Yep, but Google itself clearly makes good money as they put advertisment in any place they can.

@Mark_the_Harp

If I remember correctly, Google started to get serious money from Youtube (but not sure if it is profitable now).

They are just not interested to share anything to anyone except few partners.

This is not that bad. The only video I am making any money on though.

I average $800 per million views--it depends on how you use the instream ads, over the long hall the five second "pre ads" will at first give you a better percentage but they dampen your view count after a while.

I think it really all boils down to “What are you expecting to get”. If you think you are going to make a living on youtube then you better be pre-pared to do some seriously disgusting or embarrassing things. And be prepared to do it every single day.

If you are just hoping to pay for your equipment it really isn’t that hard. Just make videos that are well made with beneficial content to a lot of people. You can make between $2 to $3 per 1000 views on a consistent basis.

The real key here is getting views every day. You have to get the word out there and get it out there often. If people like your content then they will watch it. If they don’t then they won’t.

It is interesting that I sat next to some of Will Crockett’s employees on a plane earlier this year. They were decked out in full Safari Canon attire but they didn’t have any cameras on them. They asked about my GH2 and I told them about doing reviews on youtube.

They seemed absolutely clueless about cameras especially Micro Four Thirds. They just regurgitated everything that they had heard from Will and others that work for him. I told them that they should really try to learn more about the cameras and then do a youtube channel since he had a huge following back then.

Sure enough a few weeks later his youtube channel went up and he started accumulating a lot of hits. Then people started to realize what he was saying and that went downhill quickly.

Not everyone can do well on youtube. However, anyone can make some money with the right content and a lot of effort.

Google will be paying for my GH3 and LX7 when they get here later this week. I plan on doing a full video manual for the GH3. I will walk through every single menu option and spell out exactly what it does and how to optimize it. That should be helpful for some people. You will have to sit through the 5 second pre-roll ad though. Sorry, I can't afford it any other way.

There have always been seasonal bumps, but sometimes there is a sort of cyber fizzle. I think when the market gets priced out it can go either way.

Around 275,000 views. I shoot short fiction. Web series. Have a new episode being shot in a couple weeks. The first one using the GH2. Feel free to add me to your featured channels. I will do the same. A little synergy can go a long way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LyndrickMCollins

Views were a mixture of subscribers, utilizing a local celebrity, the actors hitting their local networks, and me stupidly wasting money on advertizing. I say stupidly bc I used adwords, facebook, twitter, and a few other solutions in the past. They all left me with nothing to show.

I was initially getting about a 1000 views per day after the first Video "The Fourth." I spent about $100 on advertising. I only had the one video at the time. It lasted about a week before it dropped to about 500 a day. It lasted a week before dropping to 200 a day. One month later it fell to about 20 views per day.

Now, after adding G&G I am at a steady 40-50 views per day. The key words I chose for G&G were not highly optimized. The Fourth, however, is ranking in the top 5 for 4 keywords. That is where my traffic is coming from.

For G&G Youtube Advertising was a bit tricky. I used $100 and $50 coupons for advertising Google and FB. It went no where in google. I may have gotten a thousand views. Facebook was a bit better, but the money ran out fast. I did okay with sponsoring tweets. I basically paid ppl with huge twitter followings to send out a good number of tweets about my video.

The rest was posting all over the net. I lucked out the on first day of "the Fourth" and ended up on the main page. I also had tons of ppl copy my video into their feeds. This time I didn't do as much and it shows.

Our group about 10-11 million spread over several channels. Don't make anything like $2000 per month, more like $200 :)

I run a few "small" youtube channels for extra income. My most successful channel contains 54 videos and quite a few of those have 200,000 plus views. Two of the videos have even cleared a million views. I've also got over 12,000 subscribers on that channel. Out of all of my channels this one in particular has a much higher CTR rate (ad click rate) than every other channel I've seen and or run . Typical CTRs I've seen hover between 2-6 percent. This channel in particular is upwards of 10-12% over the last 2 years. From this channel I have consistently pulled in between $200 and $600 a month.

Keep in mind there are quite a few factors weighing in on how much money a person makes from Youtube. However, the two most important factors are CTR and Ad payout rate. Some ads only pay out 2 cents while others might be 7 cents or more. The higher the ad payout and the higher your CTR the more money you'll earn. It's really just common sense....

I still haven't figured out what causes people to click the ads on this channel in particular more than the others. If I were able to, I'd well....be rich.

That said, I've done quite a bit of experimenting with content on different channels (cooking, video games, tutorials, short film works) over the last couple of years. I've also figured out how to effectively market my channels using SEO and other social media platforms.

Unfortunately, I've kind of lost interest in the majority of it and really don't have the time with all of the video work I've been doing. I've abandoned all channels save for two of them, but left the others open for small residual income. I'll still upload my short works and will put up tutorials from time to time. After all, money is money I guess =)

Now, I'm not claiming to be a Youtube superstar as I really have no interest in making a full time job of it, but last year I was able to use my "Youtube Money" to invest in quite a bit of video equipment (body, lenses, stabilization, etc...) and head in the direction I had originally intended. I guess all of it was an experiment to see just how far I could get on a next to zero budget. I started with a $50 webcam and a $10 dollar table top microphone. It took damn near 4 months to hit the $100 payout threshold, but after that things began to snowball.

I'm starting to ramble.....

@Riker

My original channel: Vlogs mostly since I only had a webcam and microphone. I discussed mostly creative projects I was working on as well as explaining how I was able to accomplish fundraising and market myself and things like that. This was wildly unsuccessful. I actually took this one down.

2nd: Cooking. A friend of mine and I tried to do a short cooking show using his old sony handycam (MiniDV old) and provided short "episodes" of how to make budget meals for college students or anyone unable to shop at Whole Foods. Mostly crockpot style stuff. We were broke and making cheap meals anyway, so it didn't matter. Besides, the aesthetic and resolution of MiniDV only lent itself to the fact that it was about being low budget. My friend and I went on with this for about 8 months before calling it quits. We ended up being able to pay for the groceries, a few crock pots, and enough to treat ourselves to something small.

3rd: At one time in my youth I had dabbled in the semiprofessional gaming circuit. The non first person shooter variety. MMOs and RTS specifically. At any rate, I started to see the online market with Twitch boom for gamers and decided to hop on board. I ended up doing videos on how to prep yourself for professional play and better yourself in general. Most of it was improving hand eye coordination, situational awareness, and how to properly key bind and break "bad habits." things like that. 5,600 plus subscribers despite abandoning the channel over a year ago. I still see some decent residual income from this one. The numbers wax and wane, but it doesn't matter to me. I have absolutely no time to update it at the present and have no use for video games anymore. If I have some free time down the road...sure.

4th (and probably last) The main draw has been from a channel where I do bi-monthly vlogs and have tutorials for production and post production work. I live in the part of the United States where all things Video/Filmmaking are pretty much non-existent. It's pretty much an untapped resource for work. I obviously can't charge industry or union rates, but it definitely pays the bills. Anyways, my vlogs consist of recaps of what I've learned on projects along with examples of what I've determined are "do's and dont's" I also put up short films I have either made or worked on in collaboration with others.

Meanwhile youtube's own button for fullscreen exit looks exactly like a german ww2 emblem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkenkreuz