YouTube videos could make your fortune. Find out how to claim a share of the ad revenue
More than a billion people visit YouTube each month. That’s a
huge market for Google: analysts believe it makes more than $4 billion
per year from selling advertising around (and on top of) user-uploaded
videos.It could also be a huge market for you. Google operates a profit-sharing system where video uploaders receive a cut of the revenue raised from advertisements shown next to their content. The idea is to encourage creators to keep uploading high-quality content to make money for themselves and Google. Already there are plenty of people making a comfortable living from creating and promoting YouTube videos – and in this feature we’ll show you how to join them.
Teaming up with Google
In order to make money from videos, you need to become a “YouTube Partner”. It’s a friendly-sounding phrase, but you should realise that you’re very much the junior partner. You have to play by Google’s rules, which means granting it a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform” the videos you upload.It’s also worth remembering that Google likes to tinker with and upgrade its services. It’s possible that one day you’ll wake up and find your financial arrangements and video-promotion strategies have been turned upside down by some big, unilateral change. That’s just something you’ll have to live with if you want to be a YouTube Partner.
For the same reason, while building up your YouTube channel, be wary of following online advice and tutorials that are more than a few months old, as more recent updates may have made them obsolete or misleading.
Happily, if you’re ready to take the plunge, the process of becoming a YouTube Partner is quite effortless. In the past, only big, successful channels were considered for partnerships, but today anyone can get in on the action.
What sort of videos can you upload to make money?
YouTube has a set of guidelines that cover all uploads, both from partners and regular users: broadly speaking, you can’t post anything containing copyrighted music or images, as well as sexually explicit content, gratuitous violence and misleading tags and titles. These guidelines are often flouted, but as a partner you’ll want to take them seriously – YouTube reserves the right to cancel partnerships with people who break the rules.Apart from this, you can indicate that you’re happy for adverts to appear on any uploaded video. You can even upload your own commercial content (such as an advert you’ve made for someone else’s business) as long as you own the copyright: you simply need to warn YouTube at the time of uploading, so it doesn’t place inappropriate advertising alongside it.
If you’re creating content specifically to make money on YouTube, however, it’s worth putting effort into tailoring your videos for maximum marketability: we’ll discuss this below.
Setting up your account
Although setting yourself up as a YouTube partner isn’t difficult, it’s a process that involves a few steps. The first thing you need is a YouTube account. You can use an existing Google ID, but if this is tied to your personal name you might want to create a new one with a more eye-catching name: all things being equal, a video channel curated by “AceGuitarReviews” is likely to attract more clicks than one operated by “bjennings78”. This new ID can be easily connected to an existing one, so you can use YouTube under your new nom de plume while remaining signed in as yourself to Gmail and other services: to switch, use the icon at the top right of the YouTube interface.Once you’ve done this, you can sign your new ID up for the Partner programme. Once you accept the terms and conditions your YouTube account should immediately become eligible for advertising. To see this in action, upload a video: in the Edit view, above the description, you should see a link labelled “Monetisation” below the video frame (this link doesn’t appear for non-partners). Click it and you’ll see the options to enable in-video adverts – the sort that appear over the bottom section of the frame while your video is playing – and in-stream ads, which are shown before your content starts. YouTube also offers a control panel where you can also check your monetisation settings, and apply settings to multiple videos.
Before you can relax and wait for the money to roll in, however, there’s one more very important thing to be done: if you’re not already a user of Google’s AdSense service, you’ll need to sign up for this as well. This is how your payments will be made, so if you enable adverts but don’t set up an AdSense account, Google will keep all the money for itself.
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