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- YouTube’s Partner Program lets creators earn money by monetizing their channel with video advertisements.
- These advertisements will generate a certain amount of money depending on factors like a video’s watch time, length, and viewer demographic.
- A video with roughly one million views averages between $2,000 and $5,000 in Google AdSense revenue for YouTube influencer Shelby Church, she told Business Insider.
- Church broke down how different factors affect her earnings.
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Making money from YouTube can be a fickle proposition, and depend on a variety of factors, but getting a million views can net a creator thousands of dollars.
For YouTube influencer Shelby Church, who has 1.2 million subscribers, her videos with around one million views have made between $2,000 and $5,000, she told Business Insider. Church has 17 videos with over one million views. Her video titled, “This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me For My 1,000,000 Viewed Video (not clickbait),” which itself has 2.7 million views, made more than $7,000 in Google AdSense revenue, Church said.
The breakdown
From brand campaigns to in-video advertisements, there are a number of different ways a YouTube creator can make money from a video. The YouTube Partner Program allows creators with at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last year to monetize their channels through ads, subscriptions, and channel memberships.
Advertisements are filtered through Google’s AdSense program. How much money these ads generate depends on a video’s audience, watch time, and which advertisers are buying, according to Petar Mandich, chief talent officer at Addition, a talent management company focused on influencers and creators.
Length
Creators can place a certain number of ads in a video depending on its length. Videos over 10 minutes long will make more money because they can include more ad breaks, Church said.
Watch time
Viewer watch time helps determine how well a video is performing on YouTube, and high-performing videos have a greater chance of being picked up by YouTube’s automated algorithm, Mandich said.
YouTube’s automated algorithm impacts how much money a video makes in two ways. The algorithm can pick up a video and suggest it, helping its overall reach, or flag and demonetize it for containing inappropriate material like copyrighted music, which restricts it from making any money.
Demographic
A YouTube video’s monetization is also affected by what part of the world viewers are watching from and their ages. North America and the UK are the two most important geographical regions for video views because more companies are buying ads in these regions. If 80% of a video is viewed from somewhere other than these regions, a creator won’t make as much in AdSense revenue, Mandich said.
Church has a video on her channel with over 2 million views, but the video didn’t make her as much money as she expected because most of those views came from India, she said.
