How Much YouTube Paid Me In My First Month Monetised

With Only 1k Subscribers

The road to YouTube monetisation through Adsense has been a long one, but the wait and the work have been worth it.

Though I certainly won’t be retiring any time soon. The amount that I managed to earn in my first month monetised with just over 1,000 subscribers was more than I anticipated.

If you are pursuing YouTube monetisation through Asdense you are probably already aware, that to meet monetisation requirements you must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

They have just updated this and offered some new payment incentives if you have 500 subscribers and 3,000 hours of watch time. But to enter into the Adsense program where you earn money from Ads placed on your videos, then the original requirements still stand.

I share the full story of my long-laboured journey to monetisation here:

At the end of July, I finally reached those requirements and was eligible to start earning money. At this moment in time, I had around 1.1k subscribers when I hit the 4,000-hour watch time threshold.

August was my first full month of monetisation and I earned £222.61

Not a huge amount I know, but it was quite a lot more than I was expecting. I was seriously expecting pennies!

I had a few videos that were doing okay, and then one video really took off and has kind of gone a little bit viral.

It’s not viral in the traditional sense. You see this particular video is a review video, in fact, it’s reviews that have really helped my channel and my blog to take off.

The review on this particular weight loss programme has a very high search volume. Mainly because this company pumps an insane amount of money into adverts across all platforms.

As a result, a lot of people are searching for reviews on it to see if it’s worth the money. Hence my video and the related blog post have gone viral because of search volume and not traditional virality.

You can see here in my stats that 45% of my traffic to this video has come directly from search within YouTube. Yes, people use YouTube as a search directory when they are looking for answers to questions.

35% is coming from external sources. This is mostly people who have done a traditional Google search and have landed on blog post about the same topic. The YouTube video is also embedded into my blog post, and this blog post is currently ranking in the top 3 for Google search when you look for reviews on this product.

I use RankIq (** Affiliate link) to help me make sure I am hitting all relevant keywords on my blog. I swear by this tool to help me reach the top spot for this article and a powerful tool for those blogging alongside YouTube.

Only 15% is coming from browse features. This shows up on people’s home pages when they open up the platform. So not true virality or this number would be higer. I see this as a good thing as virality can lead to a lot of random people who aren't truly interested in the type of content that you create.

The 80/20 Rule

As you can see in the below image, most of that money is coming from that one video.

The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your return will come from 20% of your efforts. So for every hit video, there will likely be a tonne of duds that earn pennies. But that is always the name of the content creation game.

I am also fully aware, that this traffic is not going to last forever. However, as long as that company keeps on pumping out the same ads (and they show no signs of slowing up) people are going to keep on searching.

But as more people create content on those same keywords, I will likely slip down the rankings.

This is why it’s essential to keep on creating fresh and new content so I’m not just reliant on that one search term.

It’s Not Just About Adsense

This video (and the blog) has also helped to see a peak in my email subscribers and course sales.

I have had an email list for years, it’s a small list, but intimate. I have a great community on my list, but the growth of this list has been incredibly slow.

Since the video and blog have taken off I have had a significant spike in email subscribers which has then translated into an increase in the number of people choosing to come and work with me.

You see the people that are landing on this are super hot leads, they are people that are looking to lose weight. I have a course and resources that can help them do that. They are people that are already primed to buy.

The video means that these people are getting to see me and make a more informed decision if they like what I am saying and the way in which I say it.

This is the power of Youtube!

What Next…

This is still very early days and the result of one viral video.

Now the real work starts as I work towards increasing this revenue month-on-month

I plan to do this by:

• Consistency with video uploads — I have been very sporadic with my video’s and now I want to work on a regular weekly upload.
• Improving speaking and presentation.
• Improving video and sound quality (there were a LOT of comments on this video saying they couldn’t hear me, but yet others could. So I’m not sure what went on here but I can’t change it now)
• Exploring more video styles
• Improving editing skills (though I would really love to hire an editor as soon as I can, I certainly don’t think it’s where my skills lie and it’s incredibly time-consuming)

So if you are thinking about pursuing YouTube I hope this gave you a little insight and inspiration.