What my present-day Income on YouTube looks like after doing this for 5 years.

what real monetization looks like - Made with Clipchamp.mp4

Monetizing YouTube Properly

This isn’t going to be a deep dive on monetization. That will be in a different section. This is going to be an overview of how to monetize your YouTube channel, the different ways of monetizing YouTube, and which monetization methods are the most effective for different situations.

What is monetization?

This is where you go from an influencer to a business owner.  There are channels out there with millions of subscribers that are broke.  There are channels out there with only a few thousand subscribers that make 7 figures a year.  What’s the difference between these two types of channels?  Effective Monetization.

Different Types Of Monetization

We will go over the different types of monetization for educational channels and we will start with the “easiest” types first.

Easy Monetization Methods:

Adsense + Affiliate Marketing

Adsense

This is where you place ads in your videos and when people watch those ads you get paid by YouTube/Google.  In order to enable monetization you need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time.

This is a nice form of income, but realistically you should be able to make AT LEAST 5x more than what you make from Adsense.

So if you’re making $10k/month in adsense, you should be able to make at least $50k/month overall if you’re correctly monetizing (which 99% of YouTubers don’t).

In some cases you can make 100x more than adsense if you monetize properly.

PRO TIP: To max out your adsense revenue, make sure you enable all ads AND make sure you put ads every 90-180 seconds in your video.  They won’t show all of these ads, but it will give your video more opportunities to show ads, which increases the revenue.  You can also place them strategically as well throughout the video (more on this in the Uploading/Optimizing section).  This can actually double or even triple your adsense income.

What you actually get paid in adsense is your RPM (Revenue Per 1000 views).  What most people talk about on YouTube is your CPM (Cost Per 1000 Views), CPM is the total amount that is made from the ads, then you have to split that total amount with YouTube (So it’s approximately double your RPM).  So it’s best to just pay attention to Your RPM because that’s what you actually make.

Your CPM or RPM is going to vary a lot depending on your niche, location of your viewers, age of your viewers, demographics of your viewers etc etc etc.

So it’s impossible to say exactly how much each niche makes because there are a lot of other factors outside of the niche.