More than a billion people visit YouTube each month. That’s a huge market for Google: analysts believe it makes more than $4 billion per year from selling advertising around (and on top of) user-uploaded videos.
It could also be a huge market for you. Google operates a profit-sharing system where video uploaders receive a cut of the revenue raised from advertisements shown next to their content. The idea is to encourage creators to keep uploading high-quality content to make money for themselves and Google. Already there are plenty of people making a comfortable living from creating and promoting YouTube videos – and in this feature we’ll show you how to join them.
Teaming up with Google
In order to make money from videos, you need to become a “YouTube Partner”. It’s a friendly-sounding phrase, but you should realise that you’re very much the junior partner. You have to play by Google’s rules, which means granting it a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform” the videos you upload.
It’s also worth remembering that Google likes to tinker with and upgrade its services. It’s possible that one day you’ll wake up and find your financial arrangements and video-promotion strategies have been turned upside down by some big, unilateral change. That’s just something you’ll have to live with if you want to be a YouTube Partner.
For the same reason, while building up your YouTube channel, be wary of following online advice and tutorials that are more than a few months old, as more recent updates may have made them obsolete or misleading.
Happily, if you’re ready to take the plunge, the process of becoming a YouTube Partner is quite effortless. In the past, only big, successful channels were considered for partnerships, but today anyone can get in on the action.
What sort of videos can you upload to make money?
YouTube has a set of guidelines that cover all uploads, both from partners and regular users: broadly speaking, you can’t post anything containing copyrighted music or images, as well as sexually explicit content, gratuitous violence and misleading tags and titles. These guidelines are often flouted, but as a partner you’ll want to take them seriously – YouTube reserves the right to cancel partnerships with people who break the rules.
Apart from this, you can indicate that you’re happy for adverts to appear on any uploaded video. You can even upload your own commercial content (such as an advert you’ve made for someone else’s business) as long as you own the copyright: you simply need to warn YouTube at the time of uploading, so it doesn’t place inappropriate advertising alongside it.
If you’re creating content specifically to make money on YouTube, however, it’s worth putting effort into tailoring your videos for maximum marketability: we’ll discuss this below.
Setting up your account
Although setting yourself up as a YouTube partner isn’t difficult, it’s a process that involves a few steps. The first thing you need is a YouTube account. You can use an existing Google ID, but if this is tied to your personal name you might want to create a new one with a more eye-catching name: all things being equal, a video channel curated by “AceGuitarReviews” is likely to attract more clicks than one operated by “bjennings78”. This new ID can be easily connected to an existing one, so you can use YouTube under your new nom de plume while remaining signed in as yourself to Gmail and other services: to switch, use the icon at the top right of the YouTube interface.
Once you’ve done this, you can sign your new ID up for the Partner programme. Once you accept the terms and conditions your YouTube account should immediately become eligible for advertising. To see this in action, upload a video: in the Edit view, above the description, you should see a link labelled “Monetisation” below the video frame (this link doesn’t appear for non-partners). Click it and you’ll see the options to enable in-video adverts – the sort that appear over the bottom section of the frame while your video is playing – and in-stream ads, which are shown before your content starts. YouTube also offers a control panel where you can also check your monetisation settings, and apply settings to multiple videos.
Before you can relax and wait for the money to roll in, however, there’s one more very important thing to be done: if you’re not already a user of Google’s AdSense service, you’ll need to sign up for this as well. This is how your payments will be made, so if you enable adverts but don’t set up an AdSense account, Google will keep all the money for itself.
The regular AdSense sign-up process is designed for webmasters, but as a YouTube user, you can sign up without having to wade through irrelevant questions about your website by going through this simpler sign-up process. You’ll have to provide a physical address – Google takes financial transactions a little more seriously than everyday website business – and it may take a week or more for your registration to be processed.
How much money can you expect to make?
Once everything is set up, you’ll receive 55% of the advertising revenue generated through your videos, via an automatic payment each time your outstanding earnings top £60. Exactly how often that will be is hard to predict. For one thing, it naturally depends on how many people watch your videos in the first place – or, to be precise, how many people watch the adverts. If you choose to allow pre-roll advertising to play before your video starts, you’ll only get paid if the viewer watches at least 75% of the advert.
On top of this, Google sells adverts at a variety of rates, and receives commission based on a combination of views and clicks. It doesn’t share the details with its partners (that is, you), but once you’ve been up and running you’ll clearly see that some videos generate far more revenue per view than others. In all, it’s impossible to make any promises in advance about how much you’ll make.
We can, however, give you a very rough idea of the sorts of figure we’re talking about. Based on online anecdotes and our own observations, it isn’t unreasonable to expect your videos to average between 0.1p and 1p per view. You can check on your revenues at any time by logging into your AdSense account.
Attracting viewers
Since you have no control over the commission rates on your videos, if you want to maximise your return you’ll have to tackle the problem from the other side – by getting as many viewers as possible.
Regular content and subscriptions
Uploading single videos on an ad hoc basis may suit your lifestyle, but you’ll get more clicks if you can persuade people to watch lots of videos in one sitting – and to come back for multiple sittings.
A schedule gives visitors a reason to keep coming back to watch your videos - and adverts
You can encourage the former by organising your videos into playlists and promoting them as such, so that when one video finishes, the viewer is automatically carried on to another. Ideally you’d divide your content into playlists so that the next video would be relevant to the viewer, and they’d want to stick around. If you can’t do that, offering them something only tangentially related is better than offering them nothing.
When it comes to attracting recurrent visits, YouTube recommends that you establish a regular publishing schedule. When you advertise a schedule on your YouTube “channel”, you give your visitors a reason to keep coming back to watch your videos - and adverts.
YouTube also lets users “subscribe” to your channel, so that when they’re logged into YouTube they’ll see your activity on their home page, and can easily keep track of your uploads (along with those of other channels they like) through the My Subscriptions link at the side of the screen.
Persuading people to subscribe is a tremendously effective way to get more attention from them, so Google puts a handy Subscribe button on every channel home page. Even better is to persuade people to subscribe while they’re watching a video. You can do this by using YouTube’s Annotations feature: this lets you overlay a speech bubble or “hot” area on the video that, when clicked, immediately subscribes the viewer to your channel. For some types of video it may even be appropriate to have the presenter say something directly to the viewer, perhaps along the lines of “we post new content every Wednesday, so please click below to subscribe”.
Other ways to woo viewers
We’ve tackled a few fundamentals, but there are plenty of smaller things you can do to help build a following. As YouTube links are easy to share around the internet, it often happens that views build up slowly, then suddenly one of your videos “goes viral” and the next thing you know, 100,000 people are checking out your channel.
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