SOCIAL MEDIA LIFE
DO’S & DON’TS - A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO MAKING MONEY ON YOUTUBE YouTube has become one of the world’s most popular social media channels with over five billion videos shared on the platform alone to date and that huge number is growing daily. This veritable cornucopia of content on YouTube ranges from the mainstream to the esoteric, from the purely whimsical to the deeply philosophical all the way to the highly educational. If you search around long enough on YouTube, you will likely find someone has made a video for whatever subject or need you’re looking for no matter how unusual it is. Beyond more popular content like movie trailers, makeup tutorials, viral videos, product unboxing clips of toys and gadgets, zany pet videos, discussions on the latest Game of Thrones episode or whatnot, YouTube also has a ton of surprisingly useful content available across a gamut of topics from learning how to replace the broken display on a notebook all the way down to more mundane issues like the right way to bake a cake and even how to resolve those tough maths equations in your homework. The interesting question remains though - who is creating all this content? Rather than some large conglomerate, the contributors and creators of this diverse array of YouTube content are surprisingly people from all walks of life. While many do it to share their passion, a great many - aspiring musicians, small businesses, budding entrepreneurs and more are sharing what they love and making money by doing so on YouTube. Interested? Here’s how!
WHAT DO I NEED TO START?
ANYTHING ELSE TO WATCH OUT FOR?
If you are already running a business, you can use YouTube as a platform for advertising by paying YouTube a fee for every view of a commercial that you supply that will appear on the platform to viewers to drive more business but that, and other forms of income generation like product sponsorships are an entirely different topic. For the scope of this article, we will be focusing on the most common means of making money with YouTube - as a content creator.
For advertisers to be confident enough to advertise on your videos and platform, you’ll need one more important thing on top of having a healthy subscriber count respectful, positive content that is mindful of social and cultural norms. Essentially, don’t post anything that would be hurtful to another demographic or belief that wouldn’t appear on daytime national TV.
By creating interesting videos and cultivating an audience who tune in regularly, you create opportunities that allow other advertisers to place their ads on your YouTube channel and which then allow you to generate revenue via advertising on the YouTube Partner programme. To start earning advertising revenue, you will need to grow your channel to a certain size and have a minimum number of subscribers before you’re allowed to join the YouTube Partner Programme. Currently, to be eligible you need at least 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months and at least 1,000 subscribers to be considered for membership. The figure is daunting but it can be achieved! Even if you’re already a content creator on YouTube, it pays to do your homework to find out how to create exciting content that fans will want to subscribe to your channel for and in order to grow your channel to meet the size required to be monetisable. Whether you’re a neophyte or a seasoned YouTube content creator, you’ll constantly need to conduct research to find out what the top content creators in your chosen interest niche are doing right and how you can improve your own videos and channel in the long run. For example - If you are doing cookery videos, find out who’s the biggest and the best, then find out how they run their channel and create content. Good content is half the equation though. You still need equally good equipment to create that content as most people won’t tune into a channel with videos that are an incoherent mess with low resolution footage and inaudible sound. That means you need some solid equipment. You can check out our feature in Top Gear on the essential equipment you need on ‘How to Be a Vlogger’ to get started.
8
SHOUT 2019 BUMPER EDITION
Another thing to be mindful of is copyright infringement. That means you cannot simply use someone else’s work and claim it for your own. If you’re using music, graphics or any other form of content that is created by someone else, you either need to pay royalties or give due credit. It is important that you to be familiar with the basic concepts of copyright so that you avoid getting in trouble and risking litigation or having your channel being taken offline for copyright infringement. For more specific details on the YouTube Partner programme, you can visit their page at https://creatoracademy. youtube.com. Good luck and have fun creating great content!
