I’ve always been interested in knowing how much money do YouTubers actually make? Whenever I come across a YouTube video or a blog post about someone’s YouTube channel’s earnings, I click immediately. Now, even though my own channel is monetized and making money, the eager to know how much does YouTube pays never ends! I believe there are more people like me how does the same.
With the rise of creator economy, many people dream of becoming a content creator, especially YouTuber because YouTube is the most reliable and the platform with more earning opportunities compared to other platforms. So, this also might be a reason why people like me have that eagerness to know about someone’s YouTube income.
First, Let’s Talk About The History of the Channel!
I started this particular channel back in October of 2020 and it was not my first channel. Before I started this channel, I had multiple other channels but all those failed because I was neither consistent with uploading videos nor patience enough to wait for the results. I’m the type of guy who works today and hopes for the results tomorrow, which never happens. Because of this habit, I couldn’t stick to any of those previous channels and they failed.
The posted the first video on 6th October, 2020. It was a long form video, not a YouTube Short. After than, I somehow became consistent on this channel and posted everyday for nearly 2 months before I ran out of content ideas. Yes, I did run out of ideas to create content upon!
Check out my Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Successful YouTube Channel in 2025
My First Successful Video
I believe it was my 11th video, I posted the video at around 5:30 in the morning. Then, I went on my with day and when I returned home at around 4 p.m. and checked the video’s analytics, it was at 400 views. For someone who was getting barely 3-4 views per video, 400 views was something to celebrate about! That video gave me hope and motivation to work much harder.
After seeing that video’s success, I created more similar videos like that and people absolutely loved it! I started getting 400-500 views on each of my videos after that.
I Ran Out of Video Ideas & Shifted to YouTube Shorts
After working regularly for nearly 2 months, I ran out of video ideas and the worst thing was AI was not around at that time. So, I had no way to find new video ideas to create content about!
After few weeks of running out of content ideas, a miracle happened! YouTube brought a new video format to their platform called YouTube Shorts. I got to know about it via vidIQ before it even got launched officially. It was still getting tested but I wasted no time in getting into it. I believe, I was one of the first few creator in the world to start creating YouTube Shorts.
I began trimming my long videos and started posting them on YouTube shorts. By doing that, I was able to create 3-5 short videos from a single long-form video.
YouTube Shorts Kicked In
After sometime, YouTube officially launched YouTube Shorts. Before the official launch, I was getting 40-400 views on each of my shorts, but as soon as it launched officially, I started getting 3000-4000 views on each of my short videos. It was on December 12th, I posted a video and within a week, that got over 100,000 views. And nearly 10 days later, another one of my video started to pop up and got over 150,000 views. For someone who barely had a 1000 subscribers, that was something out of the world.
After this, my videos started popping up here & there but, because of my busy schedule, I couldn’t post anymore.
Completing the Monetization Criteria
At that point, I already had over 4000 subscribers because of YouTube Shorts, but I was still stuck at 2600 watch hours out of 4000 needed to apply for monetization.
And all of a sudden, on the month of May, 2021, one of my long form videos started to pop up. I found out that it was ranking on top on it’s search results. At first, the growth was insanely slow, but it picked up the pace in the beginning of 2023. Because of that video, I completed the monetization criteria and applied for monetization on May of 2023. And on 10th of May, I got monetized!
How Much Money Did I Actually Make?
Before getting into the actual income, let me tell you that my channel got demonetized on May 31 because of inactivity & for falling below 4000 watch hours in the last 365 days. But I uploaded few videos, reached the watch hours criteria and applied for it again. On 10th July, I got accepted again. After that, I’ve been making money consistently.
In total, my long form videos have got 314K views and my short form videos have gained over 1.8 Million views. Nearly 2/3rd of the views were not monetized so, only about 700K views was monetized and most of that views was from YouTube Shorts.
My long form videos have made $57.20 with an average RPM of just $0.30 and my Shorts videos have made a whooping $21.24 with an average RPM of just $0.01. In total, I’ve made $78.44 from this channel. Yeah, it’s a lot lower than what you could have expected, but I’ll take it. It’s better than nothing!
Main Purpose of This Post
The main purpose of this post was not just to share you my earnings, but also to share you the journey you have to go through to become a YouTube creator and make money. If you want to be a YouTuber, there will be up’s and down’s in your journey but, at the end, it will all be worth it.
