How long do you take to make some stable income from Youtube?

[FRANKIEandEMILY]

Nothing wrong with doing it for money, as long as you will not think it's going to be easy money. I started this thing as a business, not for fun. Doing it for over a year now and don't despise it, still full with energy to make it work.

that's a great point as well

 

[KiddieToysReview]

first off, it should be for fun / not for money or you will despise doing it after a short time.

Money makes the world go round. If you don't get paid, how can you pay rent, buy food, pay the bills.
YouTube expects high quality content, preferably daily uploads, varied and trendy topics. That takes a lot of time, resources and money. Cameras and backend equipment is expensive.
Software subscriptions necessary to run a successful channel are not cheap (Tubebuddy/Adobe/Microsoft/etc).
Keeping on trend with kids/toys is expensive - props and toys for each video run from a few $ to $500+; costumes are $20-$80/pop, Thomas sets $20-$100, those giant inflatable toys $20-$50.
If a top channel does something, Youtube algo wants more of it to promote and place in suggested, so if you want to grow you need to buy that stuff immediately and execute on the trend.
Nothing wrong with mixing fun and money. Some of the most enjoyable things in life are more so when you get paid. YouTube and money go perfectly hand in hand. Our boss, Google, is all about money. The search engine functionality exists solely for the purpose of placing ads. Google and YouTube are nothing but ubiquitous ad servers. The more creators get paid, the more they want to make awesome content and engage with the platform. Cut the cash, and who can afford to spend thousands every month supporting a losing hobby as you get served an eviction notice and your power gets cut off for not paying the bills?
The more money we make on YouTube, the more excited I am about the opportunity of it, and the more channels I want to open and build a profitable business. There is nothing more enjoyable or satisfying than creating something from nothing and working for yourself on your own terms, hours and letting your creative juices flow.

 

[Stearmans Toy Review]

Money makes the world go round. If you don't get paid, how can you pay rent, buy food, pay the bills.
YouTube expects high quality content, preferably daily uploads, varied and trendy topics. That takes a lot of time, resources and money. Cameras and backend equipment is expensive.
Software subscriptions necessary to run a successful channel are not cheap (Tubebuddy/Adobe/Microsoft/etc).
Keeping on trend with kids/toys is expensive - props and toys for each video run from a few $ to $500+; costumes are $20-$80/pop, Thomas sets $20-$100, those giant inflatable toys $20-$50.
If a top channel does something, Youtube algo wants more of it to promote and place in suggested, so if you want to grow you need to buy that stuff immediately and execute on the trend.
Nothing wrong with mixing fun and money. Some of the most enjoyable things in life are more so when you get paid. YouTube and money go perfectly hand in hand. Our boss, Google, is all about money. The search engine functionality exists solely for the purpose of placing ads. Google and YouTube are nothing but ubiquitous ad servers. The more creators get paid, the more they want to make awesome content and engage with the platform. Cut the cash, and who can afford to spend thousands every month supporting a losing hobby as you get served an eviction notice and your power gets cut off for not paying the bills?
The more money we make on YouTube, the more excited I am about the opportunity of it, and the more channels I want to open and build a profitable business. There is nothing more enjoyable or satisfying than creating something from nothing and working for yourself on your own terms, hours and letting your creative juices flow.

I have wondered about daily uploads. We did it for a long time, but wonder if it would make more of a difference now..[DOUBLEPOST=1498994686,1498994448][/DOUBLEPOST]

first off, it should be for fun / not for money or you will despise doing it after a short time.

From a strictly business point of view, you have to have multiple "streams of revenue." More streams of revenue = more money. Adsense = 1 stream. Merch = 1 stream. Brand deals = 1 stream. Partnerships = 1 stream.

So to answer your question, it depends on how you're doing it and what you're doing/how long. Typically 1 million views on a video = roughly $1,000 on adsense alone. So you can see how the bigger channels can make more money easily because they've built this up.

The road up is tough and takes most people several years to gain a following. The exceptions are viral videos, success on other platforms, collabs with other YouTubers, or hitting trending topics consistently. There's a lot more behind the "hard work" that creates the illusion of "luck".

To me is seems you will need a large following in order to get any of the other streams... I don't think anyone would want merch from me until I'm huge.. and brands and partnerships wouldn't want much to do with me either until I'm larger.. but maybe i'm wrong. I have had several toy companies send us products to review, but those are unpaid in the sense of revenue.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

I have wondered about daily uploads. We did it for a long time, but wonder if it would make more of a difference now..[DOUBLEPOST=1498994686,1498994448][/DOUBLEPOST]

To me is seems you will need a large following in order to get any of the other streams... I don't think anyone would want merch from me until I'm huge.. and brands and partnerships wouldn't want much to do with me either until I'm larger.. but maybe i'm wrong. I have had several toy companies send us products to review, but those are unpaid in the sense of revenue.

Yep, some top channels such as Ryan, Vlad Crazyshow, Emily, ToysToSee, ToysAndMe upload daily, but they have extremely high views and subs. There's a lot of demand for their videos. Think new iphone release.

Smaller channels with not many active subs, if we release daily, the vids blow over and we don't get much views. Think of some new startup from Somewhereghanistan releasing a new mobile phone. No one really gives a crap. Unfortunately that's the reality. Recently we've been getting the same number of views on new videos as we did back in the days of 10k subs. Putting more videos out there won't help.

About the alternative revenue streams, once again only in the very top tiers of the platform, will any of those other streams make sense. We've had a number of offers of free products, but nothing paid. I never found a match for us in Famebit either. t-shirts, ye can try, but how many will we sell at $20 and $1 commission when parents can buy Disney brands at Target for $7, is it really worth the hassle of spending days setting all those graphics for $5/week income. That won't even buy me a caramel frappuccino, they are like $7 here already.

As for partnerships, the only ones who contact us want a 10-20% cut of revenue for unquantifiable benefits. I could never nail a MCN/ network partner down into specific contractual commitments, they just have very general clauses open to a variety of interpretation.

The cold hard reality is adsense is the only viable revenue source, and if you do get to 2M subs and 60M views/month where you might get larger brands interested (and I stress might), the $50,000/month from adsense is more than enough to not be very much concerned with t-shirts and doing toy reviews for $100 a pop. I have read that the beauty vertical may be different, but that's far removed from what we do.

The only viable way I can see for a 1M-2M sub channel to increase potential revenue is to open other channels and diversify. Once you learn how the system works, take that knowledge and reproduce it. That's how Kroc build McD and Walton built Wal*Mart. Get the system nailed down, then reproduce it. Lots of top tier channels are diversifying wide in the kids vertical. Lots of synergy and efficiency is achieved at relatively low overheads. Franchise!!

 

[Stearmans Toy Review]

The only viable way I can see for a 1M-2M sub channel to increase potential revenue is to open other channels and diversify. Once you learn how the system works, take that knowledge and reproduce it. That's how Kroc build McD and Walton built Wal*Mart. Get the system nailed down, then reproduce it. Lots of top tier channels are diversifying wide in the kids vertical. Lots of synergy and efficiency is achieved at relatively low overheads. Franchise!!

Yes! Maybe if we ever get there we can start a few more haha. looks like your other channel is doing well.. so YES, franchise

 

[FRANKIEandEMILY]

Money makes the world go round. If you don't get paid, how can you pay rent, buy food, pay the bills.
YouTube expects high quality content, preferably daily uploads, varied and trendy topics. That takes a lot of time, resources and money. Cameras and backend equipment is expensive.
Software subscriptions necessary to run a successful channel are not cheap (Tubebuddy/Adobe/Microsoft/etc)....
Keeping on trend with kids/toys is expensive - props and toys for each video run from a few $ to $500+; costumes are $20-$80/pop, Thomas sets $20-$100, those giant inflatable toys $20-$50.
If a top channel does something, Youtube algo wants more of it to promote and place in suggested, so if you want to grow you need to buy that stuff immediately and execute on the trend.
Nothing wrong with mixing fun and money. Some of the most enjoyable things in life are more so when you get paid. YouTube and money go perfectly hand in hand. Our boss, Google, is all about money. The search engine functionality exists solely for the purpose of placing ads. Google and YouTube are nothing but ubiquitous ad servers. The more creators get paid, the more they want to make awesome content and engage with the platform. Cut the cash, and who can afford to spend thousands every month supporting a losing hobby as you get served an eviction notice and your power gets cut off for not paying the bills?
The more money we make on YouTube, the more excited I am about the opportunity of it, and the more channels I want to open and build a profitable business. There is nothing more enjoyable or satisfying than creating something from nothing and working for yourself on your own terms, hours and letting your creative juices flow.

Oh totally, I get that approaching it as a business is smart + you have to be conscious of your time investment and monetary investment into production and content. I simply meant that a lot of people nowadays want to be "YouTube famous" and get frustrated when they realize how hard it is/it's actually work.

We have recently decided to start a channel for our kids as well since they have such a funny and engaging personality. It'll be exciting to learn that side of YouTube as well as we produce our own content for our channel

 

[ToysForKids]

3. I have found from our channel, and analysis of other channels, that you generally need 1 video to go viral in the order of 10M-20M views in 1-3 months, and follow it up with other semi-viral videos (1M-10M views) for the channel to get traction, build authority, and start some sort of "auto-pilot" growth.

How to increase the chances of having a video go viral?

 

[KiddieToysReview]

How to increase the chances of having a video go viral?

That's the $20,000 question, which incidentally, is how much a kids viral video makes these days, give or take a little.
Jokes aside, I would like to know this too. We would have much more of them.
There's a few blog posts on the www, google for them. There'd also been a few posts here in the last year or so.
Ultimately, it's mostly surprise, luck, and the x-factor.

 

[sanitary103]

I believe many of you may also like me, use google adsense on your youtube videos, hoping maybe the videos can generate some income, however much it maybe. I wonder what it takes to start making some relatively stable income for your channel (when i say stable, i dont mean like an amount that can take over your day job, more like to the point you feel quite guarantee that you can make say like $10 a month, or $50, or even $100)?

1. How many video did you post to make it to that points?
2. how much promotion did you do?
3. from what you heard and/or from your experience, does it eventually will start making money, or really have to go viral before you can make money? I understand content really matters, but I run a gaming channel that makes first look videos and walkthrough videos (mostly ios/android games). Content seems to be quite depends on the game itself, and maybe not easy to make them go viral.

1) I don't know the exact amount but if I had to guess, I probably had over 500 videos at least. this is a very rough estimate b/c it was years ago.

2) not too much to tell you the truth. I'm not the biggest social media, "Hey look at me", type of person but that's just me. I do have facebook, instagram and twitter and started doing that a few years ago.

3) you don't need a viral video to make the 100 dollar threshold. but if you want to make an actual living off Youtube, you probably need tons of successful videos if you don't have a viral one.

 

[TheAngryPanda]

Like the replies above I could never look at YT as a "stable income" as they are relying on their clients to supply them the work also. If advertisers don't advertise on YT the money is going to do down. I'm currently self employed in other work and if I lose my main supplier I'm potentially in a bit of bother but for now it's worth it.
With YT I have little overheads and I enjoy the editing and gaming so if anything ever did come out of it, it will be bonus income to me but for now I'm just enjoying the ride and the social aspect of it all. Plus it's a great way to learn new skills!