Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you today?
I am spectacular.
Thank you so much for asking.
Today’s topic is one that I’m sure is going to be very interesting in our journey
to 100,000 subscribers.
We’re going to be talking today about monetizing your channel, adding ads to your video.
Should you be doing it?
Shouldn’t you?
How much money can you expect to earn from it?
Is it worthwhile?
Let’s have a quick conversation about that entire space.
Let’s begin.
I’ll tell you about my experience and then we’ll set that against some differences
there that you might be experiencing.
First of all, I began monetizing both my web page and my ads in my YouTube channel fairly
early on in the process.
The main reason was I hoped that I’d make money.
I wished and prayed that I’d make money but it wasn’t the overriding concern for
me, thank goodness, because it hasn’t exactly changed my lifestyle yet.
But especially on my website, when you think about signing up for AdSense and enrolling
in an ad program, with my website I always wanted to include one AdSense ad.
There’s my AdSense ad here at the very bottom of my webpage.
Why do I put that in?
This isn’t scientific at all.
This is actually flying completely in the face of everything that Google and AdSense
and YouTube are saying but I just thought that in search if two websites are fairly
equal or equal as far as value, as far as the content goes, that the one that Google
or YouTube makes money from is probably going to get a little boost somehow and somewhere
in the algorithm.
Again, complete speculation on my point.
In fact, Google denies this vociferously but I’m not going to take a chance.
I’m always going to have an AdSense ad on every one of my pages because I want to be
part of that program.
For my web page—I mean we’re not talking about pages here; we’re not talking websites,
I know—from this I make very little money.
I don’t push it very hard.
I’ve got a couple of affiliate ads or products that I quite like and I’m willing to be
an affiliate partner with, in this case Sanebox and Grammarly.
Then the AdSense ad I make $20 a month from based on like 17,000 traffic to my website
which isn’t huge in either aspect.
It’s certainly not life-changing money but I do leave that ad there.
But we’re not talking about website ads today; we’re talking about YouTube ads.
Should we be monetizing and what are the advantages of monetizing our videos?
So before we begin, I think it’s really worthwhile having a quick conversation of
whether or not you should be considering it at all.
If you have a website which is building your enterprise, which is building the people’s
opinion of you, building the reputation online, I question very severely whether or not you
should be adding ads.
Say you’re a realtor or you’re a yoga studio or say you’re a dog-walking service,
all of these sort s of people can benefit from having online video but should you be
advertising if you create intellectual property, if you’re doing courses, if you’re teaching
courses?
Now I know I do a little bit of that.
But if your main business is teaching courses and getting people to sign up for your online
courses or signing up for your online services , should you be incorporating ads?
In those cases, I say no, not if you’re selling something.
If you’re selling something or if you’re trying to build your reputation online, I
don’t think that you should have ads on your videos.
Now I’m going to put one caveat there.
I think it’s worthwhile having an ad on one or two videos about we’ll talk about
that in a moment because that’s a strategic decision as opposed to a monetary decision.
My channel is all about productivity and the videos that I produce and the fact that I’m
committing to produce a large volume of videos covering a wide spectrum of content, the value
is in the content as far as I’m concerned.
Although I do sell courses, that’s a real downstream product and in very specialized
and vertical areas.
You will notice that when I am doing videos promoting those courses and the different
things that I actually sell, I won’t be monetizing those videos in any way.
I won’t be adding ads to those particular videos.
But these videos here for this channel, for growing to 100,000 subscribers, I have no
other way to make any revenue at all from these other than through the ads because I’m
giving away free content.
Even more importantly in my productivity videos, I’m just giving away content so I don’t
have any problem at all in incorporating ads.
I did give that caveat of there’s an occasional time I think everybody should have an AdSense
relationship with YouTube set up and I’m not positive it’s still 100% the case but
back when I started, if you enrolled in the AdSense program with YouTube they gave you
some extra permission as a partner.
They have you permission very early on then to put cover art on your videos, to be able
to do a custom slate on your videos, things like that which I think are quite valuable.
It basically puts you up a tier as far as the partnership program is concerned.
I know that’s a moving target.
They’re constantly changing those things but if that’s the case for you then it’s
definitely worth looking into, especially if you’re a new partner.
It’s definitely worth including at least one of your videos with ads on it.
But having said that, unless you’re giving away a lot of content and you’re going to
be publishing content, for me if you boil back to the reason that I started doing the
productivity videos it was because I was writing newspaper columns that were being syndicated.
I was writing for a single paper, was being syndicated across their network and I wasn’t
being paid any extra for any of the syndication.
So I thought I’ve got to take control of my own content.
By making my videos, embedding ads in my videos, now I can syndicate it or I can give it to
anybody to watch those videos or publish those videos on their site and now I can make some
revenue from it.
Let’s now take a look at the types of ads and then we’ll talk about the revenue that
you can be making from it because I know you’re all interested, “How much is Steve making?”
I’m interested in how much you’re making if you’re out there, too.
It’s kind of one of those things that we’re kind of all interested in.
We have to be careful about how much information we share in this space because there are actually
some rules attached to our AdSense account about what we can and we cannot share.
If you read their Terms of Service, I think I can share my totals, like how much money
I make on a monthly basis.
I’ll give you an idea of what I make per subscriber because the whole goal of this
series of videos is growing our subscribers so understanding how much each of those subscribers
is worth to us a month or a year is I think an important factor.
But what I can’t share is how much each click is worth or how much the revenue per
thousand views is worth.
That’s information which is proprietary between AdSense and myself so those numbers
I’m not going to be able to share unfortunately.
I wish I could because I’d love to hear what yours are to see where we land on the
scale but those aren’t numbers that we’re allowed to share.
Let’s take a look at the types of ads that we can display within our video to start.
I’m just going to go into the newest ad that I’ve just created which was just up
a few hours ago.
It’s got barely any views at all and it’s on Trello.
Here it is.
When we go into the Monetization tab within that ad, we see our different formats.
This is where we actually go in to monetize the ads.
The beauty of YouTube is they really give us good contextual information as we roll
through the whole thing.
Take a look at what my options are here.
I have selected that I’m including overlay in-video ads and you know what those are.
Those are, if we just click on this selection it’ll tell us, the ones that are probably
right down here in the lower third and probably if you’ve been watching since the video
has been running for a while it’s gotten quite transparent so it’s not as invasive.
But there’s an ad probably there right now in that lower third of the video.
That’s one style of ad.
When you go into your Analytics, you can see exactly how much revenue is coming from each
of those different styles of ads so you can play with the different programs.
You can play with having them turned on, having them turned off and all of that sort of stuff.
They also have the in-stream TrueView ads.
Now these are ones which give the viewers the choice and control of which advertiser’s
message they want to see and what.
What they mean by this is the in-stream ad is the pre-roll ad that rolls before your
view.
Depending on what the ad inventory is, depending on what AdSense has and if you go to the message
boards you’ll see a lot of conversation about what’s happening with that, is advertisers
enroll in the program and then based on how many advertisers are in the program and what
they’re bidding to spend, that’s going to determine how much money you’re going
to make from your pre-roll ads and then they’re going to set that against the demographics
of your audience, how popular your videos are, how long they’re being watched, etc.
But you’re going to have a percentage of your ads which even though you’re monetizing
them, which have advertising attached and then you’re going to have a percentage of
ads which don’t have advertising attached because we’re paid in two ways for our videos.
We’re paid cost-per-click, when people click on one of the ads, either in the YouTube side
bar, in that in-stream ad or in that ad before, in the pre-roll ad.
If people click, you’re paid a certain percentage or you’re paid a certain amount for each
of those clicks.
And then you’re also paid just by the thousand views, by the number of people viewing the
ad so that it’s more of a passive income.
The value of your page will go up or down depending on the quality of the people that
are watching your video and how long they’re watching the video.
So there are two models that are happening within the AdSense world and they both have
relevance.
Now as far as the TrueView in-stream ads, those are the newer style that allows you
to skip the ad after five seconds or after eight seconds.
Some providers and some publishers will allow that and I think that’s a great, happy medium.
If you’re interested in the ad and letting it run, then go ahead and let it run.
If not, you click after five seconds or three seconds into the ad.
You watch the first little bit of it and then you go to my video.
So you’re paying a little bit of a price to watch the video but not a huge price.
You see that I like that, giving you a choice.
The standard in-stream ads force you to watch the entire ad before you can watch the video
and that’s kind of the old school way, I think far less popular and I’m noticing
myself in my online life that I’m seeing very few people that are choosing that option.
And then here are the in-stream ad options.
We show pre-roll ads.
That’s telling me where my TrueView ads are going to be.
It’s going to be rolling pre-roll.
Then there’s also something called mid-roll ads.
Mid-roll ads are actually something that I’m thinking about playing with especially for
this kind of format here where I’m doing a long video.
These videos that I’m doing for the 100,000 Subscriber series are averaging over11 minutes
in length so they’re a little on the long side so far and some of them, I’m going
to be doing some interviews and they’ll be 30 and 40 minutes.
They’ll be more like podcasts.
So I’m thinking there that we might look at including mid-roll ads in some of those.
If we click here, it tells us that the ads must be spaced at least seven minutes apart.
So if you did a 21-minute video, you could easily put an ad in it 7 minutes and an ad
in it 14 minutes if you chose.
That will be interesting.
Fortunately, of course, YouTube gives us the drop off statistics.
We see when people stop watching and if I was to incorporate mid-roll ads in my videos,
which I haven’t done yet, I would watch that video like a hawk afterwards and see
what the drop off is after the ad is inserted or at the beginning of that ad insertion,
whatever that time frame is.
That would be certainly valuable intelligence.
They also have post-roll ads which I never turn on because I don’t think anybody is
going to stick around to watch the ad at the end.
So I don’t do that.
Then it’s also asking here if this video contains a paid product placement.
If it does, partners are permitted to include it but it needs to conform to their ad policies.
So if I have a relationship with a sponsor, I want to indicate that here and I want to
be reading through the policies before I do that.
Those are basically the monetization options that we have on all of our videos.
You can set this as a standard for all of your videos or you can go in and manually
set it each time you run a video.
That’s how I have mine set up.
Now I know you’re wondering how much money I’m making from it.
Is it worthwhile?
The interesting thing is when I started running ads on the videos, it was to make extra money
to help pay for my server and that sort of stuff and to help kind of pay for some online
expenses that are kind of attached to producing these videos.
But since September 2013, so we’re talking seven months ago when I’ve really started
to concentrate on growing the channel—I’ve really only been working hard at it for about
seven months and especially since the New Year—I’ve noticed that the ad revenue
has increased to the point where it’s not incidental money anymore but it’s actually
real dollars that I noticed coming in.
I’m seeing, I think that you can average it, if you kind of work it out to the subscribers,
I think that a channel can get anywhere between $0.02 and $0.03 per subscriber per month to
north of $0.06 per subscriber per month.
So just do the math.
I’m at 17,000 subscribers.
So if I’m in the middle there right now, I should earn in this month here somewhere
between—I’m at 18,000 subscribers I think—anywhere between $700 and a $1,000 and I think that’s
reasonable as far as what I’m expecting to come in right now as far as revenue.
Now that’s gross revenue and of course YouTube or AdSense takes a cut of that.
So you’re not going to see quite that much money actually flowing into your account but
it’s all of a sudden not insignificant money, especially when we start adding zeros.
If we look at my goal of growing our channel to 100,000 subscribers and we hit 100,000
and we’re somewhere in the middle of that range there, say we’re at $0.04 per subscriber
per month, you’re looking at $4,000 a month in revenue which is not that bad when you
stop and think about it.
Assuming when you start getting north of 100,000 subscribers, your YouTube channel has the
potential of being a really good business that you have total control over.
Well, you have mostly control over.
I mean there is still the challenge and the fear I think that YouTube advertisers have
around that revenue stream is how little control they have over how well those ads are performing
in the advertising world.
Does this make sense?
Here’s the yin and the yang of the ads.
When I did my TV show, I had to go and get every sponsor and every ad that was placed
in the TV show.
I had to work hard and I had a long sales cycle.
Probably 60% and 70% of my time in the off season and even 20% of my time while we were
taping the show was spent in business relationships, getting sponsors and getting advertisers to
tie into the Dottotech show.
Now I spend zero time worrying about my advertisers because I have a partner that takes care of
that.
I have AdSense.
Unfortunately, I just have one partner and I’m kind of beholden to them to make sure
that they do a good job.
They’re working hard to make sure that the proper value is being applied to the different
advertisers and they’re working hard to make sure that advertisers are getting good
value from being related to positive and quality videos.
Now I think that our channel here is pretty lucky.
From talking to a lot of other YouTube publishers, my demographics are 75% male which isn’t
great or bad but they’re 75% male and over the age of 45.
So they’re a pretty good income group.
They’re pretty easy to define.
Advertisers like the fact that I have a fairly narrow market that they can definitely target
towards.
The other thing is people are happy, typically happy when they’re watching our videos because
we’re seeing that they’re watching a minimum of about six minutes per video across the
channel.
So YouTube says oh, people are happy when they’re coming there.
They’re getting the information that they desire.
All of those make my property, our property here at Dottotech, more appealing than a property
that has a more scattered audience and has less engagement, people watching the videos
for less time and that sort of stuff.
So the bottom line as far as I’m concerned is I have to continue to produce really good,
quality content that my audience, who I know who they are and I’m engaged with, find
valuable so that they stay engaged with me and watch for a long time.
It’s pretty simple, I’ve got to tell you, as a person that is coming from the broadcast
industry where I had so many different partners that I had to deal with that were often so
difficult to deal with.
For instance a programming manager that was responsible for setting the schedule for a
TV station, they could take my audience away from me with a stroke of a pen by saying,
“Steve, we’re moving you from Saturday morning at 10:30 to Sunday afternoon at 4:00.”
The audience that I’d built up at Saturday morning, they had to now find me on Sunday
afternoon at 4:00 and I had no way of talking to them.
It was a one-way dialogue.
I was on the screen and they watched me when they were on TV.
So somebody that was not even part of the whole process could take my audience away
from me and God forbid they’d canceled the show.
Then I lost my audience completely.
It was held hostage to me.
Now I have much more control over my audience because you’re subscribing.
We’re creating relationship and there’s a dialogue happening.
Additionally, I don’t have the network to deal with as far getting permission to be
on the air.
If I produce good, quality content, YouTube is happy to have that content because ultimately
they just want to have people that have good quality content online so they’re going
to continue to promote my video.
I’ve got a space on the dial no matter what.
Now the dial is infinitely large.
It’s not small like when I was on TV but still I now have my place and nobody can take
that away from me.
So there are some real positives there as well.
I guess to summarize, the thing that I think most publishers have to continue doing is
first all you should sign up for an AdSense account.
Do all of the enrolment and get all your paperwork in place.
Get all of the linkages in place between your AdSense account and your YouTube account so
that you can at least monetize a few videos to make sure that there are no permissions
or there are no extra benefits of being enrolled in the revenue side of the program that you’re
missing out on.
That’s number one.
Then you have to make a good, hard decision whether or not you should be incorporating
advertising at all.
If the answer is no then that’s pretty much it.
You’re done.
If the answer is yes, you think you should be including advertising because you’re
going to be building business on it, then you want to pay attention to what type of
ads you’re going to be running, how they’re going to be placed, what your threshold is
and what your audience’s threshold is for accepting those ads.
Then concentrate on producing content to make sure that the advertiser’s product is placed
in the best light.
Then be realistic about what your revenue is going to be.
You’re not going to get rich but it could be a really nice revenue stream as soon as
you grow to some level of critical mass.
Even a hobby site that’s 10,000 to 20,000 subscribers can bring enough money in to pay
for a vacation each year which is not bad when you stop and think about it.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
I’m sorry it’s a little on the long side but it was a deep topic and I know we are
going to return to the whole revenue side, advertising and AdSense side of the conversation
several times through this series.
Now I’ve got a couple of things to ask you.
First of all, engage in the dialogue below.
Click down below us and make your comments, add questions.
If you think I’m on or off-base then tell us in the Comments, engage in dialogue and
help to build this community and add extra value.
Please if you haven’t subscribed, by all means subscribe to our channel.
We are trying to get to 100,000 subscribers and for that we need you to be a subscriber.
Also, it wouldn’t kill you to give us a Like or a Share which definitely helps us
get out there a little bit more.
I’m Steve Dotto.
It’s been really fun chatting with you today.
We’ll see you real soon.