Money using Youtube never really occured to me.YouTube to me was initially a great tool to look for videos mostly related to music, sport and entertainment. It was great because I discovered information that was good to discuss with my friends. It had a major impact in terms of discovering music. Over the years my search patterns on the web site started to change towards vlogs. Vlogs are also known as video blogs. There are vlogs on a variety of interests. The most common ones being about beauty tips and lifestyle. Channels on life style, motorcycle vlogging, travel vlogging and many others have made it to my subscription page.

Examples of such channels are “Salomondrin” car videos, “Baron Von Grumble”- a motorcycle Vlog channel”, “Casey Neistat”- Who has shot to fame with his Vlogs on his daily life, “Walterrific”- Another motorcycle based Vlog Channel.The video below is an example of a Vlog.

But the question was, how do these people make a living? After a bit of research I came out with a list of likely ways that Vloggers might monetise their YouTube videos.

Money from Advertising:

Vloggers can make money by allowing others to advertise on their channel and they mostly use AdSense. AdSense allows Google to display advertisements on YouTube content. Vloggers usually sign up with AdSense as the service is free and allows the Vloggers to collect a portion of Google’s commission every time someone engages with the ad. The usual split of such commissions are 45/55. Here Google keeps 45% of the revenues while the content creator or channel owner gets 55% of the ad revenues

In 2013 the average revenue per thousand views was around $7.80. Hence videos from vloggers such as Casey Neistat probably garnered up to $16000 per video with an average of 2 million views on a weekly basis and around $64000 per month.  Vloggers such as MoVlogs in Dubai average $7800 per video and with daily releases the figure could goes up to about $235000 a month. All yes if your channels gain a massive following and views.

Building the channel into a Brand:

Once there are a regular group of followers, the owner can slowly start turning the channel into a Brand.  A lot of Vloggers have a symbol associated with the channel. These help viewers associate with the YouTube channel. It also helps the Vloggers create merchandise with these symbols that are sold to fans.

As part of the branding efforts, the vloggers constantly interact with their fans and spread the channel’s brand over other social media platforms. These vloggers also advertise themselves by wearing their own merchandise when they go out into public spaces. This would mostly translate into views and revenue via advertisements. The revenue from efforts such as selling merchandise may be much lower than what the vloggers generate from AdSense. Merchandise prices can vary from 20$ for a t-shirt towards a 100$ depending on the popularity of the channel and the brand.

Money from a Companion Blog:

Some of the Vloggers start a companion blog. It is used as a way to provide more content to the followers and users. In addition to this blogs can also be monetised through Google AdSense which will match targeted ads to the audience. However with a companion blog advertising is not the only way to make money. Writing a sponsored post for brands is another way of earning on your blogs. The user would have to make sure that such a sponsored post is communicated to his or her audience. Hence a companion blog also acts as an additional source of revenue along with a YouTube channel.

Money from YouTube Sponsorships:

YouTube videos can be sponsored by brands. For example fashion vlogger Zoella did a series of videos for the brand named “Lush” and helped the brand gain a larger number of customers. Brands usually leverage well known vloggers in order to tap into the vloggers audience. However the video should not look like an advertisement as it could turn away viewers from a channel. Ways in which vloggers endorse brands are as follows: 

1.Shoutouts and mentions during a video:

A vlogger may mention the brand or point to a link in the video description or show the brand logo. This is the easiest but the least profitable. This involves using affiliate links, codes etc for product pages and affiliate web sites. When clicks happen on the affiliate links, the partner checks the traffic directed to his or her web site and revenue generated. The affiliate partner then rewards you for directing traffic to their page.

2.  Detailed product Review:

In this people will do a full review of the product on their channel. Example:  Marcus Brownlee, a well-known tech reviewer is known for this from of video content. Here the Vlogger can act as an influencer and get brands to send them products to review.

3.Indirect Promotion:

In such videos, vloggers will not explicitly mention the name of the brand on their videos but strategically place the product in the video. I have noticed such placements by vloggers who usually do motorcycle vlogs. Especially when it comes to riding gear or the name of a mechanic.

4.Paid Sponsorships:

This is the hardest form of sponsorship to obtain but is the most profitable. These usually occur during intermissions in the video and the vlogger is usually paid to talk about a brands products.

 Most vloggers will gain sponsorships by reaching out to the brand for a potential sponsorship. They either contact the brand directly or use an online platform which connects brands interested in sponsoring vloggers. Some of the Web sites that help connect Vloggers to sponsors are sites such as: Grapevine, Famebit, Reelio etc.

Thus:

These are a few avenues through which a vlogger can monetize his or her videos on YouTube. But in order to gain revenue from a YouTube video the content has to be of high quality and pertinent to the audience or community that a vlogger will broadcast to over time. Vlogs where the content has started to suffer are from Vloggers such as Salomondrin. As a result of poor content the number of views have remained static over time which then effects any revenue growth from AdSense.

Fresh and engaging content for the viewers has always been a challenge for vloggers. As a result of which Baron Von Grumble has started a new channel named 44 Teeth which he uses to branch out into other forms of content for motorcycle vlogging. All in all to be successful at vlogging you would need to know how to gain views which could translate into revenue. Maybe take a feather out of Casey Neistat’s cap and come up with something fun and interesting to watch which gains close to 2 million views and 8 million followers. Sounds Easy?

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