Does anyone have experience building a YT channel as a side hustle? If so, what genre are your videos? There are quite a few YTers (< 0.75M subs) making $100k/mo on ads revenue for their videos
I fit into this criteria. I film a certain sport (not basketball or American football) at college/professional levels and have 11k subscribers
Less than 1m subs you dont make 100k in ad revenue. Most of it comes from sponsorships, commission or merch
Joma has 250K subs, and a full time job, and still needs to sell $1k “interview courses” to make it work 🤦♂️
I don’t think ~anyone~ with 750k subs is making 1.2m a year in ad revenue...
Think OP was referring to this guy https://youtu.be/px317izkJ6w
Yeah @dnb Graham Stephen is one of them
How much ad revenue does 1M subs make?
The public estimate is $1 per 1k views. Depends on the viewership and number of ads. And in this case the number of quality videos. So let’s say 3-5 videos of 500k views, meaning $1.5-2.5k/mo? Of course, this is highly variable due to the distribution of views.
I run a successful vlog, upwards of 200 subscribers. Haven't monetized though because my TC is enough without it.
200 lol
Here is the trick with YT: It’s really hard to make $1000/pm on YT. The CPM is around $10 which means you will get $10 per 1000 ads view.Which means your video needs to be seen 1000 * 50 times to display that many ads . Which means to get $1000, your video needs to be seen by 50,000 * 1000/10 = 5,000,000 times. But YT will keep 45% . So basically the number jumps to ~11 million views. Also, $10/CPM is very high as cost per CPM Ad is $0.4 to $22 with higher ad rates tapering off at exponential speed. So if you assume $5/CPM, you will need 22 million views. So what’s the catch? Successful YTers have identified this problem and they start working with brands early on. Instead of relying solely on Ads revenue, they sign side deals with brands or use the publicity factor to attend meetups. It’s typical for a medium YT Star with 1 million subs to charge up to $10,000 for an event. Also, make videos which can subtly advertise a brand without impacting your core content. The money is on side hustles on YT.
$5 post-revshare cpm, $1000/5 = 200, 200 x 1000 = 200,000 ad views per month. now there is no way fill rate is at 2% these days, assuming conservatively 10% that is only 2M video views. There is no way YT is going to show 0.40 CPM ads, that would barely cover cost to serve. Even trashy AdX backfill averages multiples higher than that.
If you get all traffic from US, 0.4 will be less. In worst case, if your viewership is Asian countries, 0.4$ is awesome.
There are a couple ways to do it. I know one entrepreneur who leverages her YouTube channel to drive business to her coaching business. People type in Google something like “how to increase YouTube channel views” or whatever and finds her video in the results. Another hack I heard was to create a channel by editing royalty free footage together.
I think YT realistically as a side biz would be quite difficult and not worth the effort. I have a friend who does a channel on the side as a hobby and creating/editing content is a grind. Makes around a couple hundred dollars a month so not bad. Unless you are able to produce content constantly that you can sustain and enjoy you're probably better off finding a different venture. Best of luck though!