Making Money On Digital Content Besides Ads

Traditionally, the usual way people who make YouTube videos and website content is to make money by placing ads on their YouTube video or website. But if you are involved in the digital content creation business, then you already know that ads are a poor way to earn money.

I suggest you watch a few videos of the YouTube channel Income School especially their video:

YouTube Video: How much is 100K pageviews worth in ad revenue??

As these experts inform us, there is not much money to be made in ad revenue even though you already have a lot of viewers of your YouTube or website content. They advise that unless you already have regular viewers that number to about 100k, then you are better off not putting ads in your blogs or websites for example.

YouTube Ads:

If you are new to the digital content creation business, then you might not be aware that content platforms have certain minimum rules before you can monetize your digital content. The more the digital platform pays out, the stricter the requirements.

Let us take for example the most famous one at the moment, YouTube. For your videos to be approved by YouTube, you have to satisfy their minimum requirements. This is what I found online:

“Effective immediately, to apply for monetization (and have ads attached to videos), creators must have tallied 4,000 hours of overall watch time on their channel within the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers.”

This might sound like a light requirement from YouTube until you really upload your videos to YouTube. There are a lot of YouTube content providers who do not meet this minimum requirement for ad monetization.

Adsense:

Contrary to YouTube Ads, Google Adsense does not have minimum requirements. All they require is that you must be at least 18 years old and have your own website or blog. You might think that earning from ads from your website is easier than YouTube, but consider this:

As compared to YouTube channels, there are much more many websites online. This means that there would be more competition between website content providers as against YouTube contents providers.

Another thing to consider is that Adsense is one of the poorest paying ad network around. This is the reason why many content providers change to other ad networks as soon as they can meet the more strict but more lucrative requirements of these ad networks.

Other Ad Networks:

As said before, there are other ad networks besides AdSense. If you Google the search keywords “ad networks,” you would find many articles and lists that show the names of these other networks.

But a good YouTube video I have found which I think is reliable is from Income School. Here is the link:

YouTube Video: What Ad Network Pays Bloggers the Most? (We tested them all)

It is up to you to believe their assessment and select either AdSense, Ezoic, Mediavine or AdThrive. The important thing to note here is that you have a choice besides AdSense. This is good news for people who feel uneasy that the number one search engine is also their ad network provider.

Google Adsense:

Google Adsense pays between $0.006 and $0.015 per page view. What is a page view? It is an instance where an internet user visits a particular page on a website. But not all advertisers pay for page views. Many pay only when their ad is actually clicked by the internet user.

You can easily see how making money through ad monetizing your website can be frustrating. You may have thousands of page views but if the internet user does not click on the ads, you don’t earn anything.

YouTube Ads:

If you even managed to meet YouTube’s minimum monetization requirement, this is still no reason to celebrate. For one, as compared to Google AdSense, YouTube rates are much worse.

YouTube gives 55% of its ad revenue to its video content creators. On average, it earns $7.60 for every ad that is viewed. This means that the video content creator earns on average $4.18 for every 1,000 views of ads on their videos.

This means that you just earn $0.0042 per ad view. This does not even count if an ad viewer does not finish watching the ad. And this scenario is very common. If you are a regular watcher of YouTube, chances are that you keep pressing the “skip ad” button everytime an ad appears.

Not All Ads Pay The Same:

Another bad news for you regarding ads is that the pay rate is not uniform across all ads. There would be ads that pay higher than the others. This applies whether it is a YouTube or a website ad.

Advertisers of finance products such as home loans, insurance and other banking products for example, pay higher for content that feature finance or investment related videos and digital content.

These same advertisers may not even pay for digital content that does not contain or has very little finance or investment content. This is understandable considering that they are just after consumers who are more likely to buy their finance products.

When a person watches or reads a finance or investment related digital content, the advertiser and Alphabet Inc., the owners of Google and YouTube, assumes that you may be interested in finance products. That is why they target their ads to these people.

This is why if you really intend to monetize your videos of website thru ads, research first if your digital content is in high demand from advertisers. There is no sense spending a lot of time creating digital content which many will watch but you won’t be paid much.

Finance, Entrepreneurship and other money related content like investing and saving tend to earn well in terms of ad monetization. Vlogs, gaming and lifestyle channels do not really earn much. They earn about $2 per 1,000 video ad views that are completed.

To see how small this is, consider a scenario where you produce 5 videos a week where you get an average view of 500 each. You’ll earn probably less than $50 a month for doing work of a normal employee who work regular hours.

This is pretty bad. As you can see, you are better off getting a regular nine to five job instead of slaving five days a week creating a YouTube video which would only earn you about one dollar a day.

There are many famous YouTubers and bloggers who make a lot of money even in the millions every year. If you Google the search keywords “which content makes the most money on youtube” for example, you would be shown plenty of articles and lists which show who are making millions on YouTube.

But these channels are lucky to have millions of subscribers which they have grown over the years. Growing a YouTube channel takes time. Even if your channel is a runaway success, there is a strong chance that you might not earn enough money to sustain it.

According to estimates, you need to reach nearly 12 million viewers or readers of digital content before you can even consider leaving your day job that supports your daily expenses. So don’t give up that day job just yet.

Don’t despair if you don’t have the millions of subscribers or viewers to your YouTube channel or website. There are still other ways that you can earn besides putting ads in your YouTube channel or website.

Affiliate Advertising:

If you notice, many digital content creators don’t depend their income on ads alone. Affiliate Advertising is one of them. Although it is still a form of advertising, it pays much higher. While YouTube ads may pay $0.004 per ad view and Google Adsense may pay $0.008 per ad view, Affiliate advertising pays on average $0.09.

This means that affiliate advertising pays at least 12 times more than Google Adsense and 24 times more than YouTube ads. The good thing about affiliate advertising is that you can also place them on your videos and websites just like regular ads.

There are also a lot of affiliate advertising networks around. If you Google the simple search keyword: “affiliate network,” you would be taken to plenty of articles that discuss affiliate networks.

These articles even have a list of the affiliate networks you can choose from. To discuss affiliate networks is besides the scope of this article, but suffice to say, their pay rates are higher than ad networks.

One thing that needs to be discussed about affiliate networks is that there are some of them which also have sales requirements. The Amazon Affiliate Program for example, demands that you meet their minimum sales quota or your affiliate marketing account will be terminated.

That is why it is good advise that you research and start first with affiliate advertising networks who do not have strict sales quotas. This way you get your feet wet without being burned by the more strict affiliate advertising networks.

Sponsored Posts:

This is another alternative to ad monetization. Sponsors on the average pay just a bit higher than affiliate advertising networks. They average about $0.10 as compared to the $0.09 of affiliate advertising networks.

This takes a more direct approach to earning money as you would have to look up sponsors directly, but is more lucrative. If you get 500 views for your videos, then you can charge a sponsor $50 for you to include them in your video.

You can even charge more if your entire video is about your sponsor. The more time your sponsor is exposed to your video the more you can charge. The same applies to your website. The more you mention or talk about your sponsor, the more you can charge them.

Courses:

Courses are a big thing right now. Think Masterclass. It seems everyone has a course to offer, even famous personalities from all disciplines of life. Need to learn about internet marketing? There’s a course for this. Need to learn writing? There’s also a course for this.

You might find it silly that there are people who are willing to pay for such courses like these when there are plenty of information that already exists online. But people buy based on perceived value.

Many people still think that just because it’s free it must be of low quality and just because it’s expensive it must be of high quality. So if you already have free digital content whether it is a video or any other digital content, why don’t you sell a course equivalent?

And it could be lucrative. For example, if you manage to convince one of every 500 of your monthly digital content viewer to you $100 course You would have earned $100 a month on one video alone.

If you create 5 videos a week and have the same results as above, you would have earned a neat $2,000 a month. This figure is likely to grow for each video which has a similar viewership result.

This article just discussed three other ways besides ad monetization to earn from your digital content. Affiliate Advertising, Sponsored Posts and Courses are not alternatives to ads, but are a more lucrative monetization method.

There is a good reason why you should consider this other types of monetization methods. For one, ad networks are in complete control of how much and how you earn your ad income. They are the ones who determine the ad monetary value of your digital content.

Affiliate and Referral Marketing.