The dream of every small YouTuber is to get monetized and make money with their YouTube channel. But reaching the monetization criteria is not a piece of cake that anyone can have. In order to get your channel monetized, you need to meet the monetization criteria set by YouTube, which is either 1,000 Subscribers & 4,000 Public Watch hours in the last 365 Days or 1,000 Subscribers & 10 Million Shorts Views in the last 90 Days.
It takes several months or even couple of years and hundreds of videos for people to reach this criteria, but what if I told you, one of my friend completed this entire criteria required to get monetized with just one single video in a very short period of time. Well, in this post, I’m going to tell you how my friend completed the criteria and got monetized with just one video uploaded on his channel. I’ll also share, how you can do the same for yourself! Btw, his name is Mark.
The Main Purpose of This Story is to Motivate You & Prove that Anything is Possible if You Work for it.
How it Started?
It was a plain simple day as always, when Mark was scrolling through his Instagram feed, but all of a sudden the feed stopped loading and started showing the loading screen. This was when he went to check his Facebook account and the same thing happened there as well.
At first, he though there might be a problem with his internet connection, but turns out it was something else. The reason was, Meta’s servers. Meta’s servers were down for sometime and that incident happened.
1. Find a Problem or Niche
Everything was completely normal until Mark opened YouTube and typed “Instagram” in the search bar. He saw videos with 100K, 200K, even 300K views. And those videos were not uploaded weeks or months ago, but just a couple of minutes ago.
He was really surprised to see how fast those videos were getting views.
That’s when he realized something: whenever an app stops working, people rush to YouTube and search the app’s name to find out what’s wrong with it.
They start searching things like, “Why are PlayStation servers down?” or “How can I fix this problem?”. It’s not just a couple of people searching for these terms, but there are thousands or even millions of people looking for these answers.
There are hundreds of apps that stop working every day, even banking and finance apps stops working time and often. Ryan realized that these type of topics get higher RPM rates, so that’s how he found this sort of a cheat code of getting high amount of views in a short time and making insane amount of money.
Check out this Step-by-Step Guide if You Want to Start a Successful YouTube Channel in 2025.
2. Create a Channel
After all this happened, he thought about starting a YouTube channel similar to the ones who were getting thousands of views posting Meta’s server down story. His main aim of creating that channel was to see, if he could get some views and make some money for himself. As we all know, everything starts with a little curiosity in mind. That’s what happened with Mark too.
So, he created the channel, and now it was time to start making videos. But the problem was, apps like Instagram or Facebook don’t go down every day.
That means he couldn’t make videos about them all the time. He had to make videos about other apps whose servers were down.
3. Create & Upload Your First Video
To make his first video, he went to a website called Down Detector. Down Detector is a website which shows apps and websites that are not working at the moment. He chose the location as USA, because videos that gets views from USA makes more money compared to other countries.
On Down Detector, he found a game called Helldivers 2. It was the #1 game on Steam, but it was having server problems because too many people were playing it at the same time. On the game’s Reddit page, he sorted the posts by “Hot” and saw that players were saying they were not able to connect with their friends or use their friend codes. This is where he saw an untapped opportunity.
There were no videos about this problem till he found out about it, so he knew there were thousands of people searching for it. Then, he decided to take action and created a video about it. It was a super simple video that took him just a few minutes to make.
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4. Getting Views
After he uploaded the video, it ranked #1 on YouTube search, because there were no videos about that topic. He was the first person to create a video on it, so there was no competition at all.
The video got 549 views on the first day, 2,625 views on the second day, and 2,597 views on the third day.
Very soon, other channels started making videos on the same topic, so the views started getting shared between them.
Even then, his video reached a total of 124,800 views, and helped him to complete the 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 Subscribers mark needed to apply for monetization.
5. Applying for Monetization
After the monetization criteria were completed, he applied for The YouTube Partner Program immediately. And the very next day, he received an email saying, he was approved for The YouTube Partner Program and he could now make money from his videos.
6. Making Money Consistently
After he got monetized, he used the same Reddit method to find a new topic ideas. He saw many users asking, “How to buy premium War Bond in Helldivers 2?” He went to Google and researched about the topic, then created a video about it. That video did really well as well as it gained over 15,000 views. He started making videos following the same method and started getting 15,000-30,000 per video.
After he made his first $10, he received his AdSense pin and since then, he has made thousands of dollars from that channel.
How You Can Copy This Success for Yourself?
At this point, you should have understood that your video topic is the main factor that could decide if you’ll get views or not. So, what you need to do is, keep an eye on trends that happens in your niche; that can be a major fishing competition if you have a fishing channel, a new AI chatbot launch if you have an AI news channel, a new Apple product rumor if you have a tech channel and so on.
After finding such topics, you need to create a video about it post it as soon as you can. This way, you can utilize the power of trends to grow your own YouTube channel.
You can find trending topics on Reddit, Google News, Google Trends, and on news platforms. So, if you can utilize these trends properly, you can easily take your YouTube channel to new heights.
This was a Story from my friend Mark Andrew. Here’s a link if you’d like to connect with him.
