How to Make Money on YouTube: The best monetization strategies
While anyone can enjoy uploading videos to YouTube for fun and entertainment, there may come a time when you really want to earn income from your video content. If you’ve been thinking of devoting serious time to your channel, you’ve probably wondered how to make money on YouTube.
The truth is that very few people will ever become super rich on YouTube, so it’s important to set real expectations. However, as a YouTuber, you have many options to monetize your videos and make money from your work. Let’s take a look at how you can make money on YouTube by discussing the most popular monetization methods.
1. YouTube Advertising — Partner Program
Like most free services, YouTube is funded by ads (unless you pay for YouTube Premium). Before you watch most videos, often in the middle of longer videos, you will have to watch a short advertisement. Some of the money from this promotional clip goes to the owner of the channel; While the rest goes to YouTube itself.
YouTube has specific guidelines for when your channel is eligible to join the YouTube Partner Programme. Joining is required for monetization (meaning ads will appear on your videos). At the time of writing, YouTube requires a channel to have 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months, plus 1,000 subscribers, to monetize. See the YouTube Partner Program overview page for more details.
This means that you won’t be able to make money from ads until you start building a fan base on YouTube. To check your progress, you can visit the YouTube Studio page and then click on the Monetization tab on the left. You will see if your channel meets the requirements, and if not, where it is lacking. Click Notify Me When I’m Eligible if you’d like to receive an email when you meet all the requirements.
When you meet the requirements, you can proceed to enable monetization on your channel using this page. You will need to link your AdSense account, choose the types of ads you want on your videos, and then review in order to start the review process.
Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for how much money you can make with YouTube ads. It all depends on the number of people watching the full ad, the number of viewers using an ad blocker, and other factors as well as the number of clicks. Additionally, YouTube has had a lot of issues in the past with advertisers pulling their ads off the platform. This has led to the website misleading videos for several reasons, and often changes the rules around monetization, making the income from it inconsistent.
In general, this means that when starting out, advertising revenue is not guaranteed. To deal with YouTube monetization issues, many creators are using additional ways to make money on YouTube.
2. Product placement
Product placement is an old and common advertising technique in TV shows and movies; It can be used to make money on YouTube as well. The practice is mainly to use specific brands in order to promote them. For example, a movie from Sony Pictures might include a shot of someone playing a PlayStation on a Sony TV.
On your YouTube channel, you may be able to strike a product placement deal with a company related to the type of videos you produce. Of course, you’ll likely need to build a following before a brand will want to advertise with you, so you can’t do this when you’re just starting out.
Product placement doesn’t have to be the focus of the entire video — only a portion of it. All that is required is to refer to or use a trademark in your video in a natural way. The Rhett & Link video embed above is an example of good product placement, as the music video is on its own free of charge for Buick’s promotion.
This is a powerful advertising tactic because the viewer can’t skip it. In addition, they often feel connected to their favorite creators. This lends more credibility to your recommendations, but you need to be careful that it doesn’t backfire
If you don’t make it clear that you’ve been paid to promote, or that you don’t actually like the product you’re reviewing, it can negatively affect your viewers’ opinion of you. Fortunately, YouTube includes a checkbox to let all viewers know that your video contains sponsored content. This indicates up front that you have been paid for the inclusion.
3. Sponsorships and promotional videos
Promotional videos are similar to product placement, but with some key differences. While product placement involves embedding a brand into an existing video, sponsored video is based entirely on that brand or product.
For example, if you run a gaming channel, a developer might approach you to make a video about their game. Since you likely wouldn’t have been playing this game otherwise, you will tell the viewer that the developer paid you to make the video. A good sponsorship agreement allows you to share your real thoughts about the game so that no praise comes across as fake.
Care comes in less serious forms, too. Many YouTubers include a short sponsor message at the beginning or end of their videos. Basically, this is a quick branding ad separate from YouTube Ads. Sometimes this includes a discount code for viewers to save a little money if they sign up for the service through you.
Like product placement, sponsored videos are a good alternative to making money, but you have to be careful with them. If you are not honest, your audience may find these or mentioned videos in bad taste. Thus, you should try to avoid advertising anything you have not used before or that you do not really endorse.
4. Affiliate marketing
As you may have already heard about affiliate links, this is where many websites use affiliate marketing services to make money. Basically, affiliate links allow you to create a unique URL for a website. When anyone follows this link and buys a product, you get a small percentage of the sale price.
This option is very easy to set up, and doesn’t require brand sponsorship deals. If you are talking about a specific product in your video, you can include an affiliate link to its Amazon page in the description. Or you can add an affiliate link to services like Audible, where you’ll make some money if someone decides to sign up.
Affiliate marketing is a good passive income generator. After all, if someone is going to buy a product anyway, it won’t make any difference to them if they buy it through your referral link. Like other methods, it’s a good idea to clearly disclose to your audience when you’re including affiliate links.
Keep in mind that a lot of popular affiliates have gone viral on YouTube. Sponsorships from services like Audible, Squarespace, and VPN are very popular, so you might not make much money with affiliate marketing because the viewer sees them all the time.
5. Funding from fans and channel subscriptions
Many people have turned to fan funding as an alternative way to make money on YouTube. This often includes joining a service like Patreon or SubscribeStar that allows a fan to donate some money each month to support their favorite channels.
Most creators who use a service like this offer levels of reward for the support of their fans. You can include their name at the end of each video, host a video chat with them each month, provide early access to videos, or provide behind-the-scenes clips. It’s a great way to connect your biggest fans to their favorite channels, and it provides a fairly stable form of revenue that isn’t dependent on ads.
YouTube now offers its own way of doing this with its Channel Membership feature. Once your channel meets certain guidelines, you can allow viewers to sponsor you monthly via YouTube in exchange for certain perks, the same way Twitch subscriptions do. It’s up to you whether you want to continue sponsorships on or off YouTube.
If you are going live on your channel, you can also use the Super Chat feature. This allows the viewer to donate money in exchange for their messages being featured for some time during the broadcast.
Finally, it doesn’t hurt to have a donation link set up with a service like PayPal. As long as you’re not begging for money, someone enjoying your work might use the link to send you a few bucks.
6. Selling merchandise
Another monetization option is to create merchandise to sell to your fans. Websites like Spreadshop allow you to create custom designs for t-shirts, wall art, mugs, and more. Many creators provide creatives with catchphrases, jokes, or art from their videos.
Once you’ve created some great designs, let the viewer know about them at the beginning of some of your videos. In addition to including your store link in the video description, YouTube’s Merchandise Shelf feature allows you to display some products directly below your videos for added clarity.
Selling actual products is a good way for your fan to support you while getting some great gifts at the same time. You will only need enough followers so that people will be interested in buying your items.
7. Consider branching out into other services
This last point is a little different from the above but is still worth considering. If you have reached the point where you are enjoying success on YouTube and making some money, it is not a good idea not to diversify your online business a bit. Spending time on other platforms will open up more sources of income for you.
For example, if your YouTube channel is known for written videos on a topic like cooking tips or video games, you can start using Twitch to broadcast live to your viewers and earn money with subscriptions there. If you aren’t already using services like Instagram to drive traffic to your YouTube channel, try posting clips to catch people’s eyes as they scroll through videos on that platform.
Whether you use other services to bring more people to your YouTube channel or bring your followers to another platform for a new type of content, you won’t be limited to just YouTube.
Now you know how to make money on YouTube
Although there are many monetization options available on YouTube, you must remember that making money is not easy. You will have to produce high quality videos for some time to build the required viewership for ads, sponsorships and more.
If you’re just starting out, focus on making great videos and making your channel the one people want to subscribe to. And hopefully, your audience will come over time. You can then look deeper into these monetization options once your channel becomes more popular.