see my ad revenue really skyrocket.
And I have a feeling it's probably because of C O V I D or whatever else.
And then obviously near the end of the year,
it's also a bit higher because it's the holidays.
And most advertisers spend a little bit more to have their ads show on YouTube.
And so that's just the picture here month to month.
And then this is the cost per thousand,
how much it costs the advertisers for every thousand ad impressions that they
get on my video. All right. So now that you guys got a peek inside the hood,
you know how much I made last year,
and you also know how much I made month to month,
let's talk about why some YouTubers may get paid differently than others.
Because like I said earlier on in this video,
I don't get paid the same as someone else who's doing similar videos,
or maybe people who are doing different videos,
very similar to working a nine to five.
Every person kind of has a different salary depending on their skills,
depending on what they bring to the table,
depending on whether they ask for a promotion,
all of these different factors are contributed.
And so it's kind of similar to how YouTube or content creators here on YouTube
get paid as well. So let's talk about the first obvious one, and that is views.
Remember how I said cost per thousand and revenue per thousand well it's per
thousands of ad impression views.
And so obviously the more views that you get,
the more chances that there are of someone watching the ads,
that those advertisers are placing in your videos. And by the way,
it's a huge misconception to think that the YouTuber AKA me has
control over what ads are getting shown to you. It's really out of my hands.
And so what you have to realize is number one,
views matter when it comes to getting more ad sense revenue here on YouTube.
However, the second main thing too, is ad engagement.
It's not you getting paid for someone to watch your videos.
It's you getting paid for someone to watch the ads that are on your videos.
And so ad engagement matters.
You know how when you see an ad and you see skip ad, well,
if someone doesn't skip it and actually watches more than 30 seconds of it,
that contributes to how much you get paid as a content creator, not only this,
the best part would be. If someone actually clicks on that ad,
then you would get more as well. And so ad engagement also matters.
It's not just views, it's the ad engagement itself. However,
if you have more views, there's more chances of someone to engage with your ad.
Now you have more traffic to your video. Speaking of views,
let's also talk about view duration view duration is how long someone watches
your videos that shows the engagement levels of your audience.
And this is also why I think I might not be getting paid as good as other
YouTubers because I do sit down videos that could be less engaging to some
viewers versus if I had a lot of B roll. If I had a lot of action shots,
if I had documentary style,
if I had more interesting visual videos that could contribute to me having a
higher view duration,
because right now my average view duration sits about five minutes. I think,
which means that about most people who land on my videos,
they probably only watch five minutes of it and then leave or five minutes or
less, and then leave versus someone else.
If they have more engaging videos and people are watching the whole thing,
that means advertisers are going to be willing to pay more,
to put ads on that content creators videos,
because they know that they have a really engaged audience.
And if your audience is watching all throughout the entire video,
that means there's more opportunities to show them ads.
And so that also contributes to how much you're getting paid as a content
creator, which is again, why in this video right here,
where I talk about my social media strategy for 2021,
one of my personal goals is to make my videos more engaging instead of just
sitting down and talking all throughout,
because I think that might be contributing to why I don't have as high of a view
duration as other people.
The next thing that I want to talk about that contributes to how each YouTube
gets paid in terms of ad sense,
revenue is your niche or the topics that you talk about.
You want to create content that is advertiser friendly,
anything that's not controversial, that's not explicit and all of that.
So for instance,
a really good niche for most people is like real estate finance.
It's probably why people like Graham Stephan makes such good money on YouTube
because their niche is really safe.
And not only this businesses who are related to finance and real estate likely
have a bigger budget to spend on ads. And so niche really matters.
Versus if you're someone who's doing political topics or controversial topics or
prank videos,
you might get paid less because advertisers might not want to show ads as
much on these type of channels.
And so that's why if you care about how much money you earn on YouTube,
that matters what you also want to consider is swearing.
If you're constantly swearing or using profanity in your videos,
advertisers may not want to put their ads or may not want to pay as much to put
their ads on your videos as well.
And so that's also something that I've been working on because when I started
this channel, I was a huge potty mouth.
And now I'm a little bit more mindful of that.
And so that's something that I definitely want to share with you guys as well.
Speaking of being advertiser friendly,
there's actually an amazing medium blog that my friend Roberto Blake wrote,
and I learned something new from reading that article.
And that is YouTube actually has a thumbnail algorithm that comes through the
thumbnails on YouTube and deem it advertiser friendly or not.
And so if you have inappropriate photos on your thumbnail,
that could also impact the amount of money that you get paid with ad sense
revenue. So I just want to shout out Roberto Blake,
cause he's definitely the expert on this topic.
And I actually learned something new from reading this article.
So I'm going to link it in my description box below because I definitely think
it's a really great resource.
If you want to learn more about how to increase the ad revenue that you make
here on YouTube. All right. So, like I said earlier on in this video,
when I was showing you guys my analytics and all of that,
there are two metrics to track cost per thousand,
which is how much the advertiser is willing to pay for every thousand ad
impressions that you get for them when they place their ads in your video and
revenue per thousand, this is how much you get to take home.
After YouTube takes their cut and revenue per thousand is actually a new
metric. And YouTube actually just started sharing that in 2020 of July.
And so before that, YouTube actually,
wasn't really sharing this information with their content creators. Now,
obviously YouTube still doesn't share exactly how much they take home,
but at least we know as a content creator,
how much you take home at the end of the day beyond just ad sense revenue
though,
I want to tell you that there are so many other ways to make money as a content
creator. And if I were to give you a concrete example,
although I got paid $70,000 in ad sense revenue in 2020,
I actually made more than $2.5 million as a whole,
as a content creator.
And so that's why I want to share with you guys the different ways that you can
actually make money with your YouTube channel.
That's not just related to YouTube. So let me quickly share with you guys,
some of my income streams to give you guys the endless possibilities of how you
could possibly monetize as a content creator.
The first one is I sell a digital course,
so not only do I have free content here on my YouTube channel,
on my podcasts and over on my Instagram, I also have gated content.
So if you actually want to take it to the next step with me,
and you want to learn more information from me at the premium level,
you can enroll inside the boss Graham Academy. This is a course that I sell.
And from this course alone,
we have made over $2 million last year now beyond just selling a digital
course and having premium content for my subscribers,
for my followers and for whoever finds me on this channel,
I also have affiliate marketing.
And let me share my screen and show you exactly how much I made in 2020 with
Amazon alone. All right. So as you can see, from 2020 alone,
we did $398,000 of shipped revenue for Amazon.
And our commission was obviously not that high,
but we earned about $15,000 of referral fees.
So this is just me passively adding links in my description box on my YouTube
channel and on my website now on top of Amazon alone. And by the way,
this is just Amazon us.
We also have affiliate links in different countries for Amazon as well.
I want to show you this affiliate tracker that my team and I use.
And as you can see,
we kind of stopped tracking it because it's actually quite hard to track all the
different partners that we're with. However,
what you can notice is that every single month we make anywhere between 3000
to as high as $8,000 of basically passive income from affiliates.
And this is just from January to July of the amount that we've been tracking.
And again, unfortunately,
we kind of fell off in the tail end of 2020 of tracking things,
but I wanted to show this to give you context of how awesome affiliate revenue
can really be. Now, as you can see to some people,
it might be a lot to other people. It might not be a lot, but for me,
I also don't focus that much attention when it comes to affiliate marketing.
All I really do is I have a section on my website that has all of my affiliate
links to all the software and products that I recommend for all of my
descriptions.
I also link the affiliate links to my equipment because a lot of people ask me
about that.
And another thing that gives me a little bit of a competitive edge is I use the
website URL genius to pump out my affiliate links. So here's a pro tip for you.
The problem that I see with affiliate links specifically with Amazon sometimes
is I'm Canadian.
And majority of my audience is in the U S so if I pump out a Canadian affiliate
link,
then there's going to be a lot of people from the U S who wouldn't be able to
purchase that product. And vice versa. If I post up a us affiliate link,
then my Canadian audience wouldn't be able to access that product.
So by using something like U R L genius,
I'm able to pump out a link that can actually direct people to the right Amazon
marketplace, depending on what country they're from.
And when you use something like you are LGS,
you're going to be able to also maximize your affiliate revenue.
So that's just a little pro tip that I do in order to maximize the affiliate
money that I'm making with Amazon specifically.
Now on top of affiliate marketing,
there are so many other ways that you can make money as well. For instance,
brand sponsorships,
selling merch or physical products like opening up your own e-commerce store,
as well as having a membership level to your YouTube account over on YouTube,
you can actually create a membership where people can pay you kind of like
Patrion to be a part of your community.
And so these are some other ways that you can earn additional revenue,
leveraging the platform that you're building here on YouTube. Now,
if you are a content creator and you're watching this and you're interested in
learning how you can monetize even more,
then make sure you visit www.followerstoclients.com.
Inside this training,
I specifically compare the different business models that exist for content
creators, such as digital courses, one-on-one services and e-commerce products.
I give you the pros and cons of each.
And I also give you three additional trainings on content creation, funnel,
building, and niching, and scaling up. And so make sure you visit this training.
It's absolutely free. And I promise by the end of the training,
you're actually going to walk away with actionable social media and business
strategies that you can apply to your business or to your platforms right away.
Now, I usually post content on marketing, social media and entrepreneurship.
So while you wait for next week's video,
make sure you check out these two videos that I have right here.
I promise they will not disappoint as always guys. I appreciate you.
I hope you guys learned a lot from this video. I hope you guys have a great day,
a great week and a great life, and I will see you in the next one. Bye guys.