With the popularization of the Internet , a couple of decades ago, many companies saw a new business opportunity for a totally emerging market. YouTube , the most famous audiovisual content platform in the world, was one of those companies, and youtubers were the most palpable proof that you can make a lot of money creating content.
Despite the evident success that well-known youtubers such as El Rubius have achieved, and the controversies generated by its very high level of income, there are still many people who cannot explain how it is possible to earn so much money uploading videos to YouTube.
The secret is in the ads
The key to success, as in almost everything that has to do with the Internet, is found in advertising , in the number of people who see the ads that appear in a video, or who directly click on them; Google takes care of the rest.
Of course, advertising revenue varies depending on how many visits the video has and how many people are subscribed to a channel, that is, how much target audience is going to view or click on the ad.
To manage all this, Google has the AdSense tool, which pays the youtuber up to 68% of what the advertising inserted in the video generates. In other words, for every 100 euros generated by the video ads, Google gives the youtuber 68.
However, the actual fees paid by an advertiser vary, generally ranging between 10 and 30 euro cents per ad display, and of course you have to watch it for a minimum of seconds for it to count as a display. In this section, YouTube gives you a choice between revenue per ad view or revenue per click . Keep in mind that most of us close the ad as soon as we get a chance, so waiting for people to click directly on your ad is pretty naive.
Going to somewhat larger figures, a more or less well-known youtuber earns around 5 euros for every 1,000 views of any of his videos. If we extrapolate this to the most famous youtubers, someone whose video has 100,000 visits will earn around 250 euros; that’s multiplied by the number of videos that get that audience.
It is not necessary to continue with the rule of three. The most famous youtubers usually exceed one million views in all their videos. This means that a day they get to pocket several thousand euros. It’s no wonder that many of them top the rankings of the richest influencers.
Money calls money
As we have seen, the operation and dynamics of YouTube are very simple, the enormous difficulty lies precisely in getting thousands or millions of people to be regular viewers of a channel . The more loyal the subscriber base, the more target audience advertisers will detect and the more stable income the channel owner will receive.
Channels that hoard hundreds of thousands of views daily inevitably reach the next logical step: sponsorship. Many youtubers are sponsored by clothing brands, technological devices, sports, etc. This means that advertising revenues stop depending on the number of visits their videos have, and directly sign a contract with the brand, which pays them in exchange for showing and using their products in their videos.
