how youtubers make money (+how you can too) 📈 insider tips from my 5 years on youtube lol

i think we're all aware that youtubers make a lot of money for what i can tell you firsthand is not a particularly labor-intensive job we're not all like the bigger influencers who are you know making millions buying those gucci mansions that is definitely not a thing but even those of us who have a smaller channel still do make a pretty decent income but you might be wondering where the heck all this money comes from when technically what we do is make free videos on the internet well today i'll be telling you just that based on my nearly five years as a youtube content creator and i've you know been monetized for pretty much all of those five years i know this sounds kind of salacious and like the epitome of annoying influenza culture but i kind of just want you to be aware of the potential incentives that your favorite youtubers may be looking at and maybe provide some like advice or info for those of you who are aspiring youtubers so without further ado let's get into it first of all one of the most common revenue sources for youtubers is adsense you've definitely seen this in action before it's you know those ads that play before in the middle of or perhaps at the end of videos and there are also banner ads and those little things on the sidebar all of these potential ad placement spots contribute towards the youtubers adsense income maybe this was more of a thing like back in the old days of youtube but i've always seen a bunch of viewer speculation about like what adsense is based off of and i'm here to clear that up for you once and for all adsense is based exclusively off of the number of ad views that a youtuber gets it does correlate with view count but there are definitely a lot of exceptions and complications which i will discuss in this section adsense earnings are not in any way connected to things like subscriber count or the amount of likes or comments or shares although youtubers will usually encourage you to do these things because it increases the amount of views that they're likely to get on each video but yeah google adsense since you know google owns youtube is directly integrated into the site and those of us who are youtubers or maybe work in marketing have this specific number called a rpm which is short for rate per ml and this is the amount that the youtuber gets paid for every 1 000 ad views a mill is not like short for a million it's the latin word 4 000 fun language facts with your local linguistics nerd and as i kind of touched on earlier this rpm is kind of sort of related to the number of views on the video although some videos might have more ads on them like if they're longer a youtuber can place more mid-roll ads or some videos get demonetized because of you know explicit content or copyright strikes or any reason under the sun there are way too many reasons to get demonetized which is the bane of every youtuber's existence youtubers also get like a marginally higher amount of pay if there's an interaction on an advertisement like clicking on the banner or watching it all the way through instead of skipping but it's honestly so marginal that like i know people always say things like oh i watch the ad all the way through for you that's giving me like an extra 0.003 cents so while i appreciate it it really doesn't make that huge of a difference so just save your own time and don't watch the whole ad so these potential complications mean that you can't really calculate the amount that any particular youtuber is earning off of their videos just based on the views alone and furthermore this is complicated because rate per mill or rpm as i'll continue to refer to it from now on can vary wildly between channels by the way i'm sorry if you can hear like rumbling background noises i do live in a college dorm so that's just like the reality of life here but rpm according to the internet can vary from a dollar to five dollars and then there's this even higher tier called youtube select which is for like the most massive famous influencers that pretty much everyone knows the name of and they have premium ads that get them an even higher rpm you might be also wondering like why does rpm vary so much an ad view is an ad view right well not really because certain niches are considered more profitable a niche is just like a genre of video i guess i don't know if that's like a very youtube marketing specific terminology or if like people know that word generally some niches that are considered really high profit are things like personal finance or like real estate things like makeup and fitness are also considered very like profitable because you know it's easy to sell products to people when you manufacture insecurities from them yeah i'm not gonna say that all this stuff is like morally right i'm just describing to you like how the market works doesn't mean i endorse it rpm also varies pretty significantly based on the time of year like during the major shopping periods like black friday and right before christmas rpm is higher than ever which is also the reason why a lot of youtubers do vlogmas because adsense is pretty freaking lucrative during the month of december leading up to christmas to get involved in adsense youtube basically allows you to sign up directly in the platform by just like connecting your bank account information but you do have to hit a certain subscriber count and a total amount of view time which is like the total amount of time that people ever have spent watching your videos i don't have the exact numbers and i'm pretty sure they recently changed them i don't want to give you an exact number in case they change them again so just google this information wow google really does freaking control our entire lives doesn't it the next most common thing that you're probably aware of hopefully if your favorite influencers have been disclosing this type of post they better be otherwise they're not following the law is sponsored posts just like adsense rates vary pretty wildly across influencers depending on the industry they're in or the viewership they have like i mentioned earlier certain niches like makeup or fitness are just like considered higher profit niches in which people are more likely to open up their wallets and buy things based off an influencer's recommendations i can try to provide you an estimate of like a standard rate for a youtuber but marketing teams that involve themselves in influencer marketing do a lot of super complicated analysis about factors like subscriber count typical view count and audience demographics to try to figure out the actual market value of that influencer's content you know companies have like a target location or age or gender or any of these factors and so they want to make sure to like maximize the amount of access to that audience they're going to get through a particular influencer gender is also a factor cause like you know some products are mostly marketed toward women and also apparently a highly female audience is considered desirable because women tend to have more purchasing power in the household so like girl power i guess it also varies just based on the brand some brands just have like bigger budgets especially bigger more established brands but my estimate though and like again take this all with a grain of salt you can't generalize to everyone is that a channel expected to get around a hundred thousand views per video is expected to be paid somewhere around ten thousand dollars give or take a couple thousand either direction for a 60 to 90 second video mention i'm not going to get too into this because honestly it's a lot of business jargon that i'm not 100 sure i understand myself also if i did this video would be like two hours of marketing lecture but at the end of the day all these conflicting factors just means that we can only have a general estimate we as commoners can't really truly know how much a youtuber makes off of a particular sponsored video unless they tell us but it's probably a lot i get mind blown every single day that people are willing to pay me this amount of money and believe me i've seen big numbers college tuition is no joke getting sponsorships is pretty difficult when you're first starting out you usually have to just put your business email in your description and on your channel page and just wait for brands to reach out to you make sure you don't get exploited though because a lot of brands will say like oh we'll give you free product in exchange for a mention that is so not worth it unless the product is worth like 500 to a thousand dollars like even if you have a small channel you should be fairly compensated for your work once you get up to a certain level you can maintain this sort of like oh i monitor my email and have brands reach out to me or you also have the potential to sign on to management companies where they will actively go out and get you business deals and they'll help you negotiate higher rates as well since again it's hard for us to know how much like our channel is worth to a brand so we tend to undersell ourselves honestly i don't have a lot of tips on like how to get brands attention as a beginner youtuber because i didn't really want to get brands attention as a beginner youtuber and i still don't really like actively put myself out there to try to get brands attention cause like i'm just so morally pure and i'm not in it for the money no i'm i'm kidding like we all need money to live so it would have been funny if i did a sponsored video in this section as like part of the bit that like oh influencers are greedy and all they want is money um you're right i want money we need money to survive anyways that's what this whole video is about so let's get into the next money making method next we have affiliate links and codes the way these work is if anybody makes a purchase through the influencers custom link or uses their custom code the influencer gets a little bit of that profit from the thing that was sold like if you see links in the description to a product likely an affiliate link and most influencers if they are you know following ftc guidelines not breaking the law should be telling you when things are affiliate codes or affiliate links the standard rate for these types of affiliate marketing really vary widely i'd say an industry standard i guess is somewhere around 10 although if it's something like amazon associates or an affiliate program that pretty much anyone from the general public can sign up for it tends to be quite a bit lower and i know this sort of number doesn't sound like that much but when you see the sorts of massive audiences that a lot of youtubers have perhaps myself included although i wouldn't say i really have like a huge audience it can add up real quick i know that affiliate codes have gotten a lot of slack and deservedly so in my opinion since in the past a lot of influencers have not properly disclosed that they're getting a financial benefit from promoting a certain product so it can definitely introduce a layer of distrust between the audience and the youtuber because like now we all kind of sort of believe that an influencer might be only promoting a product because they financially benefit from it i think the best example i can think of that has really broken this sort of trust of influencer like affiliate marketing is those freaking morphe codes which everyone had them and everyone was telling you that morphe products were the best things in sliced bread when they truly were not and now nobody likes morphe and those codes have been memes to the moon and back in my personal opinion though like i find that there's nothing really morally wrong or dubious about this unless someone is being dishonest about the fact that they're getting a benefit if you're a youtuber looking to get into affiliate linking first of all again i do encourage you to be 100 honest with your audience once you break that trust you can never really get it back and also you just want to be like a good person right how to get onto them well there's a lot that are like pretty easy to sign up for you can join them as a member of like the general public for these you can usually go on a say a small brand's website and scroll to the bottom find the affiliate section and then just apply usually you'll get immediately approved and you can start making your custom links or distributing your custom discount code some affiliate programs are a little bit more exclusive where you'll have to directly be contacted by a representative of the brand and they will set it up for you but at the end of the day they work pretty much the same way some are just a little bit easier to get access to and lastly a life hack for non-youtubers related to affiliate codes if a brand is just especially known for doing a lot of influencer affiliate code marketing you should always use a code even if there's not any particular influencer that you like really want to support because if you know they have these codes everywhere with pretty much every youtuber under the sun it means that their pricing with the 10 discount to the viewer and 10 profit to the influencer in mind which means that if you don't use that discount code you're paying way too much in this video i'm kind of going in order of the most commonly found most accessible to smaller youtubers and then we're progressing slowly i guess upward into the harder to access and less common ways to make money so third on the list is patreon and other membership style services for instance i know that youtube has their own built-in member service nowadays although i don't really know how it works and i find that most people just use patreon anyways the way this works is a youtuber will set up their platform on this subscription service and then their viewers can pay a monthly fee to get access to the exclusive paid content that is sort of a bonus add-on to the free content available on youtube this tends to be stuff like early access to videos or uncut versions or bonus content live streams live chats the options are pretty much endless and it really depends on what the youtuber wants to do with their patreon platform i'm not 100 sure of like how exclusive patreon might be although i do know that patreon has been approaching me asking me like please join we'd love to have you but i just don't really want to because one i'm way too busy as a student to make like good quality bonus content and secondly i just like want all my stuff to be available for free on the internet which is like why i do maybe kind of a lot of sponsored videos but like i just don't want to like make people pay for stuff if that makes sense moral posturing aside um i think the average youtuber regardless of how large the channel is can sign up for a patreon account however it is a certain like cost benefit analysis of like you have to spend a lot more time to make this bonus content in order to make the monthly subscription worth it to your viewers and so you might want to wait until your audience is big enough for the revenue you'll get from patreon to be worth this extra work i'm calling this next category merchandise but it can encompass a really wide range of products and services on the bill space on the most basic level this is when a youtuber prints their full name or their channel name or like their most famous catchphrases with a cute little graphic on like a sweatshirt or a t-shirt i would say this is the sort of merchandise that is directly connected to the youtube channel identity but youtubers can also make products or services that aren't as clearly tied to their channel identity their channel is just a way that they promote it for instance some influencers may collaborate with existing brands to make their own like custom collection of a product for example ashley at best dressed has collaborated with a jewelry brand to make her own jewelry collection or a lot of makeup youtubers will collaborate with makeup brands to make eyeshadow palettes and like other makeup products some influencers may also start their own brands and then just use their huge social media power as a springboard to give that brand an audience one example i can think of off the top of my head is eggy which was made by the youtuber jen im it's definitely taken on a life of its own outside of like just this is jen im's stuff but regardless of you know how independent the brand identity is from the youtubers personal identity these products and services exist so that the youtuber can make money by getting a chunk of the profits from the collab or you know their own business on which they clearly make all the profits this one is definitely a lot harder for smaller youtubers there are some services like teespring and other ones like it i can't think of others off the top of my head but the way it works is you create your designs and you don't have any upfront costs in like buying shirts buying an inventory you know all the traditional expected costs of starting a small business you don't have to front any of those costs which makes it a lot easier for a small youtuber who probably hasn't built up that much of like a cash reserve or has such a large like expected or guaranteed buyer audience but the downside of those is that they take a pretty freaking hefty cut of the prices which means you have to increase the prices which means that like less of your viewers can or will buy it and then as i mentioned earlier starting your own business is definitely a lot less accessible for the average person like i've definitely considered it but then i was like oh no i want to save up my money to like get myself through university first and then maybe i'll start fiddling around with risks like that i don't know that's a thing i'm thinking about all the time and maybe i'll finally do it over the summer i know i've never actually made like studyquill merch or anything although i did write a book but some books are youtuber merch really but i prefer to think of my book as like providing valuable content and i just happen to be a youtuber but maybe i'm a little delusional maybe it is youtuber merch and i just have too high and mighty of an opinion of myself as a potentially helpful writer the last and definitely like least accessible way to make money on youtube is through live appearances an appearance can be related to a brand or it can be something completely independently organized by the youtuber so starting with the sort of brand appearances these take place because brands like to have famous people at their events famous people can bring their audience and like attract people to attend the event and they will usually tend to post about it on their social media which offers some promotion for that event but on a smaller scale like personally i've been paid by mcdonald's asian american scholarship organization to speak at one of their live events or i was paid by muji to host a bullet journal webinar for them these are kind of like brand deals where it's like i really have no idea like how to get these for yourself i only got these through my management company and i don't know whether the brand approached me or if i was pitched to the brand so i can't really offer advice on this the next category i can offer even less advice on because i've never personally done this and this is things like a tour where the influencer is the one hosting the event not some outside brand entity and you know people make money off of these often because they sell tickets for the event or for a meet and greet afterward one good example i can think of was curtis connor and drew goodin and danny gonzalez i mean no they're all the same person i forgot sorry um but some people go on tour to do comedy some people go on tour to just like be famous i don't know not to knock like influencers some youtubers do have like legitimate talents and can sell tickets off of that some people have talents that i don't understand yet i can't tell if i'm trying to be shady or if i'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and as i mentioned earlier i cannot advise you on how to do this just like a massive massive audience who loves you and will pay money to see you live and then go sell tickets to meet them i guess i don't know you probably aren't watching this video and don't need my advice if you're at that level of youtube but yeah that's my semi-exhaustive list of ways that youtubers can make money and how you perhaps may get started on doing that too although you know the first step that you need to do is like start a successful youtube channel which is a freaking tall order i know i kind of like crapped on youtube as a career at the start of this video because like technically the work of video production isn't very like physically demanding but getting youtube channel off the ground is no easy feat and it takes a lot of knowledge and luck so if you'd be interested in me sharing some of the knowledge about like how to get started on youtube advice on video production stuff like that let me know in the comments if i should make this whole how to youtube thing into a series or maybe that'd be very self-important of me to assume that like people care about life as a youtuber because like maybe you don't maybe no one cares anyways regardless of whether or not you found this personally useful i hope you at least found it pretty interesting i upload new videos about student life every week so usually not related to this topic and you can check out my instagram my tick tock and my second channel for some other occasionally school related content see you next time

Channel: studyquill

Views: 52,063

Rating: 4.9772511 out of 5

Keywords: studying, college, school

Id: sUnVH3ma-Wg

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021