YouTube is becoming a great source of income for those creating their own channels or working as a freelancer creating videos for companies. The video market has become huge with so many people watching videos on social media. Just scroll through your newsfeed and you won’t make it far before a video (or two, or ten) appears. Facebook and Instagram are embracing the video trend, but nothing beats YouTube for videos, and for income with videos.
You’ve probably heard claims of people making hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands through YouTube. Are these claims really true? And if so, how are they doing it? Let’s take a look at how it works.
How Much Do YouTubers Get Paid
If you’re just getting started on YouTube, the most important thing you can do to create income is to link Google AdSense to your channel. YouTubers make 68% of the ad revenue for each time an ad shows with their video. Essentially, YouTube charges advertisers every time a viewer watches at least 30 seconds of their ad. The average charge is $.18 per view.
Only about 15% of viewers actually watch that much of the ad, most choose to skip. But let’s say your video has 1,000 views and 15% of those views watched at least 30 seconds of an ad, that’s about 150 views that you’re paid for. At $.18 per view, that’s $27 YouTube charges the advertiser. Since you are the content creator and you’re receiving 68%, you’d make $18 of that $27 for 1,000 views.
So can you really make money this way? Yes, if you’re getting the views. A few years ago, the top channel on YouTube was a blogger who unboxed Disney toys. That’s all she did and every video on her channel was opening packages of Disney toys. She received over 217 million views! That means, on average, over 32 million people watched ads for those videos. If she made $18 for every 1,000 views . . . you get the picture!
If you want to get paid to promote products on YouTube, you need to build an audience. The more followers you have, the more you can charge companies to market their products. In general, most YouTubers charge around $10,000 for 100,000 views. This can be risky for the advertiser though because there’s no way to guarantee their video will receive 100,000 views. The more people you have following your channel though, the less risk it is to the advertiser because they can feel more confident that they’ll receive the views they’re paying for.
Here’s how it looks from a marketers perspective:
They can have a YouTuber create a video and post it their channel for an average of $10,000 for 100,000 views (or $100 per 1,000 views) with no guarantee they’ll get the number of views they’re paying for.
Or you can opt to run an ad that would pay approximately $27 per 1,000 views and it would cost about $405.
Both are good options and with videos becoming more and more popular every day, it’s unlikely that the trend is going to go down. But having a YouTuber create a video for you means giving up creative control of your content.
If you’re looking to create videos for income or advertising, you may be better off creating your own channel and promoting it instead of hiring a YouTuber.