to your audience — whether it consists of one person or ten million — centers on understanding them and satisfying their appetite. (For more on building your audience, check out Chapter 10.)
Building a business
In addition to letting you upload your videos to satisfy the fun side of your personality, YouTube can work wonders for your business side. You can easily set your account to monetize video content, as mentioned in the next section; as long as you meet the minimum requirements for monetization and enough viewers watch your videos, you can earn some extra money. If you have something to sell or a service to offer, you can also leverage YouTube for some pretty cool and powerful advertising. As you can see in Chapter 13, it’s simple enough for anyone to do it.
Monetizing
You can earn money with your YouTube channel every time someone views a YouTube ad before watching one of your videos. The more people who view your content, the more money you can potentially make. The minimum eligibility requirements to turn on monetization features for your channel have dramatically changed over the past couple of years, primarily because of what are referred to as brand safety issues with advertisers.
So, what's all this about “brand safety”? Actually, it's not that complicated. An advertiser wants to place its ads on videos that are suitable for its brand image, culture, and vision. An advertiser doesn’t want its brands associated with bad press or negative content. What is suitable for one brand advertiser might not be suitable for another brand. For example, a video game manufacturer might be okay with advertising on first-person-shooter videos, but a beauty brand may find that kind of content inappropriate for its video’s ads or just not relevant for its target audience.
Your first hurdle for making money on YouTube is to get accepted into the YouTube Partner Program. To apply for the program, you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public video watch-hours over the past year.
Now that users have found the potential to make money on YouTube, it’s become like the California gold rush of 1849. Motivated entrepreneurs are setting up shop in the hope of striking it big with their YouTube channels.
As you might expect, not everybody will strike it rich. In fact, very few will strike it rich. Nevertheless, it’s possible to earn a side hustle, especially if you take advantage of the multiple ways you can make money by way of your YouTube channel, including advertising revenue, channel membership, your merchandise shelf, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and YouTube Premium Revenue. Just keep in mind that slow-and-steady wins the race — making money takes time, or at least it will take time until you build a massive following. (For more on monetization, check out Chapter 14.)
Chapter 2
The Basics of YouTube
IN THIS CHAPTER
In the simplest sense, YouTube is a website designed for sharing video. Before YouTube’s founding in 2005, posting and sharing a video online was difficult: The bandwidth and storage needed to stream video were expensive, and many copyright risks were involved in letting people upload whatever they wanted. Because YouTube was willing to absorb the costs and ignore the risks, it provided, for free, the infrastructure for users to upload and view as much video as they want. This proposition turned out to be a popular one.
Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and YouTube’s growth continued. As of 2019, viewers watch more than a billion hours of video per day, and more than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
Let us say that last part again: 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Given that amount of content, you, as an individual, could never watch everything that’s available on YouTube. For every minute of video you watch, you’re 500 hours behind. For every work of genius, such as “Cat in a shark costume chases a duck while riding a Roomba,” YouTube has literally tens of thousands of poorly shot, poorly edited videos of family vacations, dance recitals, and bad jokes that could possibly be of interest only to the uploader. This chapter serves as your (essential) guide to finding the good parts while skipping the bad. (Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody had to do it, and that somebody was us.) We help you navigate the YouTube interface, establish an account, and start looking ahead to planning a channel. If you’re new to YouTube or you need to dig a bit deeper as a user, this is the chapter for you.
What You’ll Find on YouTube
You’ll find, in a word, videos on YouTube. You’ll find, in several words, just about anything on YouTube. We would say that you’ll find anything you can imagine, but even we never would have imagined that anyone would make a compilation of animal clips from the defunct app Vine, and we definitely would never have imagined that the compilation would have been viewed over 214 million times. The best way to describe what’s on YouTube may be to start with the categories that YouTube lists on its home page.
Managing your identity
Your entire YouTube experience is driven by whether YouTube knows who you are. It doesn’t use any magic to figure it out. Instead, YouTube simply determines whether you’re logged in or logged out. When you log in, YouTube can make video recommendations based on your viewing behavior. In other words, after YouTube knows what you like, it does its best to bring more of that great video content to you.
As you can see in this chapter and throughout the book, you need to be logged in to do most of the important things on YouTube. Sure, you can watch videos without being logged in, but you’ll miss a good part of the experience. You need a Google account to log in, and we show you how to set up one of those a little later in this chapter, in the section “Working with a YouTube Account.” You also have the option to create a YouTube channel for an existing Google account.