Oh! Here we are 5 years on YouTube and 5 million views on my youtube channel you
know looking back over the last five years and the evolution of my channel
and my business and myself but it is that time of year when we look back and
we reflect on the past and make a plan for the future and in this video I'm
going to reflect back on how much YouTube has paid me for my 5 million
views now I asked you all on Instagram if you're not following me vid Pro mom
then you missed out on this my channel is either about you or has already just
passed 5 million views for the total lifetime do you have any guesses what
what do you think you do paid me for 5 million views tell me that well I am
gonna spill the beans for you so let's hop over to my desk and check out those
analytics what am i doing on my floor you know every once in a while I decide
to rearrange some things in my office until I get it just right and then it
will be just right briefly and then I need to change it again and that's
what's happening I am make shifting a tripod as a true YouTube creator would
do if I do this without spilling my coffee and my desk it'll be a miracle ok
so I have my Joby tripod sitting on top of a shelf which is on top of a crate
now ad revenue is one of those things that YouTube creators tend to obsess
about and I totally get it because we want to earn money for the content that
we're creating on YouTube for YouTube that YouTube is benefiting from but the
consequence of obsessing over it is that you're focusing your energy on something
that you have no control over and there are other revenue streams and I'll share
a little bit about what mine are at the end of this video I started publishing
every week on YouTube back in January 2015 and I didn't really know making
money on YouTube was a thing we and that sounds so dumb now but I
wanted to be a blogger my plan was to monetize my blog and I remember like
four or five months after I started I logged into my YouTube analytics and I
saw that I had made twelve cents and then a couple months later I logged in
and saw that I had made twelve dollars in the past month and I was like wow
like YouTube is actually paying me in dollars now but I didn't actually get
paid until July or August because you have to have a minimum of $100 accrued
accumulated in your account for them to send you that first payment and then it
wasn't until a year after that that I started making consistently making at
least a hundred dollars a month now aside from ad revenue you know one of
the metrics we all love to obsess over is how many subscribers we have and you
probably already know this but YouTube doesn't pay you based on the number of
subscribers you have the number of subscribers doesn't really matter at all
but I like to think of it as a success metric as one of the success metrics
because as your subscriber count goes up that's a good indication that you're
doing all of those right things to grow your channel what really matters to
YouTube and to your bottom line your ad revenue is your views and we know that
views matter because that's the very first metric that YouTube shows us when
we log into our YouTube analytics we have views then watch time then
subscribers and then a revenue YouTube wants and views and watch time on their
platform because that is how they make money and so therefore you want views
and watch time on your channel because that is how you are going to get a cut
of that revenue and nobody wants to put all that work into creating videos and
then not see any ROI or return on that investment right so as of today I'm at
like four point eight million views we're just gonna round this up to five
so five million views five years on YouTube how does this shake out in terms
of what YouTube has paid me to create videos on this platform and I'm going to
share some caveat to this as well because what you see
here isn't exactly as it seems so after one year on YouTube I had made four
hundred and nine dollars and ninety-five cents total and I had gone from zero to
two thousand YouTube subscribers though that was my first year not too bad and
after two years on YouTube I was at about seventeen hundred dollars total
after three years I was at forty five hundred dollars total that is more than
double and I gained a lot of traction in year number four with 3.5 million views
and ten thousand dollars total in my ad revenue now your number five
truth be told my channel did not really grow a whole lot this year and the
reason is because I was focused on some other areas of my business and so
because I wasn't focused on YouTube not a whole lot happened here on YouTube so
here we are at the end of year 5 just a hair under 5 million views and just a
hair under $16,000 total in the last five years now I mentioned a couple of
caveats about how what you see here isn't the full picture so let me explain
what I mean by that ad revenue is one single passive income stream that you
have available to you and so yes we like to obsess over it it's like money that
you're creating out of thin air and some gurus will even say oh your Adsense
money is it's it's not even real money it's fun money it's just a nice surprise
to have every single month but I think we can all agree it's real money YouTube
really is depositing real money into your real bank account please tell me
it's going into your business bank account and not your personal bank
account but that's a whole separate subject for example my PI has affiliate
income ad revenue through my blog with media vine I have clients who I helped
get them started and grow their YouTube channel I have courses I have a
membership program plus sponsored brand deals in addition to youtube to add
revenue this is such a fun business and one of the best perks is that even
if you go long periods of time without publishing any new videos on YouTube you
can still get paid through YouTube and through these other passive income
streams if you are creating content that is generating views you know weeks
months and years down the road if you're wondering how to create that long term
binge worthy video content on YouTube I put all of the details in my fast way to
1k YouTube subscribers workbook which you can grab for free in the link down
in the description or you can watch the video that I have queued up for you over
here