YouTube videos could make your fortune. Find out how to claim a share of the ad revenue
More than a billion people visit YouTube each month. That’s a
huge market for Google: analysts believe it makes more than $4 billion
per year from selling advertising around (and on top of) user-uploaded
videos.
It could also be a huge market for you. Google operates a
profit-sharing system where video uploaders receive a cut of the revenue
raised from advertisements shown next to their content. The idea is to
encourage creators to keep uploading high-quality content to make money
for themselves and Google. Already there are plenty of people making a
comfortable living from creating and promoting YouTube videos – and in
this feature we’ll show you how to join them.
Teaming up with Google
In order to make money from videos, you need to become a “YouTube
Partner”. It’s a friendly-sounding phrase, but you should realise that
you’re very much the junior partner. You have to play by Google’s rules,
which means granting it a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free,
transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce,
distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform” the videos
you upload.
It’s also worth remembering that Google likes to tinker with and
upgrade its services. It’s possible that one day you’ll wake up and find
your financial arrangements and video-promotion strategies have been
turned upside down by some big, unilateral change. That’s just something
you’ll have to live with if you want to be a YouTube Partner.
For the same reason, while building up your YouTube channel, be wary
of following online advice and tutorials that are more than a few months
old, as more recent updates may have made them obsolete or misleading.
Happily, if you’re ready to take the plunge, the process of becoming a
YouTube Partner is quite effortless. In the past, only big, successful
channels were considered for partnerships, but today anyone can get in
on the action.
What sort of videos can you upload to make money?
YouTube has a set of guidelines that cover all uploads, both from
partners and regular users: broadly speaking, you can’t post anything
containing copyrighted music or images, as well as sexually explicit
content, gratuitous violence and misleading tags and titles. These
guidelines are often flouted, but as a partner you’ll want to take them
seriously – YouTube reserves the right to cancel partnerships with
people who break the rules.
Apart from this, you can indicate that you’re happy for adverts to
appear on any uploaded video. You can even upload your own commercial
content (such as an advert you’ve made for someone else’s business) as
long as you own the copyright: you simply need to warn YouTube at the
time of uploading, so it doesn’t place inappropriate advertising
alongside it.
If you’re creating content specifically to make money on YouTube,
however, it’s worth putting effort into tailoring your videos for
maximum marketability: we’ll discuss this below.
Setting up your account
Although setting yourself up as a YouTube partner isn’t difficult,
it’s a process that involves a few steps. The first thing you need is a
YouTube account. You can use an existing Google ID, but if this is tied
to your personal name you might want to create a new one with a more
eye-catching name: all things being equal, a video channel curated by
“AceGuitarReviews” is likely to attract more clicks than one operated by
“bjennings78”. This new ID can be easily connected to an existing one,
so you can use YouTube under your new nom de plume while remaining
signed in as yourself to Gmail and other services: to switch, use the
icon at the top right of the YouTube interface.
Once you’ve done this, you can
sign your new ID up for the Partner programme.
Once you accept the terms and conditions your YouTube account should
immediately become eligible for advertising. To see this in action,
upload a video: in the Edit view, above the description, you should see a
link labelled “Monetisation” below the video frame (this link doesn’t
appear for non-partners). Click it and you’ll see the options to enable
in-video adverts – the sort that appear over the bottom section of the
frame while your video is playing – and in-stream ads, which are shown
before your content starts. YouTube also offers a
control panel where you can also check your monetisation settings, and
apply settings to multiple videos.
Before you can relax and wait for the money to roll in, however,
there’s one more very important thing to be done: if you’re not already a
user of Google’s AdSense service, you’ll need to sign up for this as
well. This is how your payments will be made, so if you enable adverts
but don’t set up an AdSense account, Google will keep all the money for
itself.
Read more:
Make money from your YouTube videos | Analysis | Features | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/384619/make-money-from-your-youtube-videos#ixzz2yg9n2fKp
The regular AdSense sign-up process is designed for webmasters, but
as a YouTube user, you can sign up without having to wade through
irrelevant questions about your website by going through
this simpler sign-up process.
You’ll have to provide a physical address – Google takes financial
transactions a little more seriously than everyday website business –
and it may take a week or more for your registration to be processed.
How much money can you expect to make?
Once everything is set up, you’ll receive 55% of the advertising
revenue generated through your videos, via an automatic payment each
time your outstanding earnings top £60. Exactly how often that will be
is hard to predict. For one thing, it naturally depends on how many
people watch your videos in the first place – or, to be precise, how
many people watch the adverts. If you choose to allow pre-roll
advertising to play before your video starts, you’ll only get paid if
the viewer watches at least 75% of the advert.
On top of this, Google sells adverts at a variety of rates, and
receives commission based on a combination of views and clicks. It
doesn’t share the details with its partners (that is, you), but once
you’ve been up and running you’ll clearly see that some videos generate
far more revenue per view than others. In all, it’s impossible to make
any promises in advance about how much you’ll make.
We can, however, give you a very rough idea of the sorts of figure
we’re talking about. Based on online anecdotes and our own observations,
it isn’t unreasonable to expect your videos to average between 0.1p and
1p per view. You can check on your revenues at any time by logging into
your AdSense account.
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