I made a different style of ‘tutorial’ which explains how youtube earnings work. This would have helped me out starting out with youtube so I made this video to help out anyone else.
Enjoy 
Count me in as one of the “ad blockers.” I don’t have a television in my house (haven’t had one for over thirty years …), and I don’t have ads on my Internet experience, either. Period. :ba:
And, obviously, lots of other people feel the same way.
If you actually “run the numbers,” you will find that you have to annoy millions of people, and do so on a very regular basis, in order to make any money at all.
Therefore, I cordially suggest that you should focus on making videos that are, themselves, “worth paying for.” In other words, the video, itself, is what people are coming for … and, paying to receive. Instructional videos are a great example, and they don’t have to be about Blender. They might not be a video that you created, but rather something that you contributed (CG work?) to, in exchange for a royalty.
Or … go into the business of creating advertisements for others!
When the Internet (and games, and mobile apps in general) came on to the scene, many people gave away their valuable content, as though that content somehow had no intrinsic value at all. Yet, these same people wait in a long drive-thru line every morning(!) to pay about $3.50 (USD) for a cup of coffee, which they order in “pig latin.” Many thousands of people have labored over content, mobile software and so-forth that winds up paying them (considerably) less than $1,000.00 (USD) per annum. Why? Because their product is generic, and because they don’t hold their hand out in the first place.
The only people who are making actual, steady, money are the ones who publish the ads and who attach those ads to somebody else’s (namely: “your”) content. They don’t particularly care if “your” content makes money “for you” or not … and, why should they? All they care about is that millions of people (like you) dream of making money from the tiny share that they’ll (maybe) receive after the sure-money people have taken two-thirds of it.
Sure, there might be a handful of people out there who “make their living” from creating attractive billboards for other people to hang other people’s advertisements onto. And, I’m sure that the advertising salesmen saw to it that at least one person on Planet Earth really does make “a million dollars,” or certifiably did at one time. (The e-book industry engineered a similar feat, early in its start-up infancy.)
If you actually want to “make money from the Internet,” it must be your content that “they” (not “the entire Internet,” but a maybe very-small slice) come for. Andrew Price could be an example of that: his videos are worth paying for, and “the Blender community” (most of which “know the name” by now) is a suitable market/slice to sell product to. The video is not a vehicle for an advertisement. The video is the product. The Internet is the means of distribution.
The price that people are actually quite-willing to pay for such things is probably much higher(!) than you think. (In other words, you’re leaving money on the table, pal.) After all, they’re paying $35 a week (and waiting in line to do so) for less than 80 cents’ worth of caffeinated beverage . . .
Ya, it can’t be worth it. What do you get for a thousand hits?
There is always that YouTube Red thing they just launched.
The odd thing about YouTube is what I think is good content, and what content becomes popular on YouTube seem to be two completely different things. A lot of the top channels I don’t understand why anyone would watch at all, never mind subscribe to. I guess that is why I haven’t become a YouTube millionaire though.
@@sundialsvc4 I can sort of see where you are coming from with how ads are meant to fail, which makes sense, in-fact I myself use an adblocker just to remove the annoying skippable video ads.
In regards to your suggestion about creating content for money, this doesn’t always work, actually in most cases unless you are already a professional or well known, it is bound to fail. I myself have tried by creating a game asset package, which didn’t sell one copy, even after being listed on multiple websites.
The content I create (BGE tutorials) cannot be easily monetized in any other way, as most of its users/viewers cannot afford to buy tutorials or packages. Whether you realize it or not, most of the internet is built on advertising (google, youtube, facebook, twitter etc.) and without it the majority of websites could not exist. If a website is free to use, in most cases, you are the product.
The great thing is if someone appreciates your content very much (helped them out a lot), then even if they don’t have any money, they can donate a small amount of their time to sit through ads.
Surprisingly hard to find and estimate, I would guess around $2.00 maybe? Google don’t seem to be very informant on the exact amount.
YouTube Red does sound very good however the chances of it benefiting small you-tubers is probably very minimal and if it does you will probably only get a very small portion of the $10/month in return. Most likely I would think, if the viewer only watches 100% your content, that you would still only receive maybe $6 maximum.
Clearly, a suitable revenue model for Internet content does not yet exist. Eventually, I expect to see some kind of “a cooperative” model: your monthly subscription allows you to gain access to web-sites who restrict themselves only to “subscribers,” and sites must pay to be allowed to accept such subscribers, but, when they do, they get a proportion of the total revenue collected each month by “the cooperative.”
Many things about the present media business-models are peculiar to me. For instance, “if I paid $100 a month for “cable television service,” why should I expect to see any commercials on any program that I choose to watch?”
I think that “the Internet” will always remain the open network that it now is, but that companies who want to book revenue from the content that they provide to it will adopt more-realistic revenue models for doing so. And, those models will not be “free.” They will be subscriptions … collective-based subscriptions.
… and a lot of today’s existing web sites will quietly fade away …
Because it’s not cheap for the broadcasting companies to make the shows that you want to watch (in fact, many shows require millions of dollars to produce at minimum).
Because of that, subscription fees alone do not cover enough to make a profit (which is a major point of running a company to begin with). Your proposed model sounds that a website operator will ultimately get far less money because it would likely mean a largely reduced number of users combined with an ever growing number of participants (meaning the service becomes uneconomical and impractical if you ever want to make a living or run a company).
You can’t pay a subscription to see blank billboards, it won’t be enough for the billboard company to sustain itself. The same goes for the internet unfortunately.
Like it or not, ad revenue is what keeps many companies and individuals going. I don’t block ads on YouTube because they don’t bother me that much and they allow the content creators to keep going. Without that ad revenue, YouTube and sites like it would fold or start charging the viewers to use it. Other things like radio, newspapers, magazines, sporting events, television shows, etc., all rely on ad revenue to function. Before you dismiss advertisers for being leeches or whatever, think about the alternative… having to pay a subscription for the things that are “free” today, like internet sites that we use everyday.
A link to a store, Amazon or Ebay is ok, but I do not like many things being advertised (sometimes wish they did not exist) on Youtube and often watching the ad is too much to pay to see the quick tip or short tutorial.
The only people making any real money is Youtube and the advertisers who I assume are filthy rich.
Every year they want more.
The marketing team are just doing their job, the only people that are ‘filthy rich’ are maybe the CEO’s/owners of the company. Very rarely can you ensure the success of a product if no one knows about it. Sure Google makes a lot from it, but even now they haven’t covered the running and upgrade costs of keeping YouTube servers up just from its revenue. At the end of the day the content creator will recieve more if not just as much.
The truth is (like it or not), that without ads like those on youtube, or the banners on websites, we probably would have to pay for almost everything on the internet. Advertisers just do their jobs and get paid for it, I’ve done several myself for different clients; and it doesn’t even represent that much money for them either, a youtube ad is just cheaper than paying for a full media plan on tv, print ads or a huge billboard on a building.
Internet advertising is the cheapest, the most effective, and the easiest way to reach a specific demographic. Of course it can be annoying, I’m an advertiser and I NEVER watch a full ad on youtube, just wait until I can skip it. But it doesn’t mean is a bad thing either, without Google’s Adsense most people wouldn’t even could have a running website, and we benefit a lot from not having to pay in every single website we visit; think of Blendernation for example, or the ads we see on the header of this very forum.
Is not a black and white issue, there are good things and bad things, good uses and horrible uses for advertising; but again, like it or not, we benefit from having any kind of ads on websites. Is one of the main reasons why so much on the internet is free.