Youtube is one of the most visited sites in the world. People spend hours watching videos everyday and it’s a good opportunity to tap into this medium and try monetizing it.
So today (6 Jun 2021), I started a youtube channel to create the income stream.
From my understanding, there are a few ways of monetizing using youtube.
- List building
- Get sales
- Ad revenue
- Sponsorships
I can obviously incorporate 1-3 into the project, but since I am looking to create an extra income stream with the least amount of effort, I decided to just focus on just ad revenue.
Here are some hypothesis and thoughts I came up with before running the project.
- Since revenue from adsense are made mostly through clicks, the video is best monetized through content that are most watchable. For content that are purely on the go, ie, relaxation music, songs, there are less of a chance from people clicking, thus, lesser ad revenue for the channel.
- So what are some of the watchable content that we can produce to keep people watching and guessing. Good content videos like food, hotel, travel reviews. Or any content videos that keep people guessing what’s going to happen next – which more likely prompt people to watch and higher chance of a click.
- Niche revenue? ie, Insurance, credit cards, lawyers, properties are expensive markets for advertisers, thus translating into a higher ad revenue per click. We can obviously try to use volume to overcome this disadvantage. But how much is enough to make it worth while.
- List building or non-list building. Obviously, we can always make an affiliate business out of a youtube channel. This could mean an extra ten thousand to a hundred thousand worth of extra revenue. But that would mean extra effort to maintain the affiliate business.
As mentioned, I am all in for building a passive income stream, I decide to just go for creating content for the channel.
If the niche is responsive and profitable, I can consider building a list and monetize them later. But that’s another story for another day.
Main Objective = An extra US$200 every month from this channel
Secondary Objective = Test proof of concept
Good To Have = 100K youtube subscribers