YouTube Channels’ Case Study Update Months 4-5

Hello Peeps

Here is the next installment in my bi-monthly updates for my YouTube channels case study – and we’ve hit a pretty important milestone!

One of my channels – ‘channel 2’ – has been monetized!

My other channel isn’t doing so hot, but it’s all good, I didn’t expect to monetize a channel so soon, so I’m happy.

Here’s what’s happened over the last couple of months:

Overview of Stats for Both Channels

Channel 1	#videos	#shorts	#views	#subs	#Watch time (hrs)
February	9	1	299	14	3.5
March	21	1	3,513	39	110
April	18	19	20,617	324	599
May	33	9	6,333	165	147
June	5	0	3,115	55	103
July	6	0	5,119	79	179
Totals	92	30	38,996	676	1,140

Channel 2	#videos	#shorts	#views	#subs	#Watch time (hrs)
March	6	3	2,298	42	75
April	3	0	3,442	40	119
May	5	4	13,187	60	375
June	6	2	125,459	692	4,179
July	4	3	42,707	262	1,900
Totals	20	12	187,093	1,096	6,648

Channel 1 – Here’s What Happened

This is the channel I’m creating videos from stock footage for. I’ve gone into cruise control with this channel, to be honest, I’m just not enjoying it as much as the other channel.

I’m still pushing out a video a week and using the channel to experiment a little with tweaking headlines and some of the metadata.

But for the foreseeable future, I’m just going to put out a video a week which only takes about an hour or two to make.

As you can see from the analytics above, some videos do pick up some traffic when released.

But for the most part, things aren’t going too well!

Channel 2 – Here’s What Happened

Things are going a lot better with my second channel – in fact, I got the channel monetized on the 22nd July!

That means it took about 4 months and 23 videos to get monetized.

I’m happy with that, it’s quicker than I expected, if I’m honest.

As you can see from the analytics, I get spikes of traffic when I release a video then the traffic tapers off.

I do have some videos ranking pretty well and bringing in steady clicks though. I’m getting around 1.5-2k clicks a day while not releasing new videos.

I’ve been releasing one video a week, it’s harder to do more than one video as I have to go out and film for the day, then spend a day editing it.

I’ve been releasing a few shorts too using the extra footage, making compilations of funny moments, or creating a shortened version of the video.

YouTube’s New Monetization Requirements

YouTube released new monetization requirements a couple of months back, and it seemed to confuse a lot of people.

Even some of the videos I watched explaining the new requirements were flat-out incorrect.

The new requirements are 500 subscribers and 3,000 watch hours, instead of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

But this is only to enable Super Chat donations and Memberships, NOT the full YouTube Partner Program (YPP) video ads.

I did sign up when the new requirements were rolled out in my location, and I noticed one benefit to doing so – you can go through the approval process.

My channel was accepted in about 24 hours for the Super Chats and Memberships. When I hit 1,000 subs and applied for the full YPP I was accepted instantly, I didn’t have to go through the approval process.

YouTube RPMs

I knew before getting into YT that the RPMs were going to be way lower than on blogs, but it’s pretty shocking.

It’s early days, but looking at a few of my videos I’m getting in the range of £1-3 RPM ($1.25-3.85).

That sucks, but it’s fine.

I’ll just have to drive millions of views to my videos to make some decent £, so that’s what I’ll do.

I’ve also started adding a couple of affiliate links to the descriptions of my videos for the tech I’m using, I’ve set up the YT paid monthly membership, and am able to accept ‘Super Thanks’ donations.

So I might make a few more £ through those revenue streams, you never know.

I’ll also look into paid promotions down the line when I have a bigger audience.

The Next Two Months…

Nothing exciting or new planned for the next two months. I’m going to try and continue to release a video a week and try to spin off some shorts from the footage!

Header Photo by Amir Hosseini on Unsplash