Youtube Is Paying Me!

Last year, I decided that I was going to make money, with an online business. It was quite a departure from the story told by my work history, but I thought, "Why not?" The resounding answer, as I soon found out, was that I had no idea what I was doing. Fair enough.

Perhaps I'm unique in thinking this way, but when I find out that I have spent countless hours getting nowhere, I get discouraged. I don't get discouraged too often, but when I do, the level of disappointment is epic. I went from buying into the hype, to giving hype the finger. The hype didn't change...I did.

"You can't make money online," I said, truly convinced that the internet had been set up to make me feel disappointed in my efforts. If the world can revolve around me, shouldn't the world wide web, as well?

And then it happened. I made money on Youtube. Well, that still remains to be seen, but the potential is there. I made a video. It was bad and I knew it was bad. I shot it quickly and without a lot of thought. The sound quality is poor and the camera is shaky. My voice makes me cringe a little bit, too. But it was a test. I wanted to see if any of my research and training would pay off. Could I plug in good keywords? Could my video go viral? If it did, could I make any money off of it?

For 6 months I forgot about this video. I tried promoting it on Facebook (with little success and a bit of pity), I tried tweeting about it and I put the video on my blog. With begging and pleading, I made it to the coveted 200 views. With all of this effort and no reward, I gave up. Then, something happened.

I understand that there are formulae and ways of doing things, but for me, success usually equals some sort of magic. As I get older, I find that I take less and less credit for good things that happen to me or around me. I received an email from Youtube that said my video was eligible for making money with Google Adsense.

As luck would have it, I already had set up an Adsense account for my Hub Pages profile, since I was pretty convinced that I would make a fortune by writing about topics that very few people would read about. Perhaps the main problem lies in my planning stages?

I was intrigued by this development. Where did the viewers suddenly come from? I immediately went to connect my Adsense account to my Youtube account and see what might happen. Nothing happened. I checked my account and had the $.03 that had accrued from some polite person that had clicked on an ad, sometime in September.

As I watched the view count go up on my video, I wondered why no money was rolling in. Did people just not click on ads anymore? Quite possible. More importantly, why were people now watching my video?

Both questions were answered around the same time. When I signed into my Youtube account, one day, I began to look at the analytical breakdown of my viewership. That is quite a fun exercise. If you can start to see the gender, age and nationalities of your viewers, you can curtail your video efforts to speak to those people. Furthermore, a graph displays how interested people are in your video, at every moment. For example, if a bunch of viewers find a funny part and watch that part again, the graph displays a higher number. If a certain section of your video is skipped, or people leave your video all together, the graph shows a lower number.

My viewership was skyrocketing, because my keywords were getting some hits. Eventually, my video became a "suggestion" on the sidebar of many videos. How did this happen? E-magic, I imagine.

I had missed an important step, in all of the excitement. Even though I had linked my Youtube account to my Adsense account, I had not clicked on the monetization tab (in Youtube). Under this tab, it asks if you would like your video to be monetized. Without doing this very important step, I would have been stuck with my 3 cents. After agreeing to monetize, however, Youtube began opening up my video to advertisements that run on a Pay Per Click basis.

In a few days, my account started to accrue some income! $1.68 the first day, $2.40 the next and $6.80 on the third. I was stunned. Who knew that you could actually make money on a terrible video? (The answer, of course, is "most people.") Imagine what the Youtube celebrities are making, when they rope in millions of views for every video that they make? As of today, my video has pretty much run its course. But $45.18 is enough to pique my interest and pursue the intrigues of online business again! Sure, Google only pays out after $100, so I haven't technically made any money...but now that I know it's possible, I'll be aiming for the sky...or at least $54.82.