I started out on YouTube in January (2018). Had a lot of ideas and thought I could make them into short videos and maybe get some payments out of them. Making videos takes a lot of time so if they gain some revenue it would give me more time to make them.
When I started, the first hurdle was the 10.000 views barrier. On YouTube they had a policy that a channel first needed 10.000 views before you could monetize the videos. Ok, so I started uploading videos and it slowly got some views. The first month I had 417 views but it was slowly getting better. Emphasis on slowly. In this rate I would get to 10.000 views by the end of the year. I only got 4 videos out in January so adding more videos should get more views.
February changed the rules
When I checked my stats again in the second half of February there was a big shocker. YouTube changed the rules and now we have to get 4000 hours of view time and 1000 subscribers to be able to get monetization on your videos. While I understand that they want more serious video creators, this is a huge increase in difficulty. While my views in January where 417, my view time was only 203 minutes. Thats about 3.5 hours of view time. So to get to 4000 hours will take me several years. Monetization seems far away.
Leaves me with two choices. Stop with YouTube because they made it to difficult or continue and see how far we come this year. I decided on the latter but now I need a plan to get the numbers up.
Twitter
At first there is exposure. People need to find and look at your content, but you don’t have a lot of say in that. You can post your new videos on Twitter (or Facebook) but you need followers there too. This takes time but creating an audience always does. So I started out on Twitter (@DebomaDevStudio). Currently I only have 43 followers but this should grow as the content gets more.
Website
The second thing you could do is create a website. This also takes time but is a great way to get noticed. You could use a cms like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal (check this video on how to install Drupal) and that should speed things up. People visiting the articles and videos on your site might also be interested in your other content. This could get your numbers up too.
Longer videos
Another way I started to use to get more view time is to make longer videos. The videos I uploaded in January where less than a minute. So when a lot people would view them, my view time would still be not great. My first video in February was a tutorial on installing Drupal 8 and is 12 minutes long. So now I try to make my videos longer than 5 minutes each if the content of the video allows it and see what happens.
Update progress
I intent to regularly write updates on my progress to give you an idea of how it is to monetize on YouTube. I had a lot of questions about the subject when I started and looked at some video’s from other Youtubers. They made a decent amount but they all had a lot (100K +) of followers and where on uploading videos for several years. Not really a good reference for when you’re starting.
Thats it for today. If you want to keep updated you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my YouTube Channel. Hope to see you with the next update.