I wanted to post this a while back and now I have the time to go ahead and post this small case study. I have several small niche sites and I wanted to try to take advantage of a trend I saw a couple months back and funny this trend still climbs slowly over time. So why not take advantage of this niche and see if I can make some money off it. I searched the internet and found that there were no videos optimized on Youtube.
So I decided to create some videos about the topic to see if I can make some money from Youtube, right now it is only monetized 3 ways - Adsense, Amazon, and Blog content. I made 5 videos and I optimized all by keywords and found one did better than the others. Here is a screenshot of my stats from Youtube:
As you can see 1 video performed better, for certain searched keywords my video would be number one. Out of 4057 I only earned $22.90, not very impressive especially if we look at the CPV (cost per view) which is .0056 - not even a penny. Also just to confirm I made no money via Amazon via the 30 days I took this report. So currently the total earned is only $22.90.
As of right now (10/21/12 - 10:41am) there are a total of 16401 views and have been added to 2 playlists.
So what next...? I created another youtube channel with the same video but in segments. I wanted to try to take the full search page for certain searched terms. Once the video received X amount of views, then I can qualify to monetize the videos. I added and linked up my Adsense account to the new youtube channel and waited for approval. After several days, I have been approved - the results are the same lots of views low earnings.
I thought to myself that this is too much work. I even gave this task to my outsource team, hoping I can at least cover the cost of the time to do these youtube task and it didn't pay out. So to me there is money in Youtube, but not enough for me to continue to pursue this concept. In 30 days I made 22.90 not even 1$ a day and not worth for the amount of views the video is receiving.
One aspect I found is my video is ranked # one for the searched term and get hundreds of views a day. Also my demographic are mostly males, which also make me think why I am not making money, not even any affiliate sales from Amazon.com! As you can see my numbers are telling me this Youtube money isn't worth the time for me to continue this mini project.
Numbers at a glance:
Total views in the past 30 days: 4078
Total earned in the past 30 days: 22.91
30 Day dollar Value: .76
Earnings Per View: .0056
As of right now this isn't the best way to make money online, if you do not mind making videos that can continually climb daily and make small money then it is fine. The only benefit I can see with this is I will make money even if I stop making videos, even if it is $20+ a month. These specific videos will continually make me money if I stop tomorrow (actually stopped 2 weeks ago), so that is one benefit I see. Setup, leave alone, and make money.
