MAKING VIDEO CONTENT FOR AD REVENUE
The TLDR:
Good
- Can be fun and rewarding
- Opportunities for sponsorships and product sales for more revenue
Bad
- Lots of competition
- Significant effort and skills required to develop a channel
- Hardware and software investment is nearly required to make traction
- Monetization requires 1k subscribers
- Ad earnings are surprisingly weak
Expected Results
- $1000+ per month is incredibly challenging
- $100+ per month is doable
- $0-$100 per month is expected
Resources
Requirements to get monetized on YouTube
my experience
A Moderately Successful Channel... Sort of
Nearing 50k subscribers at the time of writing this, I can comfortably call my channel decently successful, at least more than many can expect. But it's also successful in a low paying part of YouTube. It's also been a massive endeavor, requiring developing new skills, investing in hardware, and a lot of hours of work. It's more enjoyable and rewarding work than many things, but the effective hourly pay is probably one of the worst things on this site. If that weren't enough, many wouldn't get as far as I was able to either, so I don't really encourage YouTube as a viable hobby for making money online. If that doesn't dissuade you, good! Pursuing content creation like YouTube needs to come from a place of passion and conviction. You need to have an answer for why you'll be successful when so many aren't, and that you've got what it takes to make it happen.
my results
My All Time Results
A Better Long-Form Video
A Better Long-Form Video
That works out to be about $0.35 per 1000 views (CPM), a pretty abysmal rate. But the channel has a very heavy focus on Shorts, which have a much lower CPM.
A Better Long-Form Video
A Better Long-Form Video
A Better Long-Form Video
Long form videos will get a much higher CPM than Shorts, but even at this $1.70 CPM it's still not turning heads. To reach much higher CPM you need to have much longer videos or be in more valuable niches than gaming. Of course longer videos take a significant amount more time to edit. Ultimately you need to balance your time spent editing, the watch hours you're generating, and the revenue pulled back in.