So I’ve been monetized on YouTube for a little over 2 weeks and I’ve just broken $100 in ad revenue. I’m averaging 5-7 dollars per day in earnings, which is more than I thought. I was expecting the worst, like maybe $1/day if I was lucky. I prefer to be pleasantly surprised so I set expectations low.
Now that I have an idea of what this new income source can bring in and how fast in can grow, I can start answering some questions about how I think it will grow over the next 12 months or so.
How many people are on your team?
A lot of people at this early stage, most probably, are a one-man (or woman) team. But that’s not really how I do things. I pretty much just turned on the content machine for this channel in the last week or so. I hired an editor on Upwork, found a VO person on Fiverr, and have been writing my own scripts. In addition, I’ve been providing the editor with the background music and the majority of the video clips and images. Most of the content is owned by the brand and taken in house.
I want to limit the amount of mistakes the editor can make. He is from a 3rd world country and there is a slight language barrier, but he’s been very easy to work with and more than happy to make revisions when needed. So including myself, that makes 3 people making these videos.
What’s it cost to create a video?
It seems to be costing about $100 per video plus my time. I’m doing everything aside from editing and VO. That may seem like the majority of the work, but there’s still plenty left to do to get a nice looking video uploaded.
I usually will make 3 thumbnails for each video and do the a/b/c testing, write out a full descriptions that credits any videos used, has extensive links back to the blog, perhaps some affiliate links if necessary, and of course all the YT things involved in the uploading process.
Long term plans
Over the next year anyway, I plan to upload at least 100 long-form videos. Meaning over 8 minutes long. I’m going to focus primarily on blog posts that can be converted into videos, that way we can create a cyclical effect where I link to the article in the video and vice-versa.
Currently I have about 1.5k subs, I’m hoping that in a year I’m in the 5k to 10k range there. I would expect revenue to roughly 3x or 6x as well.
So long-term plans are to scale and make more money while providing only the best content for my viewers. The audience is slightly different than I’m used to. For instance, from other channels my demographics are made up of mostly women, on YT it’s mostly men.