The secret to YouTube Monetisation has never been a secret. Make your money outside YouTube and use YouTube to drive traffic to those revenue generation approaches off YouTube. The 2018 January Partner Program Update has not changed that.

On January 16th 2018 YouTube released a blog post announcing that the qualifications for monetization will change to 4000 hours of views in the previous year and minimum of 1000 subscribers.

channels with fewer than 1,000 subs or 4,000 watch hours will no longer be able to earn money on YouTube.

This means that a lot of YouTube channels will lose their monetization and some channels will never be monetized.

Most people did not make a lot of money on YouTube Anyway

I have a channel that is monetized, with 4500+ subscribers and last year had 591,024 minutes watched. Which is 9850 hours watched. So that channel will remain monetized.

That channel has been around since 2011 and has 208 videos.

It does not make me a lot of money. Lifetime revenue has been about $2000. Which sounds a lot, but averages to around $250 a year. And when you factor in exchange rates to GBP it translates into less than that. It is probably enough to have paid for the equipment and software that I use to make YouTube videos.

According to the YouTube blog post

Though these changes will affect a significant number of channels, 99% of those affected were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the last month.

The basic point is - if you were relying on YouTube ad revenue to make money from YouTube then you were doing it wrong.

Any money made through YouTube Ad Revenue on the Partnership Program was a bonus. Not the aim.

True, some people made it big on YouTube primarily through the Ad Revenue, but for most of us Ad revenue was a bonus.

Hope

There is always the hope that you make it big. Some people on YouTube have. But I suspect the percentage of YouTubers making it massive is quite small.

What do you do?

If your aim was to make money. And you planned to do that through the Partnership Program. You probably won’t. So what do you do instead?

• give up?
  • if you do you will never be able to monetise on youtube
• find a competitor?
  • sure, try it - I don’t know what competitors YouTube have with a revenue sharing strategy. But I think people use YouTube more than any other video platform.
• monetise differently
  • Yes. We Monetize differently.

We need to diversify where we release our video content. And use the content as a traffic source to things that do make money.

Why use YouTube?

I don’t think that my Talotics channel will ever be youtube monetized. But I will continue to make videos for it. Why do it?

• share information
• build an online profile
• I enjoy making videos
• I enjoy sharing lessons learned
• I plan to eventually monetize the content

Note: I don’t plan to monetize through YouTube ad revenue. I intend to monetize the content.

Things that probably won’t work for monetization for a small channel

You will see big YouTubers making money from Ad Revenue and from:

• Patreon
• Sponsors

But you don’t have a subscriber base or view figures to justify that, so these approaches probably won’t work for you.

They might if you are top of a very small niche and you are an influencer where your viewers follow up on every call to action. But I think that is rare.

There are other approaches that will work. And have always worked.

Things that have always worked:

People that make money on YouTube also make money ‘off’ YouTube:

• Affiliate sales
  • People have always used affiliate sales to make money
  • Promote products that you are an affiliate for, and drive traffic from YouTube using affiliate links in your description or from linked blog posts.
• Saleable Content
  • Convert your videos and content into products which you upsell via your YouTube videos e.g. ebooks, online courses
• Ad Supported Linked Content
  • Direct people to blog posts with google ads - hopefully as a small youtuber your blog gets more or as much traffic as your videos

My main money from my other YouTube channel comes from:

• my books
• my online training courses
• my face to face training courses
• my consultancy services

YouTube is a funnel to this material and a way of building a trust relationship with the viewer by creating content that adds value.

Diversification Strategies

As a bonus all of the above are made more effective by diversification strategies:

• upload your videos to facebook as well
• cut down the length of your videos and add to Instagram or Twitter
• upload your videos to Vimeo

The more ways you have of people consuming your video content, the more ways you have to monetise off youtube, build trust and allow people to create a relationship where they want to consume your content.

More platforms == More opportunity for people to follow and consume.

It takes time

You also have to be prepared to commit to creating content on a long term basis. Trust is earned over a period of time by adding value.

You have to want to create the content for contents sake. Content that puts the viewer first and adds value, without considering monetization.

You have to create a lot of content. This will help you get better at creating content which will help you retain a viewership.

First Adpocalypse, Now This

Platforms change their rules.

When the adpocalypse hit, and my videos started being randomly demonetized I realised that I was using the wrong strategy on YouTube and I wasn’t diverified enough.

That was good for me.

I learned how to use Facebook video.

I started using Instagram and repurposing content on to Instagram.

I started to transcribe my videos so that I could have subtitles on mobile platforms.

It forced me to start doing things properly and adopt strategies that will help me make money from my video content.

YouTube First

I will still use YouTube first as my main video platform.

• Free video hosting - this can be really expensive otherwise
• Heavily integrated to Google - more than any other video platform
• Good search engine
• Majority of people first call for video watching
• Good automated caption generation - this can be really expensive otherwise
• Good caption editing and export

The caption management makes it easy to move the content to different platforms.

• automatically generate captions
• export to a file
• upload captions to facebook
• upload captions to video editor to create subtitles

Compare two big business hitters - not the normal YouTube ‘stars’

Let’s quickly look at two channels in the sales and marketing niche that use YouTube effectively to make money.

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Grant Cardone

Gary Vaynerchuk has over one million subscribers, and is monetized on YouTube with Ads.

Grant Cardone has over 440,000 subscribers, and is not monetized on YouTube with Ads. All revenue generated off of youtube.

And there the main differences end.

Both use the similar strategies to make their real money from YouTube:

• promotes their off youtube revenue sources - books, clothing, courses
• consumer focused, pumping out content that adds value
• big users of other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, podcasts
• live streaming on all the platforms
• product placement in their videos
• they both add a lot of content, very regularly
  • very hard to compete with this level of content creation

We need to do the same things:

• monetize off YouTube
• use other platforms
• create content that adds value
• keep creating content that adds value

Action

• Figure out how you can make money away from YouTube
• Create the content and products that you can monetize
• Drive traffic to those external products
• Keep using YouTube
• Take advantage of the features YouTube provide for free
• Create content for the viewer so you add value
• Create more content

The secret to YouTube Monetisation has never been a secret. Make your money outside YouTube and use YouTube to drive traffic to those revenue generation approaches off YouTube. Diversify where you upload your content so you increase the traffic flowing to your revenue generation sources.

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