YouTube account monetization

[Jeff Duda]

I looked around for threads relating to this already but haven't found anything.

I recently received an email from YouTube telling me that I could sign up for account monetization to make revenue from some of my videos. I'd be willing to bet that a number of chasers on this site are doing that with their own YouTube accounts, so I have some questions for you.

1) I realize that amount of money you make depends on the type of advertisement and how often the video gets viewed, but what's a good middle ground guess for how much you can honestly expect to make in, say, a 2 week or one month period?

2) Do you lose some ownership over the video? That is, do you start seeing your video get copied and posted on other websites (personal, news, weather related)?

 

[Dan Robinson]

Youtube doesn't allow subscribers to divulge how much they make, so info on this is guessing at best. It's probably safe to say it's similar to Google Adsense. I had roughly 45,000 pageviews a month on my site in 2008 and was only pulling in about $30 a month with Adsense. I know people who have made good money with Adsense, but their traffic was very high long-term with multiple "viral" events. But we're talking traffic so high that expensive bandwidth overages came into play. For people like you and me, it's going to be unlikely to see significant benefits like that. IMO every online viewer-based or click-based revenue generator of any kind (Amazon, Youtube, Google, streaming, etc) produces such insignificant results that it's only worth doing if you're pulling 100k views a month or more. Pennies on the dollar compared to production costs - the only real benefactors are the ad agency, the viewer and the advertiser. The content producer (you) bears 99% of the cost in the process and receives 1% of the benefit. Just the way I see it from a business perspective.

That said, it doesn't hurt to try it. You can always shut it off if you don't think it's doing enough for you.

Copyright wise, you don't give up any rights to the video, unless something has changed in their TOS. (just read the fine print)

 

[Matt Tottle]

I can tell you their selection process is a joke. It seems to be automated and random at best, because I got an ad-revenue invite for a video that had less than 1,000 hits at that point (and it wasn't even like it was 1,000 hits in a day or an hour - it was over maybe 2 or 3 weeks). I have other videos with tens of thousands of hits that didn't get invited (it's per video, not your entire account).

I can also tell you that the ad revenue is click based, not impression (view) based. Click based payment is crap because most people won't ever (intentionally) click on an ad, especially one that interrupts their viewing of mindless videos. Even though impression based revenue pays much less per hit, you get credit for every time the ad loads on someones screen, whether they click it or not.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

I had roughly 45,000 pageviews a month on my site in 2008 and was only pulling in about $30 a month with Adsense... The content producer (you) bears 99% of the cost in the process and receives 1% of the benefit. Just the way I see it from a business perspective.

That said, it doesn't hurt to try it. You can always shut it off if you don't think it's doing enough for you.

Copyright wise, you don't give up any rights to the video, unless something has changed in their TOS. (just read the fine print)

Similar experience for me. Definitely not going to make your living. The way I look at it is, better to pull in a little cash for something I do anyways (as a hobby).